Apple WWDC 2014: Tim Cook Unveils Yosemite 411
An anonymous reader writes "Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) has started, and OS X 10.10, officially named Yosemite, and iOS 8 have been officially unveiled. Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering, also highlighted iCloud Drive. Although a little late to the party, Apple hopes to compete with the likes of Dropbox and Google Drive."
Tired of one year release cycle (Score:5, Insightful)
I am tired of this every year release cycle. Wish they would take a couple of years and swing for the fences on their software.
Re:Newness overload (Score:2, Insightful)
I've just finished watching this. There were so many new features introduced that I have no idea how other companies are going to compete with this. I bet that one year in the future, they won't have even 25% of those features matched.
I can only imagine this is sarcasm, many of these features are 8 years old or more on competing platforms. Widgets; Transparency, Cloud integration, (Real) Cross Platform tools (not single Platform, and updated mail and browser application oooh. those are the broad stokes...Look over there they now use Bing, Microsoft outbidded Google Apple users will be so happy.
Re:Like GNU Linux/Google Cloud years Ago..or Vista (Score:5, Insightful)
My gripe is the flat look that's getting pushed into OS X. I'm seriously tired of this plague. I happen to like my 3D composited desktops.
Re:Yosemite (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think that's going to be a problem. 99+ % of Mac users probably have no idea what a blue and white G3 is, and the rest knows enough to differentiate the two.
Its Killer Feature (Score:4, Insightful)
I am tired of this every year release cycle. Wish they would take a couple of years and swing for the fences on their software.
Actually I love the idea of regular releases...and free ones too. Ignoring my slights in my other posts the fact that upgrades are free and regular, makes overpriced Apple hardware seem a little more affordable...If I was a new Apple phone user, and found I liked a lot there...and there is a lot to like, I would be tempted to Migrate to a shiny machine...Although you would have to claw Linux running on commodity hardware out of my bleeding hands first.
Re:Off-topic Maybe (Score:4, Insightful)
As someone who has worked on several cross platform toolkits I can say that
"cross platform...is the new platform" == marketing bullshit
Re:And one more thing - NOT (Score:5, Insightful)
Congratulations, you've fallen into the trap that so many other techies here at /. have in thinking that this is consumer stuff targeted at YOU.
It isn't.
The people that this is aimed at don't even know what you're talking about when you say 'FTP'. They just want to move their files around easily and transparently. Now they can. They'll like that.
Take a look at the actual tech stuff if you want to gripe or be excited. But the consumer facing stuff will be really interesting to consumers. They like a bit of GUI change as long as it's not too drastic. (Apple isn't moving the buttons or anything, they're just making a few things more accessible and modifying the design a little; this isn't near the magnitude of the change to the Windows Desktop OS.)
Apple is very good at selling things to people. For non-essential goods, there is basically no company on the planet that's better at making money from consumers. What is small potatoes to you is a big upgrade to some. And it's free. That tends to smooth out any rough edges that crop up.
Re:Its Killer Feature (Score:2, Insightful)
until recently the upgrades haven't been free, they brake compatibility too often.
as the admin of a mac shop, i am constantly plauged by building working images for our corporate tools then finding when i go to get new hardware to replace damaged machines or accomodate new users, barely even older version of os x can't be installed on the newer hardware and you can count on apple not to release stand alone drivers.
I used to love Apple, then i was forced to work with them they're fun toys but terrible tools
Re:Off-topic Maybe (Score:3, Insightful)
Not so late to the game (Score:4, Insightful)
DropBox will drop its pants for the NSA any time, anywhere, with no FISA court order required. Apple, not so much.
Re:Newness overload (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple's strategy is not no overwhelm, but to keep the users on an IV drip. And it works; they seem to listen. It stirs up emotions from side to side. It keeps the old users using the products. And more and more it becomes easier for the users of the other platforms to make a switch. Just when the same features have grown old Apple introduces them with their own extra twist and as a companions of their design. There's nothing wrong with that, and judging from the bottom line many of those features were not profitably executed.
Anyway it's not about the OS anymore, because anybody is able to seamlessly mix operating systems and their native applications together now. It's about the experience and the integration.
Re:No mention of Swift in topic nor summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X
PowerPC to Intel
Carbon to Cocoa
32-bit to 64-bit
I'm not disagreeing with most of these transitions, but they sure don't mind having their application developers rewrite substantial portions of their applications because of the shiny. I wouldn't be surprised if Objective-C was no longer supported in five years.
Re:Yosemite (Score:2, Insightful)
Think about it less in terms of people and more in terms of what a search engine will find for you.
Right now, when I type in "yosemite mac" into a Google search, I get 4 news stories from today's WWDC and the fifth match is the "Power Macintosh G3 (Blue & White)" Wikipedia page. In a few hours, those WWDC news articles will fade. Fast forward to 18 months from now, and you will get an unholy mish-mash of results from that somewhat ambiguous search term.
Apple will probably regret this name overlap, if not at the top of the organization, then at the bottom where they have to deal with customer service as a daily concern. I can just picture someone at the Apple store saying "I did some research on Google and these new Yosemite Macs won't run anything past 10.3! But you're selling 10.10 right next to them! You're ripping me off! I'm clueless!" (Maybe that last part wouldn't be out loud, but it would certainly be understood.)
Not knowing the difference in a mix of search results is exactly the problem.
Re:Off-topic Maybe (Score:4, Insightful)
Bullshit. There is plenty wrong with plain C. For example there is no defending fall-through by default between cases in switch statements.
Re:And one more thing - NOT (Score:4, Insightful)
> Last week, Apple execs were promising big announcements, the biggest since the Jobs era.
Citation needed. What *I* heard the execs saying [recode.net] was that they're going to have great products this year. They have 7 months left.
And FFS, this is the DEVELOPER conference. New product announcements here are few and far between. Here's an overview of the last ten years of WWDC. [technologizer.com] If you can read that list and still be surprised or disappointed at what was or wasn't announced today, you're an idiot.
Re:Off-topic Maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
Objective-C is not technically platform specific either, it just is in practice, because there is no room or reason for yet another wannabe C++-killer. There are already plenty of languages better than C++, another one wont make a difference, so Swift will be like Objective-C, Apple only.
Re:Its Killer Feature (Score:5, Insightful)
I like the idea of free regular releases too. But the reality is that they don't seem to be able to break much technical ground with these. Like moving to ZFS or integrating virtual reality (kinda serious) .
While it is disappointing that their push towards ZFS fizzled and died, OS X 10.9 did make some serious technical improvements under the hood that go well beyond the competition.
Compressing and decompressing memory pages on the fly being one of them. It's a much (much!) faster operation than paging to disk, and can significantly reduce memory pressure. Many users felt like they had received a free hardware upgrade -- it can be pretty dramatic. AFAIK neither Windows or Linux have transparent page compression like this. Timer coalescing was another significant kernel-level improvement (although certainly one that had been done before on other platforms). App Nap makes some significant adjustments to how threads and processes are allotted compute cycles. The overall effect can be significantly lessened power requirements, particularly on Apple's laptops, leading to increased battery life -- something no other OS vendor that I'm aware of is focussing on in the PC space (mobile being a bit of a different story, of course).
Perhaps not whiz-bang flashy stuff that end users notice first, but some pretty solid under-the-hood technology none-the-less.
Yaz
Cherry Pick Stats (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Like GNU Linux/Google Cloud years Ago..or Vist (Score:4, Insightful)
Konfabulator.
Idiot.
Konfabulator was written by a guy who worked on Copeland at Apple. Not only did he steal the ideas of widgets from Copeland and Opendoc but he also stole themes from Copeland when he released Kalidescope theme engine for Mac OS 9.
Re:Newness overload (Score:4, Insightful)
Fuck your experience and your integration. I'm trying to get work done. These 'User Experience' people are ruining desktop computing..
Re:Off-topic Maybe (Score:2, Insightful)
BSD to GPL: "Son, you need to learn to share without expectations and stop being a selfish prick while pretending you're the worlds savior"