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With all the speculations going on, the WWDC 2016 keynote came with some killing announcements across the offerings - watchOS, tvOS, iOS and macOS. Here is all you wanted to know about the cool stuff announced:
The Watch apps will now respond "instantly": Cook kicked off the event with watchOS3. Under the watchOS updates, Apple introduced the new dock feature and a control center like in iOS. The new update also introduces a “Scribble” app, letting you type to draw. The newest watchOS is 7x faster than its predecessor. Apple also introduced a handful of new features designed to allow us to navigate watchOS at lightning speed and complete tasks faster than ever before.
Adding to all this Apple also announced a new API that brings Apple Pay to watchOS to allow for on-the-go payments without needing to grab your phone at the pay terminal. Apple has also added a few new watch faces, including a Minnie Mouse version and new one that more prominently shows activity progress. The Reminders and Find Friends apps have been redesigned, and third party apps can also now run in the dock area. Apple also announced a Breathe app, to encourage users to take some time out to do short deep breathing exercises. The deep-breathing sessions can be a minute to five-minute long, after completing which you get a heart-rate summary. Another major addition in watchOS 3 has been the SOS feature, which lets you initiate a call to emergency services using your iPhone or while on Wi-fi or notify emergency contacts by pressing and holding the side button.
Apple has released a lot of features on watchOS 3 keeping in mind the fitness enthusiasts. You can now share, compare and compete with friends or family members. You can get notifications about your friends’s progress about completed notification rings, achievements and more. You can even share your Activities. Wheelchair users will get a time-to-roll notification and there are dedicated wheelchair specific workouts as well.
tvOS keeps on getting better: Apple introduced third party development on the device. The new tvOS has a single-sign-on mode that lets users log in once to access all the subscriptions available from the cable provider. So, if you don’t like syncing your TV with cable account then time for rejoice. Eddy Cue Apple Senior Vice President of Internet Software and Services said “The future of TV is apps”.
The new macOS Sierra: OS X is now called macOS and the new OS has been named macOS Sierra. With Sierra, Siri makes its debut on your desktop and Apple Pay comes to the web. The public beta of the OS will launch in July with the final version coming in the fall. Siri has been given a massive makeover that includes voicemail transcription, image search and writing messages. Siri is smarter with its suggestions as the AI can read the context of your messages, photos and other content. And the great news, Siri will be open for developers, allowing you to incorporate her into your apps.
iOS 10 came as a major announcement: The new OS offers great new features for Messaging, an all-new design for Maps, Photos, and Apple Music, new notifications, an expanded role for 3D Touch and a more powerful Siri. The new OS is all about continuity across devices. Apple has come up with a feature called Universal Clipboard, which allows users to copy and paste across multiple Apple devices.
Auto Unlock, it’s an extension of the Continuity feature between your mobile devices and your Mac. Rather than being presented with a password entry interface from your Lock screen every time you wake up your Mac, Auto Unlock is going to let you get into your Mac as long as you have an authenticated device on your person.
There are now rich notifications you can preview, using 3D Touch for more options. 3D Touch action is more interactive, too, as you can shoot a message reply straight from the Peek preview window. A new feature called "raise and wake" will wake the lock screen when you lift your phone, revealing redesigned notifications that you can interact with using 3D touch.
iOS 10 comes with SiriKit enables your iOS 10 apps to work well with Siri. All in all, iOS 10 offers better and smarter apps with built in AI, expanded capabilities and ofcourse, a special focus on privacy.
Apple Pay: Now everyone can make payments through Apple Pay using Safari. Apple Pay is currently only available in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and Singapore, and will be rolling out to Switzerland, France, and Hong Kong.
Photos: For Photos, now we have a better map view that will show where the photo was taken in similar fashion as in Instagram. Photos will also have facial recognitions to recognise who is there in your photo. This recognition feature will not only recognize persons but will also have objects and scene recognitions.
Better Maps: Apple introduced better map view by adding new recommendation shortcuts. Maps will also have the ability for us to search for nearby stops, restaurants, gas stations etc. Developers can now create third party app to use maps. The New dynamic view zooms in on quick turns, and out on long stretches of highway.
With iOS 10, Maps will become open to developers, allowing third-party extensions to plug into the official Maps app.
A big Applause for Apple Music: Apple comes up with simplified UI, complete redesign of the Music app with large images and better tabs to find the music easily. There’s a lyrics and download tabs and a daily-curated playlist - Spotify-style.
A Home app for HomeKit: Homekit gets a new Home app so you can control all your IoT gear from one place. The app’s main view offers featured scenes like "I'm home" might unlock the front door and turn on house lights. Another scene titled "Good night" might be customized to lock all house doors, lower window shades and dim or turn off lights.
News gets a redesign too: Which shares the same aesthetic as the new music look with the giant font to separate each sections. You can now subscribe to newspapers and magazines from the News app as well. News now looks like a newspaper on iPad - thankfully Apple has finally come up with a UX for News which doesn’t look crappy.
iMessages more emojified: Craig Federighi, might be right when he said, "The children of tomorrow will have no understanding of the English language,". The iMessage updates are meant to make your texting more emojified. The updates revolve around bigger sized emoji’s, and a quick search function for "emojifiable" words.
iMessage gets another fun update with various fun bubble effects like, invisible ink letting users tap to unblur a new photo or text, a scribble feature that lets you send tapbacks, digital touch lets you send custom sticker-like images. There are new text styling options that lets users add animations as well. With iMessage, rich links will now work - in-line music and videos among others.
Building sticker apps get more quick and easy. Developers are also getting access to iMessage extensions and can develop sticker apps. Also, messages app gets its own app store to download new extensions.
Anyone can code for Apple with Swift Playground! A new iPad app which will help anyone to learn how to code in Swift from the iPad itself. Apple followed gamification technique to let everyone learn more about Swift. App lets us learn about all the basic principles of coding. It will be available to public with iOS10 and this app will be free to download.