SAN FRANCISCO: With such a plethora of fancy new features from the iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks operating systems that Apple Inc. unleashed upon the world at this week’s Worldwide Developers conference, it was inevitable that a lot of intriguing new services would be lost in the shuffle.
Beyond the big stuff that made the news, like the new iTunes Radio streaming service and some of the flashier updates to its mobile operating system from creative guru Jony Ive, those two hours of keynote Monday morning were full of innovations sure to delight every Apple fanboy.
Take, for starters, the new iCloud Keychain for OS X. Joking about how tough it is to commit to memory an endless list of passwords, log-ons, credit-card and Wi-Fi numbers, Apple’s software chief, Craig Federighi, said the new security feature was a godsend. The service will store all your passwords in the cloud where they’ll be synced across your devices. Plus, Keychain will auto-suggest new strong passwords as well as store your credit-card data, using 256-bit AES encryption; all you need is your single security code to tap into it all.
In addition, the Calendar application has been beefed up, now offering a cleaner design that provides real-time travel information for a marked event as well as the day’s weather. So that noon lunch appointment now becomes an enriched mix of helpful navigational tips and meteorological metadata.
“Even with all the upgrades and new features, iOS 7 is still very app-centered,” said analyst Avi Greengart, who was at the show for New Jersey-based Current Analysis. “And that makes sense, because hundreds of millions of people already around the world know how to use them.”
Federighi talked a lot about Apple’s Maps app, a sore subject because the feature was so glitch-ridden out of the gate last year that Cook had to publicly apologize for it. “Our Maps team is making great progress,” he told the crowd. “We’ve now got street maps with flyover data; you can search for nearby points of interest, get turn-by-turn directions, and send your route from your Mac to your iPhone.”
Apple’s new operating software for the Macintosh as well as its mobile devices have also jazzed up iBooks, including new note-taking functions and more-interactive textbooks, clearly a reflection of Apple’s traditional strength in the educational market. Federighi’s demo, for example, showed how a user could zoom into a science-book’s page to watch videos that augment the texts, as well as dive deeply into an interactive photograph of a leaf to examine its cellular structure.
Security was a common theme at the keynote. And in addition to Keychain, Apple introduced a new iPhone “activation lock.” This feature will shut down a stolen device if a bad guy (without the necessary password) tries to disable Find My iPhone, another program that allows users to track down a misplaced or stolen device.
The iPhone camera will get nice upgrades. The new iOS 7, for example, allows users to swipe among four camera modes — video, panorama shots, standard still shots, and squared-off shots.