Apple WWDC 2011 Keynote Coverage

The apple Word Wide Developer Conference got underway today with over 5200 attendees. Steve Job’s opened the Keynote as usual stating hardware is the brain of our products, and software is our soul. This conference will be about software.

OS X Lion

Phil Schiller, SVP of product marketing for Apple pounced on to the stage with the newest OS X version Lion. H stated Lion has over 250 features. It will be available in July for download only from the Mac App Store for $29 (no more dvds).

Mr. Schiler went on to discuss 10 of the 250 features.

1. Multi-touch gestures. Just by swiping on your laptop trackpad you can now have the same UI conventions on your desktop OS as you do on iOS.
   
2. Full-Screen Apps. Lion now makes it easier to go full-screen with apps.
   
3. Mission Control. Integrates Exposé & Spaces and ties it to gestures. All open app instances are group and easy to switch.
   
4. App Store. The Mac App Store is now built in and will have push notifications for updates.
   
5. Launchpad. A new way to launch apps with gestures and pinches. An easy way bring all your apps on screen
   
6. Resume. Automatically save the current state of an applications and it will even save iterations of the app. If you relaunch an app it will resume exactly where you left off, with user specific personalization exactly the way you left it.
   
7. Auto-Save. Pretty self-explanatory here, it happens in the background without user or application disruption
   
8. Versions. Lion will keeps track of all previous versions of that document. A modified Time Machine.
   
9. AirDrop. Share files over a local-area network very simply. Airdrop has the simplicity and functionality of dropbox.
   
10. Mail. Mail has been updated and has a new “conversation” view that works like threaded gmail email.

iOS 5

The conference’s next Segway was the long awaited iOS 5. A laundry list of metric was discussed and such as the following:

More metrics:

– 15 billion songs sold via iTunes

– 14 billion apps downloaded from the App Store in less than 3 years.

– $2.5 billion paid to developers building apps for the app store.

– 130 million books downloads from iBooks

– 425,000 apps in the app store, 90,000 specifically for the iPad

iOS has over 200 new features. A few were touched on such as the new and anticipated Notification center.. Mail, calendar, sms and Facebook updates you will unobtrusively notify the user and it will no longer be modal. This feature was badly needed based on the traction that Android market gained for multi-tasking and notifications.

Other highlights were an new and improved Safari Reader along with “Reading List,” which is an easy way to save stories to read later. The beauty of reading list is the ability to syncs across other iOS devices. Save something on your iPhone and you can read it later on iPad. Last was a much needed and overdue tabbed browsing.

Realization of Apple speculation continued with better Twitter integration and AirPlay mirroring.

iCloud

Steve Jobs then took the stage again introducing iCloud ($4.5 million for the domain BTW). Steve fired up the whirling buzz machine and explained the service. Everything will move to the iCloud and be pushed to all your devices. The service will be free for three critical applications, mail, contacts and calendar. This will definitely be a blow to the Google Apps service which I am a huge fan. My favoraite line was when Steve jobs stated “We have finally gotten rid of the file system”. He has officially demoted the PC to yesterday’s device. iCloud API’s will be release so developers and utilize the cloud for their own services. Amazon and Google have their own cloud offerings and it will be interesting to see how the market share breaks out in the future.

Steve Job’s favorite cloud-based app was a service called Photostream. Take photos on any device and it will be available in the cloud. The iCloud service is live and available today.