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Apple announced several products and updates Monday at its World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC).
An Anonymous Coward wrote in with news of Apple's OS X 10.11 "El Capitan":
The next version of OS X, Apple's laptop and desktop operating system, has been announced at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference! Its version number is 10.11, and its moniker is "El Capitan," in reference to the superb and truly American El Capitan rock formation at America's premiere national park, the Yosemite National Park.
Details are still coming in, but it's expected to include updates to Safari, Mail and Spotlight. Metal for Mac will combine the "computing power of OpenCL and graphics power of OpenGL into a new API that does both." It's expected to be available in public beta starting this July, with the final public release coming in the fall. This is an important release of OS X that Mac users worldwide are looking forward to.
ghost sent in two submissions to tell us that Apple will open source the Swift programming language:
In today's WWDC keynote, Apple announced that Swift (the programming language from last year's WWDC) will be open sourced sometime later this year. They specifically noted Linux support but neglected to mention *BSD or Windows. (LLVM, the back-end behind Swift and clang, supports *BSD and Windows). Reactions from Open Source advocates were tempered, as they noted the source code has not yet been released, nor has the license been announced.
The Swift Blog has been updated with information about new features and the open source efforts: Swift source code will be released under an OSI-approved permissive license. Contributions from the community will be accepted — and encouraged. At launch Apple intends to contribute ports for OS X, iOS, and Linux. Source code will include the Swift compiler and standard library. Apple thinks "it would be amazing for Swift to be on all your favorite platforms".
One of our editors, takyon, scoured the web to provide us with this compendium:
Apple has announced Apple Music, a Spotify clone, that replaces its existing iTunes Radio service. It will offer: a free tier similar to what iTunes Radio provided, unlimited streaming music for $9.99/month, or $14.99/month for a six-person "family plan". The service includes human-curated playlists and a 24/7 "Beats 1" radio channel featuring popular music and interviews. It will be released June 30th on OS X, iOS, and Windows, and will come to Android in the fall. Apple is offering the first 3 months of the paid service for free.
Apple announced iOS 9 for iPhones, iPods and iPads. It will include: a revamped "Spotlight Search" with features that compete with Google Now; transit routes for Apple Maps in major cities, as well as 300 cities in China; and an improved native news application. iPads will receive "Split View" and "Slide Over" multitasking features. A "Move to iOS" app will facilitate wireless migration from Android to iPhone.
WatchOS 2 for Apple Watch will add: new watch faces; a "Time Travel" feature using the digital crown to view information and events from the past or future; FaceTime Audio support so you can call other people with Macs, iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches; email voice dictation; and an alarm clock mode for when the Watch is laying on its side and charging. Various iOS 9 improvements to Apple Pay and Maps will also come to the Watch. Finally, developers will be able to make native apps for the Watch that don't require them to run on the iPhone.
Apple Pay is coming to the United Kingdom in July.
Original Submissions: One, Two, and Three.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday June 09 2015, @02:08PM
I don't see any direct confirmation, but it almost certainly uses DRM. Most streaming does nowadays. The apps won't be browser-based so that eliminates common ways to get at cached music.
This editorial [theverge.com] made it to Slashdot [slashdot.org]. Steve Jobs' 2007 essay on music DRM [archive.org] is no longer on Apple's site. It's an odd move to censor your deity's teachings.
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(Score: 1) by canopic jug on Tuesday June 09 2015, @02:26PM
The removal of the editorial seems like it might be signaling a shift in the way they've done music. Jobs used to be in control. Now it looks like Cook might have Apple on the other end of the leash in regards to the music industry. But again, in now close to two dozen summaries of the event, I've not spotted any mention of them staying DRM-free.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by KGIII on Tuesday June 09 2015, @08:34PM
I have been on the phone with my niece six times today. I use a Mac maybe three times a year. Anyhow, the problem is she wants an AV (I doubt this will fix her problem) and the only suggestions (Avira, ClamX, AVG) I have all seem to require Mac Helper which she says seems to want her to pay something. I am not going to give my CC to be used on a potentially compromised system.
In short, I do not understand the Mac realm. DRM is only logical with them.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday June 09 2015, @02:44PM
It's an odd move to censor your deity's teachings.
Oh, I wouldn't say its unusual at all for a religion for the implementation to become darn near the opposite of the teachings. Think of stuff like prosperity gospel.
So now that I've pissed off those who speak for their gods, I may as well piss off those who think Apple is God:
Something I find disconcerting is the disconnect between anything I care about and the recent WWDC stuff. I had an ipod touch and used it as a PDA. I used a nano for listening to podcasts while exercising. Good products! But the recent crop?
Well, we have a nerdgasm over swift, which is sorta a newborn baby scala, except its mostly vaporous as opposed to being free and available. Why the hell they have to NIH and not just use Scala is a total mystery.
I'm probably never going to wear a watch again for the rest of my life, so thats just time wasted. Much as I'll probably never install a CB radio into my car again, or wear bell bottoms. Can't we just flush this turd and get onto the next fad? I hope the next one is more interesting.
Multitasking has officially been invented despite my first experience being microware OS-9 in '83 or so and pretty much continuously since on some unix-ish thing or another. First thing that came to mind is battery use/life.
Oh look we had the front end people redesign our music app into a bad clone of an app I already have no interest in using. Streaming is listening to someone else's selection of tunes (not mine) at the same time as everyone else, it has all the appeal of listening to a neighbor turn up his stereo too loud making the whole neighborhood listen to his music. Its something I'd actively avoid. Kind of like talking into my phone (or watch) like a total dork.
Next time I go to China I'll start to care about the maps of China. Till then, well, its not even aspirational for me. I gave my old ipad to the kids when I got my android tablet and I don't see this making me trade it back. I'm sure with the intentional artificial upgrade treadmill its too old to run new stuff anyway, F apple for that too.
There's more to the new apple pay system than just adding the UK, from looking at some summaries of the announcement. Next time I visit a dying legacy brick and mortar store I'll probably care, or I'd care if I had an iphone, but I have an android and for no good reason I can't run the app on my android despite it having the same NFC and wifi hardware. So if I went to a store I don't want to visit, I could use a phone I don't have, after waiting in a line I don't want to wait in, to pay money I don't have (credit card only, right?) for shit I don't want, presumably to impress people I don't care about. Although why I wouldn't just whip out the plastic is a complete mystery to me, my CC is millimeters from my drivers license and centimeters from my keys. But I can pay cash quicker yet and I have that too and it doesn't incur fees, debt, tracking, or spamming. Other than that everything about it is awesome. I suppose everybody has to have their own NIH silo'd payment system to be considered a player today. Can't wait for that stupid fad to go away too.
My wife will get the bug fix OS release on her mac desktop, but they keep on tossing in useless UI changes that frustrate her while lowering productivity. Its getting to the point where the PITA factor is lower with windows, so she'll be willing to take the security hit and go back. I can't wait to hear the crap about it, because being the computer guy I obviously wrote the new OSX and am responsible for it.
And more good news, god only knows we don't have enough 3D acceleration standards, so thank you apple for inventing a new completely closed and proprietary one, maybe this market fragmentation can kill some of the open and free standards, that'll be a real win for the community.
I watched some live blog coverage of it and rather than exciting me, everything about the WWDC was more a sense of dread, like watching a sewer drain gradually backflow and flood. I mean, couldn't they have done one thing thats good or right or useful or desirable? Just throw us one bone? The whole presentation was a stinking cloud of NIH, fads, and stuff I just don't care about.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Tuesday June 09 2015, @02:50PM
I started wearing a crap $5 watch for kids again, and the ability to check the time without pulling out a smartphone is worthwhile.
Now add in a bunch of calendar and Dick Tracy features that are a pain to use, and ask yourself, is this worth $100? $180? $250? $400? $17,000? Or just $5?
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(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Tuesday June 09 2015, @04:33PM
I'd rather wear a watch than carry around a cinderbl, er... smartphone in my pocket. I mean, I have one, but it stays in my backpack unless I'm using it.
The watch is better for camping and places where you might not be able to charge up that phone if it dies too. I'm not talking about stupid expensive $1000+ watches. I have a $20 Columbia that keeps time just fine.
I mean, the premise of the watch itself is a great one. Modern consumer electronics could learn a thing from them. They're simple, efficient, and reasonably reliable. Why hate 'em? Of course the smartwatch isn't really simple, efficient, or reliable, and requires a cinderblock in your pocket still, so I do agree with you overall at least there.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday June 09 2015, @05:44PM
WRT the velvet shackles of consumer electronics, I suppose it varies by social circle but I like having it occasionally be OK for the battery to be dead. Even when it isn't actually dead, sometimes. The world will go on after I'm gone, so I'm sure it'll survive a camping trip without me. Phones are for grind games, meaningless social drama, tracking, never being off call, pretty much all the opposite of a good camping trip or vacation in general.
I've run into similar arguments about my GPS device. Well, it floats, I can buy a set of replacement batteries anywhere in the world for practically nothing and have a full charge by swapping them in about ten seconds, it runs 48+ continuous (backlight off) hours on a set of two AA, it laughs at multiple 20 foot falls onto rocks, the transreflective LCD is easier to read in sunlight than in the dark, the software has never crashed not even once, the UI is incredibly simple and almost self training compared to a phone... but you just can't get some folks past the "but don't you just want to use your phone?" Uh, no, I don't. About the only thing I don't like is the "we decided to F you over by charging $50 for new maps because we can and you can't do anything about it" aspect.
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Tuesday June 09 2015, @06:07PM
I'm not the least bit worried about the world, really. It's more that I want to use it and it's dead. Generally for time or maps. It's important to know when to turn back on your hike or how long you have before the outfitter's pickup bus packs it in and you're walking home. If you know what time it is and can't gauge 15 minutes while you're deliberately waiting, there's neat tricks to using a stick as a compass and stuff like that too. My most frequent stomping ground, Southern Missouri, generally has nothing for cell service once you're there anyway, so it's airplane mode for me once I turn off the interstate.
That sounds like a pretty impressive GPS. I should look into getting one of those to solve most of my edge cases. You use a Garmin?
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday June 09 2015, @07:59PM
You use a Garmin?
LOL it floats, its indestructible, its easy to use and runs forever on a set of batteries, obviously its a Garmin.
Yeah a 76CS from like 15 years ago, or maybe only 10. It just does its thing, really well.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday June 09 2015, @07:14PM
So there's no possibility to reverse engineer the map format and use OpenStreetMap [wikipedia.org] or something similar?
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday June 09 2015, @07:30PM
I guess OS X 10.11 will make any device not invented recently obsoleted by not being installable on older devices and EOL updates to the OS that can be installed there..
* Metal for Mac will fragment OpenCL and OpenGL.
* Swift will fragment developer focus from Java or Python.
* Apple Music will.. who knows. But there's still iTunes and Spotiy. Or trusty "sharing".
* iOS 9 will make old devices people already have slow and drive sales.
* WatchOS 2 will do what other operating systems for watches will do, only more expensively?
* Apple Pay to compete with PayPal and banks?
I think you are right. It's very much a NIH deal?
(Score: 2) by quacking duck on Tuesday June 09 2015, @10:49PM
Swift is a somewhat-successor or complement to Objective-C, not Java or Python
If they extend support for older devices by another year, one camp will cry about making them too slow. If they *didn't* release a new iOS that supported older devices, the other camp would whine about abandonment.
The earliest iPhone that iOS9 supports is the 4s, from 2011. That's 4 years ago, literally half the time iPhones have even been in existence, and twice the usual 2-year cell phone contract.
And I don't see why slowing down older devices is seen as an Apple-only problem...
http://www.zdnet.com/article/android-lollipop-users-warn-of-unusable-devices-after-upgrading/ [zdnet.com]
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday June 10 2015, @12:46AM
The problem is that the operating system gets bloated. And it's a industry wide problem.
(Score: 2) by BasilBrush on Wednesday June 10 2015, @12:16PM
OS X 10.11 works on Macs that are 8 years old.
The main reason for having Metal on OSX is to make it easy to port iOS games. It also happens to be faster than using OpenGL and OpenCL, but that's a fringe benefit.
Swift isn't a Python replacement. Python's is for scripting. And if it takes developers from Java, that's a good thing. Java is awful.
Your complaint about iOS9 amounts to: What do we need software updates for? Laughable.
Apple Pay hasn't much to do with PayPal. It's mainly for physical stores where as PayPal is for online. But if it does replace PayPal, that can only be a good thing. No one likes PayPal. Banks, no. All these services work with the banks.
Hurrah! Quoting works now!
(Score: 2) by BasilBrush on Wednesday June 10 2015, @12:06PM
If you think Scala is the solution, you don't understand the problem. Requirement number 1 is that it is interoperable with existing Obj-C code. Feature number 1 is that it's fast because it's design goal is to create intermediate code that his highly optimisable.
And it's not the slightest bit vapourous, having been available for a year, and risen to #14 on the Tiobe index. (Scala is #30).
Likewise Metal has been out for 2 years already, as opposed to the open standard flavour of the month Vulkan which doesn't exist yet.
Other than that, none of your ranting related to development. It being a development conference.
Hurrah! Quoting works now!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2015, @07:33PM
What is hilarious is that said essay came in the middle of a legal wrangle between Norwegian market regulators and Apple over itms music being locked to Apple devices.
It may well have been Jobs way of putting the blame on the labels by claiming Apple never wanted the DRM in the first place, when Apple has always been about expensive hardware dongles (OSX and Macintosh computers for instance).