It’s time for Apple’s WWDC, and its keynote. It’s currently underway, and much like Google’s I/O keynote and the introduction of Android M, we’re looking at a lot of catch-up. Both the new OS X and iOS releases are getting new features taken directly from the competition.
OS X 10.11 will be named El Capitan, and among its major new features are the ability to snap windows side-by-side, and in case you’re wondering how it works, just look at Windows 7 and later. It’s a direct copy of the Aero Snap functionality, and I’m really glad Apple finally got around to copying this excellent Windows feature. I use it so often on Windows, I really, really miss it on any platform that doesn’t have it.
Safari, too, fired up the photocopier, and this time around, Chrome’s the obvious target. Safari in El Capitan is getting pinned sites, which is a useful Chrome feature that allows you to keep your favourite sites open all the time. Safari is also copying another great Chrome feature: the little indicator that tells you which tab is producing audio. As a Safari user on my retina MacBook Pro (Chrome is a battery hog on OS X), I am incredibly happy with these new features.
Apple is also bringing its Metal graphics API to from iOS to OS X, and Apple really focused on gaming when it comes to this one. I’m still not entirely sure who uses or even cares about gaming on OS X, but for those of you that do – this is surely great news. As has become the norm for OS X, El Capitan will be free, and will ship this fall. A public beta will be released in July.
Moving on, the major new features in OS 9 are also catch-up features, this time to Android, of course. The biggest one is Proactive, Apple’s Google Now competitor. It offers similar functionality to Google Now, including reading your email to notify you of invitations and the like. Unlike Google, however, all the ‘intelligent’ stuff happens on the device itself – not on Apple’s servers.
We’ll have to see how well it works – if Proactive works just as well as Google Now, without requiring the kind of information Google claims it needs, Apple’s got a winner on its hands. If it sucks, it will be a validation of Google’s approach.
As a sidenote, I’ve never actualy really used Google Now. It does not work for me at all because my GMail account is a Google Apps account, which Google Now doesn’t work with (yes, paying Google customers cannot use Google Now). It led to a fun situation when my friends and I were on vacation in the US, in October 2014. Google Now on their iPhones worked perfectly fine, bringing up boarding passes and relevant travel information, whereas my Nexus 5, a Google phone running Google software on a Google operating system, just showed me the weather back home. When I found out why, I turned off Google Now.
The keyboard has also been improved – and now does what every other smartphone platform has done for years: when you press shift, the keycaps will reflect the state. If you put two fingers on the keyboard, you can user them to move the selection cursor – a great feature that appears to be iPad-only for now. Apple is also introducing a new news application to iOS, which is basically a Flipboard copy.
The big new iOS feature is iPad-only: multitasking. If you’ve ever used Windows 8 on a tablet, you know how this works. Swiping in from the side, splitscreen view – we’ve all been here before. It literally works and looks exactly like Windows 8. Again – this is great. A lot was wrong with Windows 8’s Metro UI for tablets, but its tablet multitasking is absolutely great and fantastic. I’m really glad Apple copied it, and it’s high-time Android will do the same (in fact, there’s early support for it in Android M).
So, much like Google’s I/O keynote and Android M specifically, OS X El Capitan and iOS 9 are all about catching up to a number of stand-out features from the competition, so I can repeat here what I said then: another example of how competition between the major platforms makes both of them better – consumers, win.
Unlike Android, though, there’s no update elephant in the room here. In fact, Apple has heard the complaints about the iOS 8 update being too big for iPhones with little storage, so iOS 9 is only 1.4GB in size. A great move, and it will ensure that every eligible device will be getting iOS 9. In addition, Apple isn’t dropping any device with iOS 9 – if it runs iOS 8, it’ll run iOS 9.
All in all, a great keynote with lots of awesome new features, but nothing we haven’t seen before. Every single day, iOS and Android become ever more interchangeable. As consumers, the more these companies copy each other’s great ideas, the more awesome features our platforms of choice will get.
I’ll leave you with two final notes. First, Swift will be released as open source. Second, Apple had women up on stage to present new features for the very first time. It was about time.
A newer OS on an older device sometimes makes the user wish they had not upgraded.
I believe Apple is addressing this issue directly with iOS 9; it’s leaving certain hardware-unsupported features out of the upgrade for the older devices, which is supposed to both leave more free space, and keep from bogging the device down. Who knows if it will work in practice though, at least until the update drops.
Leaving stuff out for “hardware” reasons has been done by Apple in the past as well. Still had reports of slow devices post-update, and people “hacking” the supposed hardware dependent parts back onto older devices and finding them working fine.
OpenGL is being handed the towel as Metal takes its place on accelerated graphics rendering on Mac OS X stack.
BetterTouchTool provides window snapping to sides and corners on Mac OS X (http://www.bettertouchtool.net/).
And as for Chrome…
http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/5/8734623/google-chrome-flash-power-…
How and why did this retarded window snapping become a thing? Just use a proper tiling window manager already!!
…and I never used Google Now either. I tried, but it never predicted the weather correctly, so I gave up.
Looking at the OS X 10.11 footage, it isn’t quite a direct copy of this useful Windows feature. It’s more like Windows 8.1’s “Metro” split screen mode than a version of Windows 7’s snapping.
It’s activated by clicking and holding on the resize button, not dragging to the edges, and uses the full screen mode. That presumably means that it won’t work with software that doesn’t support Apple’s full screen implementation (e.g. current Adobe Software).
It can’t be used to quickly “snap” a window to fill half the screen while remaining in the full windowed environment. Instead it forces you to split the entire screen between two tiled windows, filling half the screen with an Expose view until you select the second one.
It looks nicely integrated with OS X window management features like Spaces and Mission Control, but it also looks less flexible and versatile than the feature Windows users have enjoyed for the last 5 years. As with OS X’s full screen mode, it’s not something I can see myself using often, even though I’m a regular window snapper when using Windows 7.
Just thought I would let you know that the snap windows side-by-side or snap to edge of the screen or maximized. All that appeared in Windows 7, but it wasn’t first. It appeared years earlier in Ubuntu and other X11 desktop environments too. But I first noticed it way back in Ubuntu.
Ubuntu, right.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiling_window_manager
What I think is interesting is how Apple has Adobe on stage showing off using Metal. It’ll be interesting to see what happens in the sessions later on this week particularly around the basis on which it is developed given that in the keynote they mentioned that it utilises OpenGL and OpenCL underpinnings which makes me think that Metal isn’t as close to Metal as it sounds.
It’s not a feature that’s getting much hype (understandably really) but the revamped Notes app in 10.11 is probably the upgrade I’m most interested in.
I use Notes a lot as an easily searchable dumping ground for my thoughts, bits and bobs from the web, todo lists, and anything else that I want to keep a record of for some point in the future.
Back when I used the Opera web browser I loved its built in Notes sidebar. That had some neat features, like a keyboard shortcut to quickly create a note from a text selection, which would automatically link that note back to the website it was created from (great for research or product shopping). But of course that disappeared from Chrome based ChOpera along with pretty much every other interesting or unique feature in the browser…
Anyway, if I can’t have the feature conveniently integrated into my browser, the separate Notes app is a decent enough substitute. The new version looks quite significantly improved, especially the handling of URLs, which show a preview of the linked website rather than just text.
I was a big fan of the old Opera 12.x too – still use it on occasion under FreeBSD. I see the ex-CEO of Opera started a new project called Vivaldi. A new Chromium based browser, but more in line with what the old Opera 12.x used to be.
Vivaldi has the built-in Notes support. Load the home page and scroll down a page or two.
https://vivaldi.com/
Expected, but good to see it confirmed. To me the most important news coming out of WWDC is that Swift is being open sourced.
What I wasn’t expecting was for Apple to support the Swift standard libraries on Linux. Makes sense though. Client side development in Swift, server side development also in Swift.
Swift has a very tiny set of libraries.
It will be no different than Objective-C outside Apple world.
Without the Mac frameworks, no one will care.
Doesn’t matter on the server side anyway. Cocoa and Cocoa Touch don’t apply there.
Swift is a nice language. I personally think that enough developers already like it that open source will take care of the missing pieces. As it always does. It’s just a matter of time before we see server side frameworks crop up.
Captain EO?
1
Browser: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Synapse)