After a year’s wait, WWDC 2014 kicked off with Tim Cook taking the center stage for the main keynote and revealing to us what we were waiting for since really long. The latest version of iOS X (v 10.10) has been unveiled which Apple are saying that it will be available as a free upgrade to all the current Apple OS X Maverick users in the coming fall. They have even come up with a cool name for it, “Yoselite”.
Apple has a brought some really cool new features to the new OS, but we feel that what has been unveiled, it is nothing that we haven’t already seen before. Like they have revamped the UI quite a lot and brought out an entire new Notification Panel with a “Browse Bar” on the top. The browse bar can help you find anything you need on the web or on your device like apps, maps, web and much more. On top of that, the browse bar uses Bing as the search engine and not Google; interesting!
There are many new features, the main being iCloud integration with all your apple devices. You can store any files and also create backups. Also Safari has been tweaked to allow for better iCloud integration. There is also another cool feature called Mail Drop. It allows you to send email attachments, encrypted to iCloud upto 5 GB. Also Apple has come up with a new feature called “HandOff”. In this, when you are working on suppose an iPad, you can simple use this feature to swipe up or down when near you Mac and this will transfer your work to your other Apple device which you can continue further. This works on the concept of a hotspot that gets created when the devices detect another apple device nearby and uses this to transfer files instantly.
There is also a feature which makes allows you to even take calls from your iPhone directly on your Mac and this was demonstrated by Federighi by calling Dr. Dre directly from his Mac.
Interesting numbers put forth by Tim Cook, over 800 million Apple products have been sold worldwide. One out of 10 Android users is on the latest 4.4 KitKat while 90% Apple users are on iOS 7. With this, Cook went on a direct picking spree on Google and Android.
iOS 8 is being termed as the biggest update yet from Apple. They have brought a huge number of new features and improvements on the old ones. One amazing feature is that you can simply check and reply to a text or attend to a post on Facebook in the notification panel itself without actually opening the app or leaving your current app you are working on.
Another is that your favourite contacts come up in small circle from where you can directly, call, text or FaceTime with them. There is also a new “QuickType” keyboard coming with text predictions similar to Windows Phone, but minus the swipe function of course. Also now you can add and remove people in message threads and also silent individual threads which apple is calling the “Do Not Disturb” button.
And now for the most interesting part of the new update, the “HealthKit”. It provides a complete solution for the user to create a single profile of all his health and fitness details which he can even send to the doctor directly. Nike Fuelband and Mayo Clinic are the two apps that support this function. Also now Siri can detect the music you are listening using Shazam and also you can talk to her while driving without even touching your phone. Cook has declared that iOS 8 beta will be available for developers from today itself and users will receive an update of it in the coming fall.
Team DainikDisha