The keynote at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) is just wrapping up in the Moscone Center in San Francisco, where the company’s CEO Steve Jobs announced the latest additions to the firm’s desktop operating system OS X, and iOS, its mobile sibling.
The update that will draw the most attention will undoubtedly be iOS, which Apple still claims to be the dominant mobile platform despite Google’s Android making huge inroads over the last six months. This morning Apple finally announced some oft-rumoured new features.
Firstly, an overhauled notification system which apes Android’s “window shade” mechanic. The top bar, usually home to the clock and status bars, allows notifications to make themselves known. This bar can then be pulled down to reveal more details and a quick swipe of a notification will whisk users away to the relevant app.
The next big addition was Apple’s take on Blackberry Messenger or GChat. The new system, called iMessage, allows chat across multiple iOS devices (thats the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad) over an encrypted connection, and includes niceties such as delivery receipts and typing notifications.
The next addition was wireless activation and sync. Apple is looking to cut the cord to the PC entirely and now allows new iOS purchasers to activate their device straight out of the box. System updates can also now be delivered over-the-air (OTA) – however Apple is using so-called “Delta” updates, meaning the data delivered OTA represents only the new features – saving users from the hassle of downloading an entirely new iOS image, which runs into the hundreds of megabytes.
iOS 5 includes lots of other incremental updates such as deep Twitter integration, a revised camera app allowing for the volume keys to act as shutter buttons and a split keyboard for iPad thumb-typing.
Although Apple showed off lots of new iOS features, there was one overarching theme – although all are welcome additions to Apple’s mobile platform: None were “new” in the purest sense. All appear to have been lifted, or at the very least influenced, by features on other platforms. Even the additions to the Safari browser, which allow for the caching of web pages for reading later, have been around for years in services like Instapaper. All the additions had the typical Cupertino polish, but there was a lack of true originality in the latest software updates.
iOS 5 is available to developers today, and should find its way to the general public this Fall.
Image via Engadget
