So Apples Developer's Conference is happing this week and the Keynote was today where they announce new stuff. There was no hardware announced but there was a TON of new software. OS X and iOS both got big updates. There will be lots of articles written about the details. They opened up a lot of things on iOS that were previously off limits for developers who weren't Apple.
They also made Macs and iOS devices work better together. Everyone wanted AirDrop to work between Macs and iOS but that was just the beginning of the announcement. With Handoff they now know when they're near each other and via a technology they're calling Continuity let you easily continue a task from one device to another. Reading a web page on your Mac? You can now pick up your iPad and swipe up on the lock screen and see the same page. Started an email on an iPhone, click an icon on your Mac's dock and finish it up on the Mac. In a lot of places they seemed really good about creating a new technology and not just creating one new feature that used it, but all the logical ones you'd want. Texts and voice (and maybe video) chats can be moved between devices. Your phone rings the Caller ID info appears on your Mac. Right click on a phone number anywhere on your mac and menu lets you call it from your phone. Your Mac can notice an iPhone nearby and prompt you to have it set up a hotspot.
Spotlight got a UI update. The search window now pops up in the middle of the screen like Quicksilver and there's not just a list of results but a preview pane of the first one which can also show wikipedia page previews and maps and other things. It's kinda like what Google does with their results now with the pane on the right.
On iOS they beefed up Mail and Messages. The system keyboard now (finally) has predictive typing and third parties can add new system-wide keyboards. There's now an iCloud Drive and apps can use a picker to find files form other apps. So you can pick the app you want to use to view that PDF you have.
They mentioned some new APIs. With HealthKit and HomeKit they worked with leading venders to define a new API so that data can be shared easily. They also (again finally) added family sharing support for iTunes and photos and other things.
The App Store got a lot of new features. There's trending searches and Editor's Picks and Bundle pricing. There's beta testing platform developers can make use of and they can post videos of the apps (no more 5 screenshot limitation). They still didn't mention anything about App trials which I think would really help developers (and users).
There were some oddities. Markup lets you draw on pictures in mac Mail and has some shape recognition stuff left over from the Newton. It also has some PDF annotating and signing features. These are fine, but seem oddly squeezed into Mail rather than being system wide.
And then they announced the crazy thing. Ever since Apple bought Next the programming language for OS X and iOS has been Objective-C. They announced a new language called Swift that's "Objective-C without the C". They say it's fast, modern, safe and interactive. The quick demo looked slick. The IDE had a right pane that showed visual representations of things. Graphs showing the values of vectors and even demos of a sprite-based game being developed.
Even without any hardware announcements this was a really interesting presentation. Rumors that Apple can't innovate anymore are way way off. Also the people presenting all did a very good job. Not quite Steve level, but pretty close. APPL managed to fall during the keynote, but I doubt this is will last long.
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