WWDC 2013

Its been a while since I've posted and this week seems as good as any to get back into the writing with both WWDC and E3 on the same day but I'll be focusing on WWDC in this piece.

For those of you that don't know WWDC is Apple's annual worldwide developer conference held in the Moscone Center in California, The purpose of this is usually to unleash upon the world the most recent musings of their secretive R & D department.

The Things that I most expected to see this year were, The announcement of iOS 7, The updated Mac Pro and the New Macbook Air as well as the iPad mini with a retina display. What we actually got, well. Was all of those minus the iPad mini but th
at was a bit of a pipe dream anyway.

iOS 7

Lets start off by talking about the new mobile OS for iPad, iPhone and iPod. Since the disaster that was apple maps occured last year under the leadership of Scott Forstall there has been a fundamental upheaval in the upper echeleons of the Apple creative team. These events and his swift departure afterwards paved the way for Jony Ive, The British hardware guru who has been developing products for them for many years. He now heads up "software and hardware development" and has thus been tasked with re-imagining iOS. It has up until recently started to look very dated up against the ever changing flavours of Android and Apple fans have been starting to jump ship as every year the updates only fix minor flaws and there has been a lack of a major over haul until now. The main changes have been applied graphically with a complete redesign of the GUI making it look some what lighter and more spacious regardless of screen size however other than that there were a few tweaks made to the control center which you can pull up for the bottom of the screen and a promise to improve multi tasking functionality within separate apps. Other than that it wasn't particularly inspiring if I'm honest.


OS X Mavericks

This also heralded the announcement of the newest edition of the Mac's Desktop OS X. This was to be expected as they have fallen into a yearly cycle of refreshing the software since OS X Lion, however this brings on a new naming convention departing from using the names of feline species into apparent land marks in California. This change brings in Apple Maps for the desktop (not sure if that's actually a good thing to be honest) as well as iBooks, tabs and tags in Finder, improved support for multiple displays and promises of improved multi-tasking and energy efficiency. The improved support for multiple displays is a major, major plus. Since 10.8 (mountain lion) they have added a full screen feature for apps on the desktop which hides the dock and the menu bar so you can focus fully on the task at hand however if you were using multiple displays this meant that your second display would be rendered un-usable, they have changed this however so that this feature does not occupy both displays and that the other can be used for whatever you need it for.



The New Mac Pro

AT LAST! A new Mac Pro, It's been a long wait but by the sounds of it my god was it worth it. We didn't get to see much of it physically but we were bombarded with potential specs for the new device which included: up to 12 core configurations, 1866MHz DDR 3 Memory (fastest which has ever been put into an apple computer), Intel Haswell Processors and AMD Firepro Graphics capable of running multiple 4K resolution machines. Needless to say Power users everywhere will be rejoicing.

The New Macbook Air

Also announced yesterday was the refreshed version of the Mac Book Air, Not too much light was shed on the details of the new version but what we were told is that they would now be boasting up to 9 hours battery on the 11 inch version and 13 hours on the 13 inch version with brand new intel processors as well intel 5000 graphics. The new intel chips claim to boost performance by upto another 40%.

Round Up

I'm quite happy with what we got yesterday, I'm looking forward to trying out the new Control Center Interface on iOS and especially looking forward to getting my hands on an updated Mac Pro. The new OS X isn't something I'm thrilled about but its inevitable this time of year and besides with the Multi Display issues fixed maybe I can actually do some work and watch netflix at the same time now?