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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 PizzaRollPlinkett on Tuesday June 09 2015, @03:40PM
Why will Apple open source the Swift programming language? It's not like there aren't a million and one general-purpose languages now. What does it do that Java or Python won't do? Swift is the glue language for Apple's Cocoa, iOS, etc frameworks, but take those away, and ... ? What's left?
The larger issue is that if they're just going to open source the language (when did "open source" become a verb?) why didn't they just pick an open language like Java or Python in the first place instead of inflict yet another programming language on the development world? There were no existing languages that people already used which could be adapted? What makes Swift unique, anyway?
The development world needs standards, not more fragmentation.
Anyhow, I've seen people mention GNUStep, but ... I looked at GNUStep one time to see if I could learn a little about the Apple world without buying Apple gear. The first simple program I tried to build didn't work because I found GNUStep lagged Apple by so much that it will probably never catch up. And that was years ago and there have been many framework/API iterations since then.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 4, Informative) by BasilBrush on Tuesday June 09 2015, @06:31PM
The language standards people are mostly still using are C/C++ and Java. Which are old and tired. We certainly need a new language to replace those.
Swift has optionals, a better error model, values and structs as full UDTs, interactive experimentation with playgrounds, tuples, no need for header files, native fully unicode strings (not just UTF16), no implicit fall throughs on switches, optionally named parameters, associated values on enums, guard statement for preconditions, optimisation as a design goal of the language.
Not all of these are unique to Swift but some are. And the collection of all of them is compelling, even for use outside of Apple platforms.
Hurrah! Quoting works now!
(Score: 3, Disagree) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Tuesday June 09 2015, @07:39PM
Why do we need to replace C, C++, or Java and throw away the decades of accumulated experience and knowledge of them that have been built up? That seems self-defeating as an industry. Along this same line of thought, we'll also throw away Swift in a few years, so why invest anything at all in it or any other new language, since it's an exercise in futility?
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 3, Informative) by BasilBrush on Tuesday June 09 2015, @11:53PM
Why do we need to replace C, C++, or Java and throw away the decades of accumulated experience and knowledge of them that have been built up?
Because they are outdated, and you can only get so far by updating the languages. Most of those things I listed cannot just be tacked on to those old languages.
Programmers are voting with their feet. And already it's at number 14 on the Tiobe index.
No doubt Swift will be outdated too eventually. But that's no reason to work with a programming language from the 1970s/80s or 90s for the next 30 years.
Swift makes for more secure, less buggy and probably faster software. 30 years of that is worth it. But if you want to keep using the old stuff, no one is stopping you.
Hurrah! Quoting works now!
(Score: 2) by jcross on Tuesday June 09 2015, @07:19PM
If the summary is correct, it would seem they're making it open source in the same way that Objective-C is open source, and my guess is that their intent is to draw broader support for the language. Poor support outside of Apple is one major problem with Objective-C, which despite looking butt-ugly at first glance, is in many ways a much more well-thought-out extension to C than C++. However, if you're not writing for an Apple platform, all you get is the core libraries that allow you to manipulate numbers and strings and such. A language without good libraries isn't much use, and so despite Objective-C being open source, the vast majority of people using it were the people who needed to write native apps for Apple's platforms. For some reason, it would seem they want to repeat the experiment for Swift, but maybe this one has a better chance because it looks more elegant. I think it would take some open source devs with a serious use case deciding to write or wrap a bunch of libraries to really make it popular though.
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Tuesday June 09 2015, @07:43PM
I do agree completely that Obj-C is "a much more well-thought-out extension to C than C++" but that would be true of anything, even brain**** because C++ is so totally awful that any normal kind of crud-o-rama like Obj-C looks sane in comparison :) I did try to use Obj-C once, just to see what it was like, and a lot of the message passing stuff and dynamic binding is elegant once you wrap your mind around it. It's an interesting road not taken, but very very very difficult to keep in your mind when you're used to the "object.property" and "object.method()" syntax in every other OO language.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)