WWDC 2015 Announcements: El Capitan, iOS 9, Apple Music

Today's Worldwide Developers Conference keynote address announced Mac OS X 10.11, called El Capitan, iOS 9 and WatchOS 2. Apple also announced many exciting new features for developers. The Apple Music product was introduced, which will combine iTunes Music, Beats Music, a live radio station and a new way to connect with artists.

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

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. On today's episode let's run down some of the announcements from today's Worldwide Developers Conference Keynote.
So the first part of today's announcements involved Mac OS 10. The big reveal was the name of Mac OS 10.11. It will be called El Capitan. It will include a lot of new usability features. Some general stuff like the ability to use a lot of natural language when doing searches. Also some neat things like being able to swipe; do swipe gestures in mail. Also some really cool new features in Mission Control. The ability to have this split screen view. You can do a full screen view now and you can have a desktop with a lot of apps. But this split screen view looks rather interesting and pretty useful as well.
Now El Capitan is going to be out in July as a public beta. It will be out today for developers. Then we'll have it sometime this Fall and like all the recent versions of OS 10 it will be a free upgrade for everybody.
Now, of course, they also talked about iOS 9. Just like with El Capitan, iOS 9 will be available as a public beta later this summer. Right now it will be available for developers and all will have the free upgrade in the Fall.
Now a lot of usability features in iOS 9. Some really interesting things. Some of the stuff I liked was that Siri will now understand the word this a little bit better. When you say do something with this it will refer to what you are currently looking at, an email, a message, a location on a map, something like that.
There is also going to be some good hooks for developers to be able to hook into search. So you can search for something and find an item inside of an app that is not an Apple app, it is a 3rd party app if the developer supports it. 
Many people have been predicting for a long time that we will be able to see more than one app at a time on the iPad. Sure enough there will be a split screen view that will be available only with the latest iPad. So the iPad era 2, of course, is going to have to have the processor power to be running two apps simultaneously. Looks like it works very similar to the way the Mac split screen view does.
Now the next part the Keynote dealt with apps. The interesting thing for me was they didn't talk about iOS apps or Mac apps they just talked about apps meaning that most of these, I gather, are for both systems. For instance the Notes app is going to have some new features like formatting and the ability to have images and links embedded in Notes. Even little checklists as well.
The Maps app is going to have a whole new view called Transit which will have things like bus and subway schedules and be able to coordinate your movements there. That is going to launch with only limited cities and they will just keep adding cities to it.
A new app that was talked about a lot today is called News. It is basically a news aggregator not too different than a lot of things out there now like Flipboard will you will be able to select news sources or topics and it will show you news for today and you will be able to go through them. Then it will customize a little bit more as you select and read different things and you can also browse. It is going to be really interesting to see Apple's take on this kind of common app genre and whether or not this News app takes over from all the 3rd party apps that already do it.
Of course now there are three operating systems and there was a lot of talk about the next version of the Apple Watch operating system called Watch OS 2. Now it is going to include some new features. One of the cool things it is going to have is the ability to use photos as the background for a clock face. I see a lot of people using that creatively. You will actually be able to use collections of photos to switch between the. You will be able to customize clock faces with more information from different apps. Not just what they have got now. Even move forward in time. So, for instance, if you've got something on the clock face that shows weather or say what things you've got coming up today you will be able to go forward in time and see those items without leaving the actual clock.
There is also going to be a new nightstand mode that is meant for viewing the Apple Watch while it is on your charger on your nightstand. Some other cool features like the ability to reply to emails on Apple Watch. The new version of the Watch OS is going to be out for developers now but it will be something where everyone else will get it this Fall and for free.
Apple Pay and Passbook are going to be moving forward. Passbook is going to be called Wallet now. Like before it will include Apple Pay but Apple Pay will also have some store credit cards and also loyalty cards. So we'll be able to use it for loyalty cards and not just for paying.
So beside the operating systems the new big announcement was Apple Music. So Apple Music combines what we now have in iTunes where you can buy music and organize your existing music, create playlists, things like that with a few other parts. One part is basically what was Beats music which is where you can pay a subscription fee, $10 per month, and you can stream anything available in the service which I presume would be everything in iTunes now although licensing may mean some things will not be available in streaming. We will have to see.
You can do it for $10 per month. There is also this great family plan where you can, for $15 per month, have six people from one family have access to it. Which is going to be really nice and something I don't see offered, I think, by other services right now.
In addition to that there is going to be a social media kind of area to this where artists can communicate with fans. Sounds a lot like what was there before with Ping a few years ago. So we will to have to see how that is a little bit different and how many artists adopt it.
Then there is a fourth part which is Beats 1 which is a 24 hour streaming radio station. It is a live radio station with DJs and everybody will be able to listen to the same thing at the same time and hear new music. It should be interesting to see how many people tune in and how good the station is.
So some other notes about Apple Music. They are going to make the first three months free for everybody. Then we presume after that there will be no free trial. So we get to try it out starting June 30th for three months and see if we want to continue to pay for the service.
Also they are going to be coming out with versions, not just for iOS and for the Mac, but there are also going to be Windows and Android versions coming out later this year.
In addition to all those announcements that directly effect the end users there are a lot of great announcements for developers like some new developer APIs that allow them to hook into things, the ability to make native apps for the watch whereas now you had to do it all through the iPhone. There is going to be some cool new graphics engines for Mac and iOS. So we'll see how those affect the apps and the types of experiences that we have as users later on.
Let me know what you think of today's announcements. You can, of course, watch the whole thing on Apple's website right now. I'd like to know which parts you are looking forward to the most.

Comments: 7 Responses to “WWDC 2015 Announcements: El Capitan, iOS 9, Apple Music”

Jim Scudder

10 years ago

Disappointed that support for iPod Touch Gen 5 was missing for the new News app.

Robert Lamacraft

Got to say, favourite feature of new OS X has got to be movable spotlight - nothing worse than trying to do a quick calculation and the overlay gets in the way! Also hoping proactive spotlight is like Google Now's cards; that would be nice.

Kirk Edgar Aplin

2 "small" things caught my attn. in El Capitan: 1) the cursor finder and 2) the audio abort/find scheme. I will use both all the time.
In iOS 9, the split screen capability is going to be great. It's the thing I miss most when working on my iPad instead of my mac. The improved keyboard/trackpad is also cool, but I still don't see a way to use Tabs. I do not understand this lack.
I'm sorry to say the Apple Music announcement left me totally cold.

Edward Glinski

I like I radio and Internet radio which are features in iTunes. Does this streaming service replace these, or will these still be available?

Gary Rosenzweig

iTunes Radio and Internet radio stations should still be around, though iTunes Radio may be just a part of Apple Music -- same functionality, just a different way of getting to it. We'll have to see how that develops during the betas.

I currently use Moom for a split screen between word documents. Will I be able to use the new split screen feature being released in the fall still allow split screens for word and excel documents. I have office 2011 for Mac installed on my MacAir.

You should contact the developer of Moom and ask.

Comments Closed.

WWDC 2015 Announcements: El Capitan, iOS 9, Apple Music

Comments: 7 Responses to “WWDC 2015 Announcements: El Capitan, iOS 9, Apple Music”

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