Gadgetory

hey this is Josh with the Virg and we are live at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference you know it's been a rollercoaster of a day beginning with me nearly getting run over by thousands of extremely angry and anxious developers desperately trying to claw and punch their way to a chief and pretty uncomfortable seat you will sit down I promise but obviously that's not the main story the big story is that Apple had a bunch of announcements iOS 8 a new version of OS 10 called Yosemite several weed jokes on stage actually pretty good a pretty good run of weed jokes on stage OS 10 we strangely this one had large pockets of support within the product marketing organization so Yosemite is obviously a big deal it's a complete visual revamp of OS 10 for the desktop it looks a lot more like iOS there's a bunch of new features but I thought the most notable thing that they're including is something that Apple's playing continuity which is actually a cross-platform feature it is a way that you can sort of push your application States from your desktop to your iPad or your iPhone and vice versa and there's a lot of interplay there that's really similar to an idea that I had a few years ago called the continuous client which would allow you to kind of place shift the stuff that you're doing on your devices from one to the other and there's some really interesting things that Apple is doing with stuff like proximity awareness where your computer will know that your phone is nearby and will be able to answer a call from it which is kind of a huge thing and I've been sitting at my computer a billion times wishing that I could make a call or answer a call from the desktop instead of having to do it from the phone than the sitting next to it so I think that's one of the most notable things that they did today in terms of Yosemite but obviously the visual refresh refresh is in Safari a new engine that's powering Safari that's extremely fast and power efficient and I think you know most importantly what's interesting about continuity is that it allows you to place a call to dr. Dre while at your desktop if you want to be Tim into the office it'd be about four thirty but I think you know orientation new people or Ian tation starts at nine so and you don't to miss the free t-shirt so I chewed for nine I don't know if that's a feature that's available to everybody or just a Craig federighi but it's intriguing Apple also introduced iOS 8 today which is a pretty major update from the previous version of the software not a lot of visual changes that I could see at least during the demos that they had but some really interesting new features and a lot of under the hood stuff one of the things that's really notable is that they have updated notifications and you can now take action on a notification right from the drop down panel so you can like something on Facebook or reply to a message another interesting thing they've done with the Notification Center is they've added widgets to it so a third-party developer can plug in glanceable information you can access right from the notification panel I mentioned there's a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff going on and one of the big features is extensions Apple's allowing developers to make their applications extensible and plug into more of the system architecture so you'll be able to share from apps to a lot of other apps now including Apple's first party apps for instance Pinterest sharing or Instagram sharing will now be able to be built in at a system level and you can also have things like photo filters say a visco photo filter in your Photos app you can apply right from within that application so that's a huge underlying change the way Apple is running its iOS platform and as we create a lot of opportunities for developers to plug into each other's apps and to Apple's apps in a brand new way they're also allowing third-party keyboards which is a huge sea change for Apple they've been proselytizing their keyboard as the best in the business since pretty much day 1 on the iPhone and this is definitely a change in attitude about the keyboard and about users ability to customize their experience Apple is also including continuity obviously in iOS 8 it's a big part of how it plays with your desktop so that's kind of awesome and there's some new multitasking features you can now get to your favorite contacts from within the multitasker you can also access Siri without having to actually touch the phone elsewhere there's some slight tweaks some interesting changes to mail with new gestures to manage your mailbox and sort of multitask while you're working on a message and there's also maybe some changes to the speed with which the OS actually operates but that might have just been for demo purposes but overall you know this really did feel like a developer focused WWDC maybe more so than they've ever done in the past and in fact they introduced a new programming language here called Swift which people kind of went crazy for in the room and I think is a really notable move today maybe the biggest story of the day because it's certainly going to have a long-term impact on Apple's platforms but I think the most notable thing that happened today is that Apple seemed to be having a lot more fun they were looser they were more open they were cracking jokes and I think the vibe in the room was very different from previous years at this event and hopefully that's a little bit of the new way forward for the company