Apple’s WWDC 2013 Keynote: Highlights, Summary & History

So there you have it, the announcement of this year’s Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2013. This year, Apple gave fair warning for ticket sales and the public responded by giving giving Apple it’s fastest sold out event ever: ~~2 minutes~~ 71 seconds. Attendees came in from 66 countries and two-thirds of them are first-time attendees.

Everyone got something from the latest WWDC keynote address. We got a new, cylinder(!) Mac Pro (tell us if you love or hate the new design), and a new OS – OS X Mavericks (they ran out of cats), with higher responsiveness and longer battery life (it’s about time); Maps gets a second chance, users get a new password-management system for iCloud, Finder gets an update and more.

If you missed it, here is a quick recap of the highlights.

1. OS X Mavericks

So because of a dwindling supply of cats, the 10th OS version was named ~~OS X Sea Lion~~ , OS X Mavericks, and it promises to extend battery life and provide better responsiveness, hitting a 1.4x performance improvement over Mountain Lion.

App Nap

App Nap selectively assigns power to the thing that has your immediate attention and runs on OpenGL 4 for super-responsive graphics.

Timer Coalescing

Timer Coalescing lets the CPU power up from idle mode on lower energy needs, reducing CPU memory by 72%. Even Safari has a Power Saver option to help direct power to what is in the centre of your attention.

With shared memory resource cache and power saver, Safari kills the competition, and is said to be run on only one-third of the energy of Firefox.

safari usage

Apart from being able to share links more easily via Linkedin and Twitter, Safari now sports a sidebar bookmark, which actually lets you go through your Reading List as you read.

Finder Tabs

Your Finder is going the way of Tabs, like how it is with major browsers these days. Rather than have so many windows, just open up all your files into multiple tabs.

Open windows can be merged into tabs with just one clicks and files can be transferred from one folder to another just by hovering over the tabs.

Tagging

Tagging is brought to the Mac. Save a document and give it a tag and have the tags turn up automatically on the sidebar. As tagging can now be done anywhere, including on files on the iCloud, all files with the same tags can be pulled up with a single click.

Users can assign multiple tags to the same document, making all their files easy to search and retrieve.

Multiple Display

Multiple Display support allow you to work on, multiple screens, even though only one device is physically connected, even if it means you are using Apple TV as one of your screens. Full screen spaces can be pulled from one display to the next and the dock and other menus will be displayed on each connected screen as well.

Password Management With KeyChain

Apple is taking it upon themselves to better safeguard and help their users better remember their passwords, account information, Wifi-networks and even credit card numbers with iCloud KeyChain. Safari auto-suggests passwords for you, and even extends this option to your logged-in credit card information.

Yay or nay? Tell us in the comments.

Respond Via Notifications

They hit the jackpot this time with responsive notifications, allowing you to reply to notifications on your Mac, as if you were on the iPhone.

Reply straight to friends who are messaging you over messaging apps, delete emails as they come in (straight on the notification), reply Facetime calls with a text message (although I’m driving now doesn’t work) among others. All notifications are logged in, and will pop up when your machine wakes from sleep.

Smarter Calendar

You can now integrate your calendar with your Facebook calendar, but more importantly, setting up an event like a simple Lunch date, prompts the calendar to suggest places for you to dine in, gives you projected weather forecasts as well as suggestions on travel time (and when you should make a move).

Sounds like Google Now to me but hey, this one lets you send your information to our iPhone when you’ve got to go, so that’s a plus.

Smoother Maps

Apart from sending calendar events and suggestions to your iPhone, you can also send directions on the Map app to the iPhone from your Mac. This will show on your lockscreen and once you are in your phone, you are taken straight to navigation.

The Map app looks smoother and 3D rendering of the Flyover data looks stunning. Just give it a spin and rotate around the Eiffel Tower to have a look.

iBooks on Your Mac

iBooks is now available on the Mac, giving users access to 1.8 million books including interactive textbooks. The table of contents can be found at the bottom of the book title, and finding a page is as easy as scrolling through the pages at bottom of the book.

You can add notes in between, highlight important text and generate study cards from those marked passages for a highly interactive learning experience.

Macbook Air Lasts ‘Full Day’

We’ll keep it brief. Enhanced battery life. 4th generation Intel core processor. Haswell ULT. 40% faster graphics, dual GPU execution units. With all this, your Air can wake up in a second, or stay on standby for 30 days.

The 11” also got an extension in battery life, staying awake now for to 9 hours. 13” goes from 7 hour battery life to 12 hours. Good news for power users on the go. 11’ starts at $999 with 128GB; 13’ starts at $1099. Both start shipping today.

But more importantly…

Mac Pro (Became a cylinder)

When, they innovate, they innovate. The new Mac Pro now only takes up one-eighth of the original volume and packs a power in its relatively tiny frame. Two times faster than the old Mac Pro, this new addition to the family has a ‘central thermal core’ running on 12-core Intel Xeon processor, Flash storage, supports 4K displays and is available only at the end of the year.

Prices yet to be announced. And oh yeah, you can hardly recognize it too.

iOS 7

Oh yes, we got a new mobile OS version and iOS 7 promises new features (Control Center, Airdrop for iOS, smarter multitasking etc) that you shouldn’t miss and new designs as well. Siri gets a new look, we’re getting iTunes Radio, and iOS comes to life in your vehicle.

We’ve devoted another post to just the enhancements done to iOS 7 just so you can get to the nitty-gritty details. So don’t miss out on that.

History of WWDC Announcements [2003 – 2013]

Ever wonder what happened in previous Keynote Addresses? Well, we’ve looked through all the previous keynotes and pulled out some of the more major announcements from each WWDC beginning with 2003. The list is not exhaustive.