Apple Archive

iOS application developers are expendable, and have zero reach. Taylor Swift is unique, and has a quarter metric frickton of reach.

Do the math.

Taylor Swift just outsmarted one of the biggest, richest, and most arrogant companies on earth. Impressive.

The fact that Apple announced this sudden tail-between-its-legs change of heart in the middle of the night (might've been late Sunday night for US - I suck at timezones), via Twitter no less, is indicative of how badly thought-out this whole Apple Music thing seems to be. The presentation during WWDC was awkward, the three month trial period heavily criticised, and now this. Curious.

I bought an Apple Watch, and I've been wearing it for about two weeks. I'm a notorious mobile computing fanatic and early adopter. How does it hold up to real-world use? How does it compare to the hype?

Let's get this out of the way: I've been waiting for an Apple Watch for a long time. While a lot of people were quick to dismiss the whole idea, I've been on board with the idea of a wrist-mounted companion to a smartphone since I first started using a smartphone. I never bought a Pebble or any of the other first generation smart watches, largely because I've been around the block long enough to know that it's hard to be an early adopter, but partially because I wanted to wait and see what Apple would come up with.

I tend not to link to podcasts - I don't like podcasts and prefer good ol' text - but this one is pretty great.

It's a bit feelgood, of course, but it's still totally worth it. Schiller and Gruber hit it off on this one, and there's some great stories in there.

An important bit of news from WWDC that deserves its own news item: you no longer need to be a licensed developer (i.e., paying) to test your applications on your own devices.

Of course, to distribute them, you still need to pay up.

I'm glad I wasn't the only one who did a triple-take when this was said in Apple's App Store video last night. If this is truly how Apple feels about its contributions to the world - and everything points in the direction that it does - then the company has lost all sense of perspective and has transcended its usual playful arrogance towards full-on insanity.

Very disappointed in Neil deGrasse Tyson, too, for making similarly outrageous claims in this video.

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.

Let the pointless speculation, begin.

Download it through the Apple Watch application on your phone.

Meanwhile, the big Android Wear 5.1.1 update is available by buying the new LG Watch Urbane, or for LG ZenWatch owners. Oh Google.

Federico Viticci's iOS 9 wishlist contains my number one gamebreakinig missing feature in iOS:

If Apple were to finally make this possible, there's going to be a whole lot of Google iPhones and Google iPads out there.

This clearly calls for an official EU investigation into Google.

With the kind of money Apple has in reserve, and the kind of growth figures the company is still demonstrating each quarter, this seems like a very, very, very distant future. Apple will remain on top like this for a long, long time.

With Europe being pretty much a lost cause for Apple, China really stepped in and offered the company more growth potential than Europe ever could.

Right now, virtually all reporting about Apple focusses on its biggest new product in years - the Apple Watch. It's the centre of the Apple media show, and no matter where you go on the web, there's no way to get around it or avoid it - even here on OSNews. Apple is the biggest company in the world, so this makes perfect sense, whether you like it or not. Even if the Apple Watch does not sell well by Apple's standards, it will still be a billion dollar business, and it will still leave a huge mark on the industry.

However, I think Apple has a much more interesting new product on the shelves. This new product got its stage time during the various keynotes, and it sure isn't neglected by the media or anything, but I think its potential is so huge, so game-changing, that it deserves way, way more than it is getting.

I've been using touch devices for a really long time. From Palm OS and PocketPC devices, to iPhones and Android phones, and everything in between. I've used them with styluses, my fingertips, my fingernails, but there has always been a hugely important downside to touch interaction that made it cumbersome to use: the lack of any form of tactile feedback. In all these years, I've never learned to type properly on touch devices. I still regularly miss tap targets, and I still need to look at my device whenever I want to tap on something. It's cumbersome.

Apple's new Force Touch and Taptic Engine technology has the potential to change all of this.

This week, I bought a brand new 13.3" retina MacBook Pro, equipped with the fancy new trackpad technology. Remember the hype on stage as Apple unveiled this new technology? For once, they weren't overselling it. This really feels like some sort of crazy form of black magic. The trackpad does not move; it does not physically depress, and yet, when you use it, it's indistinguishable from a traditional trackpad.

When the device is off and the trackpad is, thus, unpowered, "clicking" on the trackpad feels just like trying to click on any other rigid surface. A blind person would not know she is touching a trackpad. Turn the device on, however, and the technology comes to life, turning this inanimate piece of glass into something that feels exactly like a traditional trackpad, clicks and all.

Using Force Touch - where you press down a little harder - is an even stranger sensation; it feels identical to a camera's two-stage shutter button, even though there's no actual downward movement of the pad. My brain still doesn't quite comprehend it. I know how the technology works and what's happening, but it's still downright amazing.

With the ability to give this kind of detailed tactile feedback to your fingers, Apple is on the cusp of solving the problem of the lack of tactility on touchscreens. Once this technology is further refined, it will surely find its way to iPhones and iPads, allowing you to feel individual keys on the virtual keyboard, and buttons in the user interface. Not only will this allow people to type more accurately and find their way around their device, it will also mean that one of my best friends, who is suffering from a very rare degenerative eye condition that will leave her close to blind within 15-20 years, could possibly continue to use an iPhone.

Force Touch and the Taptic Engine are, despite their horrible names, the most exciting products Apple has unveiled since the original iPhone. I'm excited to see where Apple takes this, and once it makes its way to the iPhone, I will have to think long and hard about my choice of mobile platform.