While most of the attention from today’s Apple event was aimed squarely at the new iPads and Macs being launched, there was plenty for Apple‘s loyal legion of fans to get excited about on the software front too.
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From a new developer kit for the Apple Watch to a brand new update for iOS and (finally) OS X Yosemite’s long-awaited arrival, there was a new breath of software for each of Apple’s devices.
Watchkit
Almost inevitably it took Apple launching a smartwatch for the world to actually sit up and pay attention to the form. The question it singularly failed to answer on launch day however was how developers would go about building apps for it.
Today we got the answer in the shape of Watchkit, the developer toolkit for the smartwatch. It’s set to roll out next month, although that doesn’t give developers much time to build a killer app for it, especially given that Apple seems determined to launch the thing by early 2015. If it intends Apple Watch apps to play as nicely with devices running iOS as Google does with those on Android Lollipop, the time constraints become even more stark.
iOS 8.1
While senior vice president of Software Engineering Craig Federighi spent plenty of time waxing lyrical about how fast adoption for iOS 8 has been (in reality still faster than Android, but slower than previous iOS updates), he did admit that Apple does “get a little bit of feedback”. That feedback will apparently show up in iOS 8.1.
The most interesting thing about the updated version of the iOS is not the new features that Apple will be bringing in but the old one’s it’s going to bring back.
Among the biggest on that front is Camera Roll, which was apparently vital to many iOS users.
The new features meanwhile include Apple Pay (obviously) and Public Beta for iCloud photo library. The latter will enable users to get some serious cloud storage for their photos. The first 5GB is free, with incremental prices thereafter (20GB, for instance, will cost you just under a dollar a month).
OS X Yosemite
If you were to go by my Twitter timeline alone, you’d swear upgrading to the public beta of OS X Yosemite was the scariest thing on Earth. The masses though seem completely undeterred. According to Federighi, more than a million people have signed up for it.
Not much looks set to change from the beta, with Messages, iTunes, iWork all getting updates and Apple still claiming that the new version of Safari will run six times faster than competing browsers on the OS.
Fedirighi also made a lot of bones about how secure the interaction between iOS 8 and Yosemite is (reassurance wass apparently needed in the wake of the recent celebrity hacking scandal).
He made his point using a fake scoops site and with a call to comedian Stephen Colbert, who is also apparently Apple’s “Supreme Commander for Secrecy”.
It’s a pretty useful name to have on your side when you’re getting over a secrecy scandal, and Apple’s light-hearted approach was probably the right way to go about recovering from recent events.
Heck, even Cook got in on the action, saying that he hopes Colbert “can do a better job than I’ve done”.
Anyway, iOS 8.1 launches Monday, with Yosemite available today — alongside the iWork update for OS X and iOS.
All are free to download.
