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."
It's about time (Score:2, Informative)
The current implementation of iCloud is terrible.
And Slashdot Beta still sucks.
Re:A new programming language (Score:5, Informative)
https://itunes.apple.com/ca/bo... [apple.com]
Re:A new programming language (Score:5, Informative)
Swift (Score:1, Informative)
Re: Newness overload (Score:0, Informative)
Widgets are an Apple innovation. Introduced in 2006 with Tiger. Before Windows and Linux. Troll harder.
Re:Off-topic Maybe (Score:2, Informative)
Apple Developer Page - https://developer.apple.com/swift/
Welcome to Swift (Guides and Reference) - https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/welcome_to_swift
The Swift Programming Language (iBooks Store) - https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-swift-programming-language/id881256329?mt=11
Re: Newness overload (Score:2, Informative)
Widgets? You mean Desk Accessories?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desk_accessory
Qt (Score:5, Informative)
It's not that much of an illusion. Qt's done some useful work there. I've written one app, quite complex, that runs under both Windows and OSX. The only serious work I had to do was related to USB support, which Qt really hasn't addressed worth a darn. Everything else, though, is just a recompile specifying the target. Sound, networking, file system, GUI and lower level graphics, etc. The apps are a little less efficient, working as they must through a compatibility layer, but they're efficient enough to do the job at hand on even moderately recent hardware, so I'm pretty happy with the whole approach.
Re:Cherry Pick Stats (Score:4, Informative)
iOS 8 will not be available in the STILL ON SALE iPhone 4.
False. The iPhone 4 was discontinued September 10, 2013.
It's successor, the iPhone 4S was first on sale October 14, 2011. Everyone who bought an iPhone 4 after that date knew they were buying an older model which would reach it's end of support sooner than the current model.
Apple stop providing older iPhones with OS updates when they are no longer powerful enough to support current OS release. They got it wrong once, by providing one two many OS updates for the iPhone 3G. And were heavily criticised for it - including by you. You can't have it both ways.
By contrast most Android phones sold NEVER get an OS update.
Re:Its Killer Feature (Score:5, Informative)
you seem to know what you're talking about. can you explain this idea of memory compression, and what the heck the new activity monitor means? the old one made sense. Pie chart, showing free, available, and active. Now it's apparently using up all my memory I have 8 GB but it shows a line chart with a small amount of "memory pressure".
Sure -- I'll try to explain it the best I can. I won't make any specific judgements as to whether the new controls are better than the old, except to point out that there is more useful information in the new that wasn't present in the old. You're still perfectly welcome to prefer the old pie chart :). I'll try not to stray too far into the esoteric; if you need more details on a specific subject here, feel free to ask.
First a bit on the theory of memory management in general. In most modern operating systems like Mac OS X, each application appears to get it's own memory space, starting at '0' and running up to 0xffffffffffffffff (a fancy way of saying the addresses go from 0 to somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1.84*10E19 bytes of memory). To make things easier to deal with, the operating system breaks these up into chunks 4096 bytes in size called a 'page'. Now 1.84*10E19 bytes is probably way more memory than you have available on your system, but that's okay -- while conceptually an application can use any of that memory space for pretty much anything it wants, the operating system keeps track only of which pages have actually been allocated to each application. This system is called 'virtual memory': each application has its own virtually memory space to play with that doesn't interact with he memory of any other application. This is the value that shows in the "virtual memory" box in the activity monitor.
Now of course, you have real, physical memory in your machine, and you don't have a separate set for each application (in a physical sense -- you don't have one set of chips for Safari, and another set of chips for iPhoto, for example). The real memory has to hold the virtual memory somehow, and be able to map from one to the other. The operating system keeps a structure known as the Translation Lookaside Buffer that keeps this mapping for pages stored in physical memory. So it might have a bunch of entires for Safari, saying that the page consisting of what the application sees as memory area starting at 0x0000 and going to to 0x0FFF are stored in memory location 0x40000000 (the 1GB mark), the page of what the application sees as memory area starting at 0x1000 and going to 0x1FFF are in location 0x40096000, etc. In fact, the pages can be all over the place, and not even in order -- the operating system keeps track of all the used memory pages for the application wherever they are stored in memory. The amount of physical memory you have shows in the "Physical Memory" box of the activity monitor.
If you don't get all that, don't worry -- the main takeaway is that these pages can be stored in memory, and the operating system tracks of them when they are. Because we work with all of these pages, however, the operating system can also store them someplace else. Prior to Mavericks, this was always written to disk in the "swap" file (also sometimes known as a "page file"). This happened when memory pressure gets higher than the operating system can handle in RAM alone; that is, programs are asking for more virtual pages than the operating system can fit into real memory. To try to make room for new requests without unloading applications, the operating system will periodically go through the list of pages if memory pressure is high, find the least-used pages (you might have some application running that you put into the background and haven't touched in hours, for example, or applications which have reserved pages for things such as documents you haven't looked at in hours, even if you've otherwise used the application itself), and write them to disk. This is known as "swap". The pages of c