I hardly know which to show you first. Let’s go with the song, The Craig Federighi Show:
And with that in your head, here’s what it (allegedly) looks like to outsiders as you watch an Apple announcement:
wwdc
Pet peeve rant here. Nothing to see. Move along, move along
Look, I think there’s a spectrum of interest to do with Apple and things like the company’s WWDC. Most people are in the ‘never heard of it’ category, a great proportion are in the ‘and don’t care anyway’ set. If it does affect you or you are ever going to benefit from it or be even remotely interested, the smart money says you’ll look when you next buy a Mac or an iPhone. Or maybe you’ll just get these new features when they’re here and you’ll decide then if you’re interested.
That’s not only sensible, it is intelligent and only the teeniest bit dull.
Way over here in the not sensible, not necessarily all that intelligent but definitely bright and shiny category, you join me in watching the WWDC announcements and enjoy it.
But there is another set.
It’s the set of people who are quite interested. I have no criticism of this set. I have every criticism of the kind of technology journalism that tries to snare them. It’s the same kind of technology journalism that tries to snare us shiny interested people too. And it got me.
I read a headline today that ran: “Here’s one major new Yosemite and iOS 8 feature that got overlooked”. I am not even going to apologise for how that got me and I read it while waiting for the kettle to boil.
What I am going to do is boil in harmony because this major overlooked feature was Spotlight. This is broadly a search thing that Macs have had for ages and it is very good, it finds stuff including some answers to questions: I used it two minutes ago to add up some figures. Usually it’s how I find anything on my Mac. That script I wrote somewhere between 2005 and 2008, the one with a musical number in it, I wrote it in Final Draft, I think I emailed it to Bert that time, with just that kind of head-scratching detail, Spotlight will find the script pretty much instantly. Spotlight is Good.
And Spotlight is improved in the new OS X Yosemite. But the WWDC announcement included it. It fair belaboured it. First Apple told us what was new and showed some screenshots of it in action. Then it demonstrated these same features in action. (Just as an aside, the one thing I’d lose from an Apple announcement is the demo of what we’ve learnt about two seconds ago. Sometimes it’s good, I appreciate that it helps fix the details in one’s mind, but often enough I’m looking at my watch.)
We’re not done yet.
Having told us about it in detail and then demonstrated Spotlight in detail, Apple moved on to many, many other things – and kept using Spotlight throughout. They explicitly spoke of how it was built in to various other features.
There is only one way in which this can be regarded as Spotlight being ‘overlooked’ and that’s if the website running that stupid click-bait title was admitting that they forgot to cover it before.
You’ll notice there’s no link to the article. I’ve wasted enough of your time steaming away here, I’m not sending you their way.
My name is William, and I am a journalist. Hello, William.
Embarrassingly true: how WWDC is watched
Specifically, how it’s watched by me. And so many others, too.
HeySiri – so much for jailbreaking
It was the one feature I liked on Android – though, as ever, that meant it was on one Android phone somewhere – and it was then the one thing that might make me jailbreak my iPhone.
OkSiri… makes Siri listen all the time. No pressing a button and waiting a mo before speaking to Siri, it is listening all the time. And specifically it is listening for a phrase such as “OK, Siri” that it then recognises as its cue to work.
This I Might Jailbreak For – William Gallagher (1 June 2014)
Glad I didn’t bother now. Maybe the one WWDC announcement that most grabbed me was HeySiri. (I don’t like that name any more than I do OkSiri, but.) It is exactly what that OkSiri is, except it’s official, it will work.
WWDC: What I’ll use and what firms will copy
This is going to be the norm for all computers soon but Macs soonest. You’re walking through your house writing a quick email on your iPhone and by the time you get to your desk, it’s becoming a long email. You’re wishing you hadn’t started it on the wee small screen there but you’re committed to it so you finish.
Not any more. From later this year when OS X Yosemite and iOS 8 are out, you’ll just put your iPhone down and carry on typing on your Mac. Exactly where you were. If it’s that long a bleedin’ email, you could then just pick up your iPad and head out of the house still writing it.
I can’t say I’ve ever wanted to between all three like that but I have regularly done that business with writing an email on my iPhone. I have very often had to leave for a meeting and therefore had to set things up on my iPad before I go. So the idea of just picking it up and going, I will do this. I will use this.
Apple calls it HandOff, as in handing off work to someone else or in this case some other machine. Samsung will probably call it OffHand and I rather like that better. But soon enough nobody will call it anything at all because this alchemy will be something normal that everybody uses everywhere.
I’ll also use this new business that if there’s no wifi for your iPad, it will connect to your phone and use that’s 3G or 4G connection. I do this now through tethering and it works fine, but it’s something else to remember to do. Something else to fiddle with instead of just working.
I am very big on not having to fiddle, not having to set up, not have to faff through a Wizard or something, but instead just getting on with the work I want to do.
That’s the big takeaway from this year’s WWDC for me. It’s really why I use and like Macs so that the annual announcement had more of this for both the Macs’ OS X and the iPhone/iPad’s iOS, I like that.
Speaking of iOS 8 and speaking of speaking, the only thing I wanted to see come some day was the ability to just talk to Siri on my iPhone instead of tapping a button first. Got it. The feature – it’s called HeySiri because that’s what you do, you say “Hey, Siri” and I’m not wild about that – will only work when the iPhone is plugged in but that’s fine. I add a lot of reminders to OmniFocus while I’m driving so that’s more than fine, that’s tremendous.
Speaking of more speaking of speaking, I’ve already tried an application that ostensibly let me make and receive phone calls through my Mac. It was rubbish. I regretted spending the money. But the odds are that with it part of OS X Yosemite, Apple will have made it work better. So I’m pre-sold on that one too.
I watched the WWDC video late last night and it was full of many little and large nuggets like this. Many, many times I’d nod thinking yep, I’m having that.
I did look at it from a very specific, biased view of simply what I was interested in and what I thought yep about. Possibly the best general roundup of all that was announced was done over on Wired. Do take a look, would you?
Especially as I did 5am-2am last night and swear to god I can’t remember who I am right now.
Jeff Goldblum and Steve Jobs on connecting to the internet
Inspired by the video of today’s teenagers reacting to how the internet was in 1990 and also by how today is WWDC day where Apple announces something or other, let me show you two things.
One is the Apple way of getting online back in the olden days:
And then there’s this. This is the Apple announcement in 1999 when Steve Jobs demonstrated wifi. It’s now impossible to imagine there was a time we didn’t have this so, strangely, it’s also impossible to conceive how jolting this Jobs presentation was. As ever, wifi existed before, but as ever, you wouldn’t know it from how no other firm got us using it so completely.
Where to watch Apple’s WWDC announcements
Follow this handy guide based on how much you like Apple:
You’re vehemently anti-Apple:
Go anywhere you like and you’ll find plenty else to watch. I think there’s football somewhere. Or is that next week?You’re vehemently an Apple fanatic:
You already know the answer.You’re a vehemently uninterested in anything to do with technology:
Well, thanks for reading this site anyway.
You’re everybody else:
The short answer is that you should go to Apple’s WWDC Event page . That’s not only short, it’s obvious. But it’s also new. I’m sure I’ve seen some Apple announcement streamed live but until recently the quick way to find out what is and isn’t announced is to check out an unofficial Mac website and watch as they live-blog the event.
I loathe live blogs. I have mocked live blogs. I can live without being told what music Apple is playing before the event.
And I can live without any of the actual news Apple announces. Yet I like these events, I enjoy them and I would be watching the new live stream. Except:
You’re me:
Throughout the event you’ll be driving to a place near Stratford to talk with a reading group that you’re going to write a story for.
I am obviously and understandably excited about that, but yes, you can bet that on my way home I will see if the recording of the event is up.
Here’s how Apple’s WWDC keynote will go
So there was this journalist, right, who complained that Apple took two hours to do its annual Worldwide Developers’ Conference keynote, “exactly like they always do”. He was covering it for somewhere and it was all how dare they do exactly what they always do. If he’d said they took long on certain parts, I’d have agreed. If he’d said he could’ve read all the news in a press release afterwards, I did agree. I just didn’t know why he wouldn’t do that. If you don’t like the keynote and you know it is two hours long, skip it.
I do like the keynotes.
WWDC is for developers and my own development projects are small. But this one speech is always for every Apple user, it is always the same, it is usually good fun and occasionally it is really interesting. I remember wondering how I’d tell Angela that I was definitely going to buy an Apple phone when she came home saying “did you hear that Apple’s making a phone?” We both got one.
But like or loathe the Apple announcements, the one next Monday 2 June at 6pm UK time will go thisaway:
18:00-18:10 “Good morning!” (It’s 10am in California.) “We’ve got some great announcements for you.
18:10-18:25 Statistics about how Apple has been doing since the last keynote. Expect only good numbers. Be sure that you know how Mac sales are up and that maybe more people buy Android phones than iPhones but they don’t appear to be using them much at all. (With graph.)
18:25-18:30 Retail. There’ll be a count of how many Apple Stores there are now or there’ll be something like how many sales were made in total. There will be a video of a new and impressive store with a new and impressive queue of customers lining up outside it on the first day.
18:30-19:00 These half-hour blocks are interchangeable, depending on what Apple wants to emphasise. But a typical one will cover Mac OS X first. It will do it by revealing new hardware then the latest version of OS X. Expect a wacky name to follow “OS X Mavericks”.
19:00-19:30 Again, may swap with either 18:30-19:00 or 19:30-20:00 but a typical one will cover iOS. Specifically iOS 8. There will be a video with designer Jony Ive filmed against a white background.
19:30-20:00 Potentially the most interesting half hour. It can change if there’s something really new to mention about Macs, in which case Mac stuff moves to here. Same with iOS. But this is where newer stuff goes. It’s also the last half hour so if there is to be one of Apple’s near-patented “One more thing” (Columbo is disputing the patent) then naturally it has to be here.
This year Apple is live-streaming the lot on its website here. I won’t be watching. But only because I’m working that evening. Otherwise, I will be tuning in to the recording later and I’ll probably be avoiding reading too many news sites because it genuinely is fun to see the show. Apple presents very, very well. Just watch a Microsoft presentation, preferably with Steve Ballmer, and then contrast it to an Apple one. Regardless of the products being shown, Apple’s presentation works and Microsoft’s tends to be a bit embarrassing.
I have no idea what Apple will reveal or release this year. They do like saying “available today”, which I like too. I like that they don’t very often talk about products that are coming out eventually or that they intend to make, it’s always about what they’ve made now and what you can buy now, if you so choose.
And I will be buying, if you can call it that. There is no question but that iOS 8 and the next OS X will be revealed, if not yet shipping, and both of those will be free. Both of those I will get. Beyond that, I don’t know.
But I do enjoy finding out. Call me a geek, but.