Dubbed "Apple Music," the service is both an update to the company's iTunes Store as well as Apple's response to Spotify's industry-leading streaming service and Jay Z's fledgling, all-star Tidal. Apple Music's plan includes a "revolutionary music service curated by the leading music experts we helped handpick," a 24/7 worldwide radio station and "Connect," an "ecosystem" that allows for artists to communicate directly with fans.
It seems Apple is no more immune to the same annoying catalog holes that have nagged other streaming services. But it may prove better at navigating them thanks to people like Dr. Dre, Jimmy Iovine, and Trent Reznor. That said, hurdles are already coming up. For one, don't expect to stream The Beatles discography without paying for it separately.
So if Apple is launching its own version of radio, where does that leave a station such as Radio 1? And if Apple’s idea of radio doesn’t turn out to be radio as we know it, what does that mean for the very notion of radio?
In El Capitan Apple is applying the search functionality of Siri to text searches done via spotlight. You can ask for information on the weather, or on the scores from a hockey game. You can also ask for very specific items, such as the query in the image above where Spotlight is used to find a set of Keynote slides about a natural park that were sent by a certain person.
There are two areas of performance that need to be considered. The first is raw speed, while the second is the frame rate of animations. El Capitan tackles some of the issues with the first aspect, but Apple has definitely been focusing on the second aspect with their announcement that the Metal graphics API is coming to OS X.
In iOS 9, Siri can pull up photos and videos stored on your device. More impressively, Siri becomes a smarter assistant by looking at how you use your iPhone at any given moment and recommending ways for you to use it next, interpreting natural language into commands. For example, when you’re looking at a webpage on Safari, you can create a Siri reminder by saying “Siri, remind me about this later,” and Siri will then refer back to the webpage you are browsing.
On stage, Apple touted that iOS 9's new architecture allows the update to be delivered in a much smaller download than previous versions. The thinning of actual apps could also be a huge boon for those with limited storage space on their devices. It will likely allow developers to build their app packages with just the essential code and libraries needed to guarantee functionality. That would remove some of the legacy cruft that could fatten up an otherwise economically coded app.
The big change — or at least, the one with the most potential to change Apple Watch's use — is native apps. Apple says there are already "thousands of apps" that are Watch compatible (which represents just a small number of the App Store's current catalog). With the new SDK, developers will be able to access a number of Watch functions.
Newsstand required custom app development for each publication or the adoption of a third-party iOS publishing platform, such as those offered by 29th Street Publishing, Richie, or TypeEngine. The News app does away with that, relying on interpreting existing websites’ HTML as well as a new markup specification called Apple News Format that publications (and conceivably blog platforms) will be able to produce from their content-management systems. Apple’s preliminary News app site provides scant detail so far about the format, but quite a bit of information about everything else.
I’d like to know more about this news reader app Apple just announced, let me just search “Apple News” that should do it
— Jim Ray (@jimray) June 8, 2015Jennifer Bailey, a 10-year Apple veteran and vice president of Apple Pay, described the new changes to the company's mobile payments system (including support for the UK) and vice president of product marketing Susan Prescott outlined the company's News app.
Today, Apple announced that Swift 2 was on its way, with a number of new features and better performance. But perhaps the most striking thing is that the whole codebase—the compiler and standard libraries—would be open sourced, with code that works on Linux released later this year.
Apple has consolidated its developer program, bundling together access to developer tools and pre-release software builds for iOS, OS X and watchOS all under one umbrella.
So, could app developers get Connect pages where we could connect with our audiences?
Never mind, I zoned out.
— Greg Pierce (@agiletortoise) June 8, 2015Jott, a messaging app that works without a data plan or WiFi connection, has caught on among junior high and high school students, according to co-founder Jared Allgood. He says the app more than doubled to half a million active users in March, up from 150,000 active users previous.
Text messages usually travel by way of your phone to the nearest cell tower. Then they get routed to other cell towers to reach the person you are texting. However, Jott can send messages from one device to another without any cell service as long as those texting are within close enough proximity to each other.
OutlineEdit is a clean, easy to use outliner, which is ideal for those who want to make outlines, but don’t need a more powerful tool. Even if you don’t make outlines, OutlineEdit is the kind of app that can help you get started.
I watch the Apple WWDC to learn what new un-deletable apps will show up on my phone soon.
— Matt Haughey (@mathowie) June 8, 2015Easy: 18.
#wwdc pic.twitter.com/VxM1tjDS0P
— Aral Balkan (@aral) June 8, 2015Thanks for reading.