Apple Announces iCloud and iWork For iOS

iONiUM writes "Through a press release ahead of WWDC, Apple has revealed that it will be releasing its own cloud service to rival Google and Amazon's. In addition, they will unveil the new iOS, and the latest desktop OS." Apple also announced the release of the iWork suite for iOS devices.

Re:What are the odds

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy is a survivor of a kind of cancer that has a 95%+ mortality rate. If pancreatic cancer you had, look as good you probably would not.

Re:Looking forward to Lion

[betterunixthanunix]

That depends on your definition of "systemwide." I doubt that every program that runs on Mac OS X will have autosave or resume functionality; it will probably involve some sort of hook into the system. Such a framework existed in KDE3, where KDE applications could all resume after KDE was restarted (and this probably exists in KDE4), and all KDE applications had autosave (as far as I know).

Now, if Apple has written an operating system that enables autosave and resume for any application, even X11 applications, I will be very impressed.

Re:Looking forward to Lion

[macs4all]

Sure, versioning has been around forever. But autosave, and preserving system state through a restart? I've seen both done on a per-application basis, but not systemwide.

Then I guess you missed Lisa 7/7 (also the world's first integrated office application(s)). That lighted power switch on the front of the Lisa? If it was running the LisaOS (instead of MacOS), pressing that button performed a system save and shutdown, and pressing it again did a restart and reboot. This two-part video here [youtube.com] and here [youtube.com] shows just how advanced the Lisa was. In fact, that (and the hideous price) was (were) the two main reasons the Lisas became landfill, instead of a household name. And there's no denying that it paved the way for the desktop/windowing metaphor.

BTW, notice that even in the first incarnation of the Lisa OS, it allowed for heirachical folders. That feature didn't appear in Windows until Windows 95. Amazing.

Designed starting in 1978. Released in 1983. I think they won.

And before someone starts all that bullshit about "Apple stole Xerox PARC's work", let me say this: 1) Apple PAID Xerox for to use their work [obamapacman.com]. And 2) Without the improvements (not the least of which was pulldown menus!) that some very talented engineers made, that preliminary GUI work [catb.org] would not have become really useable, let alone nearly ubiquitious.

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Re:Looking forward to Lion

[betterunixthanunix]

It's a bit disingenuous to compare Cocoa with KDE. KDE is just one of many user-facing layers on an OS, while Cocoa is *the* user-facing layer. There are a few others around for compatibility, and games bypass even these altogether, but adding a feature to Cocoa has much wider system benefits than adding a feature to KDE does.

Except that the use-case for KDE is exactly that: you are using KDE, and nothing else (with the possible exception of Firefox). Yes, an educated user might be running non-KDE applications, but I can say the same about Cocoa: an educated user might be running X11 applications. Adding a feature to KDE would have a pretty wide impact for KDE users, and I would argue that this is comparable to Cocoa. The whole point of a desktop environment is be exactly that: your environment.

Their entire state is saved, so restarting a program just reloads the memory

Can you cite a source here? That is a very complex thing for an OS to do, on the level of a live kernel upgrade (i.e. upgrading a kernel without having to reboot). If this is what the OS is doing, and if the OS is doing it without requiring the application to make any special system calls to enable that functionality, it would be impressive.

iWork for iOS (summary clarification)

[FunnyStrange]

Not seeing this upthread, but might be redundant by now: The iWork announcement was for the "small" iOS devices (iPhone and iPod Touch). Those apps have been available for iPad (also iOS) for over a year. The update makes them universal. If you own them for iPad, they'll now work on the other devices (it's a free upgrade).