Krishna Bahirwani takes a look at what's in store for Apple users with the introduction of OS X Yosemite for computers and iOS8 for portable devices
Your mac can be a phone
With OS X Yosemite you can make iPhone calls on your Mac. Read SMS and MMS messages that previously only appeared on your iPhone appear in Messages on all your devices. Deepening the connection between the iPhone and OS X, you can send SMS or MMS messages directly from your Mac and make or receive iPhone calls using your Mac as a speakerphone.
Swift – Apple's new take on programming
Swift is a powerful programming language for iOS and OS X that has been in development for the past four years. Apple claims "Designed for Cocoa and Cocoa Touch, Swift combines the performance and efficiency of compiled languages with the simplicity and interactivity of popular scripting languages."By design, Swift aims to replace Objective-C as the main language for app development on Apple's platforms by helping developers write safer and more reliable code by eliminating entire categories of common programming errorsTo help with the transition, developers integrate Swift into their existing Objective-C projects . Xcode Playgrounds make writing Swift code a very interactive experience by instantly displaying the output of Swift code. It's a major change from the syntax of Objective-C and learns from the successes and failures of a lot of languages, such as Haskell, C#, Ruby and Python, which Apple probably believes will help it appeal to the new generation of coders, keen on modern languages.
HealthKit – Your phone is also your monitor
iOS 8 offers developers a very special set of HealthKit APIs that provide the ability for health and fitness applications to communicate with each other. With your permission, applications can share information with each other leading to a more comprehensive analysis of your health and fitness. For example, a blood pressure application could share accumilated data with physician application, like Mayo Clinic app, so your doctor has the right information to properly advise you."We believe Apple's HealthKit will revolutionize how the health industry interacts with people," said John Noseworthy, M.D., Mayo Clinic president and CEO. "We are proud to be at the forefront of this innovative technology with the Mayo Clinic app."
Gaming
Gaming has been pushed to a new level with iOS 8 and Metal, a new graphics technology that fully utilizes the potential of the A7 chip. It has some pretty impressive achievements under its belt with a 10 times improvement in draw call speed, this will allow developers to bring console-class 3D games to the mobile sphere. For the not so serious gamer, iOS features SceneKit, making the game creation proceess as simple as possible with upgrades including field forces, per-pixel physics and inverse kinematics
Concerns
The new iCloud Drive creates trouble for enterprise IT because it makes it easy for data to find its way into personal services. Mail Drop is a fusion between cloud and email, which poses a major concern because any confidential file may be inadvertently stored in a users cloud storage and remain there without the user's knowledge.With iOS 8, Your iPhone Safari browser can read your credit card details using your phones camera.
Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering shares his point of view on the three big updates.
iPhone iOS 8
- "iOS 8 offers simpler, faster and more intuitive ways to use your device with incredible new features like iCloud Photo Library, a new Messages app, the QuickType keyboard and an entirely new Health app,"."We're also giving developers amazing new tools to make managing your health and your home from your devices an integrated, simple and secure experience."
iPhone iOS 8 SDK -
"With more than 800 million iOS devices sold worldwide, the opportunity for developers is huge," "This is the biggest iOS release since the launch of the App Store. The iOS 8 SDK delivers more than 4,000 new APIs including amazing new frameworks, greater extensibility and a revolutionary new programming language."
Mac OS X Yosemite -
"Yosemite is the future of OS X with its incredible new design and amazing new apps, all engineered to work beautifully with iOS,""We engineer our platforms, services and devices together, so we are able to create a seamless experience for our users across all our products that is unparalleled in the industry. It's something only Apple can deliver."
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