WWDC Keynote 2012 News and Views

WWDC Keynote 2012 – Well I’m glad that is out of the way.

In the months before the actual keynote address at Apple worldwide developers conference 2012, it has been painful to listen to the podcasters speculating and pontificating about what Apple might do and say. The Apple fan boys with the unicorn fairy dust in their hair, have been salivating at the possibilities of all sorts of new devices. Quite a few of them have been predicting televisions made by Apple. They were wrong. Some were expecting the iPhone 5 to be announced. They were wrong also.

So what did Apple announce at WWDC 2012?

There are new MacBook Pro’s and also MacBook Air’s and as you would expect they are thinner, lighter and faster. There were announcements regards the release date of Mountain Lion and the previously vague date of sometime in the summer, has been updated to sometime in July. The retina display looks like it will be amazing. I still have not seen a Retina display in the flesh. I need to buy a new iPad and a new iPhone too. USB 3 becomes available on the new laptop models, the Air and the MacBook Pros. How on earth is it possible to make those MacBook Air computers so thin? I see that the optical drive is gone from the MacBook Pro, something else that is becoming obsolete. The MacBook Pro with the Retina display get a HDMI output too.

Mountain Lion Mac OSX is coming

There were a couple of things in Mountain Lion Mac that were new announcements. I think the most notable of these was the system level dictation capabilities. Seeing as I am always using Dragon Dictate, and loving it, I will be very interested to see what the Mountain Lion OSX version of dictation has to offer. We will be pressing the function key once to start the dictation function and we will be able to toggle the dictation off also. Apple claim that it will learn your speech patterns and get smarter the more you use it.

So far I have gone over the basics of what was in the * WWDC keynote*, but I plan to watch the full keynote later today. I have already started to listen to a couple of podcasts that have been commenting upon it. One of the things that many people will be pleased with, is the price of Mountain Lion. You will be able to upgrade to Mountain Lion from either Snow Leopard or OS X Lion for the price of $20. There will be no excuses for not upgrading to the latest Apple operating system. I will be updating my iMac and my wife’s MacBook Pro as soon as it becomes available in the Mac App Store. As part of the process you will be able to check Mountain Lion system requirements. Another thing that you might decide to do before you upgrade, is to look at your applications for Mountain Lion compatibility. As far as I can tell it does seem that most developers are keen to have their applications compatible with Mountain Lion as soon as possible.

Putting some final touches to iCloud

The main thing that needs to be sorted out with iCloud as it is at the moment is the way that iCloud synchronises documents in Apple Pages, Numbers and the Keynote application. Finally we will be able to work on documents on our Mac OS X computers and they will be synchronised properly through iCloud the same as they are within iOS. It seems that it has also been made easier for developers to include iCloud document sharing with their applications. This will give dropbox like functionality to many more Apple applications.

Shared Photo Streams

With the demise of photo galleries in MobileMe that inevitably some photo sharing available from within iCloud. At some point in time between the launch of Mountain Lion this July and iOS 6 in the autumn, iCloud will be upgraded. You will be able to share single or multiple photos from your Photo Stream with a select audience. If the person you’re sharing with doesn’t have an Apple device then they will be held to view those photos on the web.

Mountain Lion Mac Messages

I have never really liked or found useful iChat, but I started to like the beta version of Messages. Where this has become useful is because my mother and my sister and also one of my sons have iPhones now and my brother has an iPad, now I can send messages directly to them using this app. It looks like the system will tie together the application with the phone number and the Apple ID more tightly to ensure that the messages get through.

And then there is FaceTime

What would have been really nice would be for messages and face time to be integrated into one application. For whatever reason, this is not the case at the moment with the next Mountain Lion download. I suppose there could be an opportunity later to pull these two applications together, but I’m now starting to think that is going to be unlikely.

It was announced that the WWDC Keynote live event that face time would now be possible over the mobile networks and not just Wi-Fi. This could have quite a large impact upon the amount of data being used and it is quite possible that some users could hit the limits of their mobile plans.

When exactly will we be able to do a Mountain Lion download?

Apple have said that July is the month for the Mountain Lion release date and I would expect that to be in the later half the month. I think it should be possible to be patient for 5 to 6 weeks and not necessary to get the Mountain Lion developer preview. I can well imagine that on the actual day of the Mountain Lion release there were lots of $20 heading towards Apple and a huge strain on the servers to get Mountain Lion out to the users.

• Will you be first in the queue along with me for the Mountain Lion download?

• How will you set up your Mountain Lion Gatekeeper?

• Were you disappointed that there was no WWDC iPhone 5?

• What is your favourite thing in the WWDC keynote?

• Would you have liked to see one more thing coming from the WWDC Keynote?

• Are you planning to buy a new MacBook Pro or MacBook Air?