A Nice report from WWDC: IOS 8, iCloudDrive, Yosemite, Desktop SMS messages, Healthkit & Swift

There was a notable absence of any hardware announcements, with CEO, Tim Cook, setting the stage for SVP of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, to announce software updates to the iOS and OS X operating systems, as widely predicted in the press.

Hot on the heels of last year’s iOS radical design overhaul, OS X Yosemite, which keeps to the new trend of Californian locations, followed suit by concentrating on design improvements and echoing the simpler and flatter interface through the use of translucency and colour for full effect. Clearly led by Jony Ive’s creative direction, although Apple’s SVP of Design notably did not feature in the keynote.

Yosemite also includes a number of innovative features:

Spotlight search has been revamped with a large search bar in the middle of the screen that now offers a greater selection of sources to search including Wikipedia and map results. iCloud Drive, surely offering competition to Dropbox, is another feature that allows the seamless syncing of files and folders across devices, including Windows.

My personal favourite was titled under ‘Continuity’ and closely integrated iOS devices with Mac desktops and laptops.

‘Handoff' is a new feature that lets you begin working on a device and continue on another. You may be writing an email or browsing a webpage on your iPad, when your Mac detects your approach, it will offer an option to resume where you left off on the desktop, very neatly done.

Building on the theme, you can now receive your green SMS messages (from your mis-guided Android friends) on your desktop and, best of all, make and receive calls on your desktop via your iPhone.

This was demonstrated by Craig Federighi calling Dr. Dre, one of Apple’s newest employees, using the Mac. Perhaps, the most expensive phone call ever made?

Tim Cook resumed by taking a swipe at Apple’s main competitor, Android. He announced that nearly half of Apple’s customers in China had switched across from Android, presumably since the strategic launch of the 5C and 5S models in the region last year. Cook also lauded the 89 per cent adoption of the latest iOS 7 release compared to only 9 per cent of Android users running KitKat. His point - most mobile malware occurs on Android and quoted ZDNet’s Adrian Kingsley-Hughes “Android fragmentation is turning devices into a toxic hellstew of vulnerabilities”, ouch.

The iOS 8 software update meanwhile packed a punch with an enviable collection of features to improve the device experience.

Updated notifications now allow you to respond to a message or like a Facebook post within the header bar, without opening up the notifying application.

The keyboard has also been opened up to third-party extensions, allowing developers to add support for input languages that aren’t currently available, and a personal favourite, the support for Swype’s continuous gesture typing, as popular on Android.

A key theme for iOS was consolidation - Apple announced the Health application and HealthKit framework to bring all health-related data and services under one app roof. Similarly, the HomeKit framework consolidates home automation applications to work seamlessly on the device. Apple even toyed with Siri integration - imagine telling your iPhone ‘I’m going to bed’ and all the lights in your house switching off. Maybe hoverboards aren’t that far away now?

Critically, the real surprise was saved for last. Echoing the “Write the code, change the world” messages displayed on the Apple banners outside of the conference and the WWDC intro video - a solid focus was placed on developers and development.

iOS and Mac development required the use Objective-C as it’s programming language, which was originally created in the early 1980s and made it’s way to OS X and iOS via Apple’s acquisition of NeXT in the mid-1990s.

Whilst both a stable and robust language, it’s many revisions fought to keep up to date with the more modern Java used in Android and even more so with the ever-popular scripting languages.

Apple managed to both surprise its loyal developer community and silence the media scrum by announcing a modern replacement for Objective-C, named Swift heralded as an ‘Objective-C without the baggage of C’.

Apple certainly did not opt for the easier route of inheriting an existing language, but instead wrote their own language from the ground up.

This is a bold but carefully considered move, which has clearly been years in the making by the Cupertino-based giant. Apple are looking to allow the developer community to create beautiful and expressive code that performs significantly faster than its predecessor, but in a manner that is defensive of common programming errors.

I feel Apple has opened up it’s ecosystem to a new wave of developers with a language that is more familiar to Ruby, Scala and JavaScript. It hopes to break down the barriers of entry that existed because of it’s less-than-modern programming language.

That said, Apple eagerly boasted that it had 9 million registered developers. By this time next year, how many more will have come on-board the Apple development ship?

Apple have put forward solid updates for both desktop and mobile operating systems, whilst offering an innovative alternative to both existing and new developers.

Importantly, they have paved the way for the widely anticipated set of hardware launches this autumn. Whoever dared say Apple can’t innovate?