MacMost Now 562: Announcing Lion, iOS 5 and iCloud

Today's Apple keynote at the Worldwide Developers Conference focused on the upcoming versions of Mac OS X, iOS and a new service called iCloud. Here's a summary of today's news.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode let's examine the announcements of Lion, iOS5 and iCloud. So no big surprise in the features for Lion, we've known about all of them for quite awhile. Things like replacing Spaces and Expose with Mission Control. Also Airdrop, a feature that allows you to sync files between your machines. And also a new version of Mail. But what is new is that we had a release time and a price now. It will come out in July and will cost thirty bucks. Now the cool thing is you're going to buy this through Mac App store. So if you buy it on one Mac and have another Mac using your same Mac store account, you get that upgrade for free. So people with a laptop and a desktop will only have to pay thirty bucks once to upgrade to Lion.
 Now this is the first time we've been hearing about new features planned for iOS5. One of the big new things is a whole redesign of how notifications work. There will be a notification center, instead of being interrupted with this little alert popup you actually get notifications at the top of the screen. We're also going to have some new apps. One of the big new ones will be Newstand. Which looks like it's going to be iBooks but, for newspapers and magazines. And there's also going to be a free new messaging service, called iMessage. That will work between iOS devices and you won't have to pay your service provider for those messages .Also one of the cool features is quicker access to camera. There will be a camera button on the lock screen, you press it and you can just get into your camera app and take a picture. And you can use the volume up button to snap that photo. Almost lost as a footnote was the announcement that in iOS5 you'll be able to use Airplay to mirror the screen to say an apple tv. So you can actually show what's on your iPhone on your television. There's also a lot of talk about how you don't really need a Mac or a PC any more with an iOS device. You can just have the iPad or the iPhone, you can activate it without connecting to your computer and do a lot of the tasks like creating a new calendar and such just on that device. iOS5 scheduled to come out in the fall and developers will get a preview of it starting this week.
Now iCloud is going to be the new service that will completely replace MobileMe. Matter of fact, you can't even sign up for a MobileMe account any more. And better still, it's going to be free, you won't have to pay for it like you did with MobileMe. What it will do is allow you to sync information, including calendar events, contacts, mail messages, photos, and documents. And do that wirelessly between iOS devices and Macs and PCs. It doesn't look like something you'll have to manually manage. Like you have to manually put something on say your iDisc and then bring it down. It's something that happens automatically, so you take say a photo on your iPhone and it will automatically appear in your photos collection on your iPad and in iPhoto on your Mac. And it looks like it's going to take over iwork.com as well because it works with pages, numbers and keynote to have documents you create in those applications available throughout your devices. And it has a great effect on iTunes, because what will happen when you purchase something in iTunes it will be available on your Mac and on all your iOS devices. Now what's interesting is a new service called iTunes Match that will be a part of this. You'll pay twenty five bucks a year and it will take all of your music that you didn't get from iTunes, say you ripped it from CDs and it will upgrade it to the current iTunes versions of those songs and then share them between your devices. And it will even take songs it can't match and just simply upload them to space that you got in iCloud. Now iCloud will be out in the fall along with iOS5 but you can already use iTunes in the cloud this week to synchronize new music that you purchase in iTunes. What remains to be seen though is what will happen to MobileMe services that weren't mentioned today. For instance, iDisc and the ability to have websites up there created in iWeb. So that sums it up, but there's a ton of information and it's all available at apple.com. They've got pages on Lion, iOS5 and iCloud there, lots of detailed information and will probably know more as each of these gets closer to release. Till next time this is Gary with MacMost Now.

Comments: 12 Responses to “MacMost Now 562: Announcing Lion, iOS 5 and iCloud”

Daniel

13 years ago

Wow! Love the music feature for converting ripped or downloaded song in iCloud.
Hardest thing is syncing "all" my music!

Thanks Gary!

Franco

Gary, will iMacs using the Magic Mouse be able to take advantage of Lion's improved gesture UI? I'm speaking of "pinching" and other such gestures.

Thanks

Gary Rosenzweig

I believe so, yes.

sami elias

Dear Gary
During the upgrade to lion , do I need to reinstall the other software like IWORK or restore all my mail and everything again ?
does the upgrade process leaves all as it it was?

No. Installing an OS upgrade does not delete your applications or files.

Alan

will icloud auto send info to my itoucj ipod

It will work with iPod touches as long as they are capable of running iOS 5.

G Tyler

I wish AirPlay would work with my older Apple TV. They really abandonned it. Thinking of trying a home grown OS on it. Any advice on that? Guess Lion won't work on my old MacMini with just a Core Duo CPU and 2GB RAM. You forgot to mention web bookmark synching with iCloud. I hope they give us enough warning in case I have to move my parked domain and lose the iDisk file sharing feature. I am imagining all the hardware products they can build around iCloud. What a great strategy.

Gary,if i update my imac to lion will it also update my itouch ipod
automatic.
Thanks for your kind reply
Alan

Those are two different things. Lion is a version of OS X that runs on Macs. Your iPod Touch uses iOS, which is a different operating system. Upgrading your Mac to Lion won't change anything on your iPod Touch.

Glenn

Dear Gary,
Thx for the great video.
Any idea about the picture gallery on MobileMe? Will that still be poss. in iCould?
I read about the photo-stream but it does not seem to be the same as the photogallery in MMe?
I'm launching a website soon and wanted to know if I would not do better by getting a Picasa space or something similar with MMe disappearing?

Thanks for your advise,

We are going to have to wait until Apple gives us more information.
See episode 549: http://macmost.com/sharing-photos-with-picasa.html

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MacMost Now 562: Announcing Lion, iOS 5 and iCloud

Comments: 12 Responses to “MacMost Now 562: Announcing Lion, iOS 5 and iCloud”

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