It was a lot of Apple Watch, a lot of Mac OS, and not a lot of Helvetica at this year’s Apple Worldwide Developer’s Conference Keynote (WWDC 2015). There was no news relating to iPhoneography and fairly minimal news regarding Photos apps updates. More importantly, there were no new clues or confirmations about the next iPhone cameras – not even a hint at the name. I really wasn’t expecting any.
What we got today was a lot of cool stuff, though. Siri, Notes, Maps, overall OS improvements…. Other websites have some excellent coverage. These are a good roundup.
Macworld: iOS 9 makes Siri more intelligent, adds transit maps and a new News app
AppleInsider: First Look: Apple drops Helvetica for San Francisco in iOS 9
The Verge: The coolest new iOS 9 features that Apple didn’t announce
I now get the keynote’s teaser “The epicenter of change”. It’s an earthquake reference as in San Francisco earthquake. iOS 9 will drop Helvetica font in favor of San Francisco font, the font used throughout the Apple Watch OS. Many bloggers are applauding this as a victory for greater legibility. It’s actually Helvetica Neue and there are big differences between it and plain vanilla Helvetica. I, for one, never had a problem reading the Helvetica Neue and will be sad to see it go.
Mac OS 10.11 El Capitan
In keeping with the California namesakes, the new Mac OS 10.11 is called El Capitan and it looks pretty effin’ awesome! It promises better overall system performance and better app-level graphics performance as Apple will allow developers to offload more graphics-heavy work to the Mac’s GPU. If you work in Photoshop or any of the other Creative Cloud apps, this is good news. Even the GPU workarounds Adobe implemented in recent versions of Photoshop have significantly improved the performance this code and CPU-intensive app. Adobe has already demoed a couple of CC apps that use the new graphics engine.
Photos for Mac will get support for third-party editing tools. This would be similar to the hooks the iPhone and iPad use to “Open In…” and lets you seamlessly work in other apps and plug-ins. As more and more apps in the Apple ecosystem support this feature, it was only a matter of time before the native Mac OS apps really started working with each other on this level.
You can read more about El Capitan – the operating system, not the rock – here:
Macworld: Apple reveals OS X 10.11 El Capitan, promising better speed and other upgrades
I wish I had more relevant news. It looks like we’ll have to wait until September to find out what presents Tim Cook has for iPhoneographers.
=M=
