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Posts tagged with "wwdc"

iCloud: Photo Stream

Another cornerstone feature of iCloud that was just unveiled was ‘Photo Stream’ which will bring all your photos to the cloud. It works so that as soon as you take a photo with your iPhone, that photo will instantly be whisked away to the cloud and then pushed back to all of your other devices - whether it be a Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV or even a Windows PC!

How many times have we taken photos on our iPhone and wanted to share them on the iPad. Wouldn’t it be great if they were already there?

Photo Stream is built right into the iOS Photos app so there is “nothing new to learn” and on the Mac it is built right into iPhoto whilst on a PC it integrates with the ‘Pictures’ folder. The Apple TV won’t miss out either, Photo Stream is integrated straight into it.

Each photo will survive on iCloud for 30 days, at which point old photos will no longer be pushed to devices. iOS devices will be able to keep the last 1,000 photos but Macs and PCs will keep all photos.

Apple Unveils iCloud

UPDATE: You get access to iCloud when you upgrade or buy a new phone. Everyone gets 5GB of iCloud storage for Mail, but don’t worry because Apps, Books and Photo Stream do not count. Developers can try out iCloud from today.

Steve Jobs has just unveiled iCloud and it is a service that frees all your devices from having to connect to your Mac to get updated media and data. The Mac is being demoted, and in its place is the iCloud which will become “the hub of your digital life”. iCloud will be free!

We’ve got a solution for this problem. We’re going to demote the PC and the mac to just be a device. We’re going to move your hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud.”

iCloud stores all your content, so that if you have something new on your iPhone it is sent to the cloud immediately, iCloud will then push it back to all your other devices.

And it’s completely integrated with your apps, and there’s nothing new to learn. It just all… works. It just works.

Whether it be new events on your calendar or a new message in your @me account (which will remain), all of it gets pushed to the cloud and then pushed back to all your devices. The App Store, which is integrated within iCloud will let you see all your purchased apps, even if they are from another device. The same will occur for iBooks

Now what about for devices you buy in the future. The cloud downloads it to all of your devices.

Backup too will be dealt with by iCloud, it will take daily backups of all your devices over WiFi including all the purchased music, apps and books, photos, videos and app data. If you ever lose your device or get a new one, it can all be restored from iCloud.

Apple Unveils iMessage For iOS 5

A new service to hit iOS 5 is iMessage, a service that will allow any user on an iOS 5 device to send text, photos, videos, contacts and more to any other iOS 5 user. It’ll work fine regardless of whether they are using an iPhone, iPad, iPad Touch or even a mixture of those devices.

Our customers have been asking us for a new messaging solution. We’re launching a service that works for all iOS 5 customers

iMessages has support for delivery receipts, optionally read receipts, typing notifications and all messages will be pushed to all devices you own, “so that you can pick up where you left off”. It’ll work on 3G and WiFi and everything will be encrypted.

iOS 5 Camera App: Lock screen Shortcut, Volume Shutter Button And Photo Editing


Improvements to the iOS Camera app are next up in the WWDC keynote, and chief to the improvements made to that app includes a lock screen shortcut to taking pictures and improved auto focus options.

A camera icon on the lockscreen will take you to the Camera app, ready to take a photo. If you have a passcode it will let you take photos but not view the photo album. What is even cooler is that pressing the volume up button now becomes a shutter button.

Within the Camera app, you can pinch to zoom and holding your finger on the screen will create an auto-focus and exposure lock around that area. Finally, you can now edit photos straight from the Camera app including the oft-used ‘Red-eye removal’ feature, crop photos and ‘Auto-Enhance’.

iOS 5: Safari Improvements

Apple has unveiled a number of improvements to the iOS version of Safari and in particular is proper tabbed browsing for Safari on the iPad. As can be seen above, you will now be able to switch tabs with just one touch.

Other new features include ‘Reader’ which will strip a website down to the bare basics of just the text and image, similar to Readability and Instapaper functions. You can then email that “streamlined” article to any friends or family.

The second is the ‘Reading List’ which allows you to save articles for reading at a later time. It works on the iPhone, iPad or Safari and you can access the Reading List from any of those versions of Safari.

iOS 5: Newsstand, Subscription Magazines and Newspapers In One Place

New to iOS 5 will be a feature dubbed “Newsstand” which promises to put together all your digital Newspapers and Magazines together in one easy to find place. Scott Forstall, who introduced the feature, said that Magazines from the National Geographic to Vanity Fair to Popular Science will be available whilst Newspapers such as the New York Times and the Daily Telegraph will be available in Newsstand.

Read all about it. All in one place. iOS 5 organizes your magazine and newspaper app subscriptions in Newsstand: a folder that lets you access your favorite publications quickly and easily.

You get the Magazines from the App Store but once added will live in your ‘Newstand’ which lives as an icon on your Homescreen. New issues will be downloaded in the background so that when you pick up “your iPad, the newspaper is ready for you to read it offline”.

iOS 5 Gets “Notification Center” With Completely New UI

The rumors were true: at the WWDC keynote Scott Forstall has just unveiled the new notification system of iOS 5, which as reported earlier today looks similar to the way Android deals with notifications through a pulldown menu from the status bar. The new system reminds us of Cydia plugins LockInfo and Mobile Notifier (who creator Peter Hajas was recently hired by Apple) in the way it presents notifications in a single place, both anywhere on the Springboard and in the lock screen.

As a rumor from this morning suggested, you can swipe on messages in the Lock screen to launch the associated app, check out weather and stock widgets in the Notification Center pulldown menu, quickly dismiss notifications when they become visible at the top with a white interface.

Photos courtesy of This is my Next.

Over 200 Million iOS Devices Sold, 25 Million iPads And $2.5 Billion Paid To Developers

Scott Forstall has just come on stage at WWDC and revealed that in just 14 months, Apple has sold over 25 million iPads. That has brought the total number of iOS devices (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) sold to over 200 million since the original iPhone launched in 2007. That brings iOS’s ‘Mobile Installed Base’ to 44% of the total market, with Android in second place at 28% of the market and RIM at 19% of the market.

Our customers couldn’t wait to get their hands on the iPad 2. In the first 14 months, we’ve sold 25 million iPads

Furthermore the iTunes store has now sold over 15 Billion songs, whilst the iBookstore (that launched last year) has seen over 130 million downloads. Apple now has 225 million accounts aggregated from the iTunes, iBooks and App Stores.

Moving to the ever-popular App Store, there have been over 90,000 apps built just for the iPad. This all contributed to what is now over 14 billion App downloads from the store - leading Apple to pay developers over $2.5 billion dollars since launching the App Store in 2008.

Mac App Store Adds In-App Purchases, Push Notification And Delta Updates

The apps in the Mac App Store are set to receive some solid enhancements including push notifications, sandboxing and delta updates.

For enhanced security, apps will have a built-in sandbox mode whilst developers will have the ability to send “delta updates”, which are effectively ‘patch based’ updates, meaning the entire app will not have to re-downloaded with every update.Apps will also be able to send push notifications to users and just like iOS apps, can also have in-app purchases.

Phil Schiller also touted that the Mac App Store has become the number one retailer for PC software, overtaking even Best Buy.