From a consumer perspective

The notification center is a breath of fresh air, being able to see emails, phone calls, messages at a glance on the lock screen is a huge improvement, especially not having a silly popup to disrupt whatever you are / were doing. The new system is fantastic to use right from the get go.

Safari has some great additions, especially the tabbed browsing on the iPad. The ‘Reading List’ feature is great, but it should be possible for developers to add this list, for example from the Twitter or Facebook app. I find that most of my content discovery is done outside Safari, so this list would be better compiled outside Safari to be read within.

The Music app on the iPad looks like a nice refresh, although I haven’t played with it a whole lot.

Newsstand looks great but I think that a lot of great apps that fit into this category will be left out as they don’t want to give Apple their 30% subscription cut. I would love for my Sydney Morning Herald app to be fresh and ready before I jump on the Ferry but I can’t see them handing over their subscription business to Apple in order to get into the Newsstand, unfortunate.

iMessages seems promising and I think that it could actually hurt the carriers, I think what people are missing when the say that it only works with iOS is that due to the way it is integrated into the system, the user does not really have a say in which communication medium is used. For instance, when you open the Messages app on an iPhone, and select a contact, the app will check if the user is registered with iMessages and, if so, send via iMessages, otherwise, via SMS. This process of not having to care whether a friend is registered or not will slowly but surely ensure that any messages that you send to iPhone users are automatically send via iMessages without the user even knowing (aside from the colour indication). This is the kind of integration that group messaging apps like WhatApp, Kik, Balooga, etc. would kill for! I can definitely see SMS figures dropping significantly for iPhone users and hopefully the carriers will see less of their $1,300/MB revenue coming from SMS…

One glaring omission for me is the Maps app, I don’t understand how they are letting this app further stagnate, once at the forefront of mapping on any platform, it now lacks vector based rendering, turn-by-turn navigation, plugin layer support. It is becoming irrelevant fast, and I can’t imagine that Apple even allow developers to submit competing (read: better) apps.

I think syncing everything from bookmarks to notes using iCloud will be great, especially with the developer API support.

Of course the ‘Wireless’ sync is a great feature, even though a wire is still required (power).

From a developer perspective

I like the look of the iCloud developer APIs, the absence of maintaining state between iOS devices is something that I have never understood, especially when they are synced to the same PC/Mac. Why can’t I have documents, notes, game scores, etc. shared between my iPhone and my iPad. Apple has always strived for a perfect ecosystem and this was something that just never worked. Sure, there were custom solutions on an application level, but to open this to every developer, without needing any credentials is a great addition.

I am disappointed with the Twitter integration. I don’t think Apple should be playing god in the sharing arena, I think everybody has unique tastes as to where they want their content sent, I think that the OS should have hooks to tap into for sharing functionality and people can download the apps of their choosing, must like the direction Android took. Perhaps they will extend this in the Accounts Framework, as they have an ACAccountType class which just contains Twitter at the moment, but I feel that this should be something that developers should be able to register for.

I think some of the additions to UIKit are great, especially the UIPageViewController and the Storyboard functionality.

I am extremely excited about the addition of two new classes to the Core Data framework, NSIncrementalStore and NSIncrementalStoreNode, which, if I am reading correctly, can allow the use of a REST-based web service as the backend for a Core Data Store. This could hugely simplify consuming web APIs, with the API makers simply releasing sub-classes of the aforementioned classes.

Built-in geocoding in Core Location and the new Core Image Framework are nice additions to make the SDK more feature complete.

What to say about Automatic Reference Counting… My opinion is that it should never be needed, as a developer should have his or he head around memory management, but unfortunately there are just way too many apps that leak and crash that it is a necessity.

In summary

In summary, I was not overwhelmed, I was not underwhelmed, I guess I was just satisfied, a few things simply had to be added, to either catch up to certain competitors or just create a more useful and full-featured ecosystem. There were a few glaring omissions, one of which being Maps, another being that there was no update to Apple TV, which I have thought and hoped would be receiving an App Store with iOS 5, especially with Sony and Samsung pushing their app-connected TVs. Apple is clearly already playing with Netflix, MLB, Flickr, etc. so I am confident that this will be opened up at some point.

I am also sure that we haven’t seen the final feature set for iOS 5 yet, particularly as they did not introduce new iPhone hardware, which always has a few features reserved for the latest version. It sounds like there were also some features that just didn’t make the WWDC timeline so weren’t discussed, perhaps Nuance/Siri integration is one. Hopefully maps will be another and Apple TV will be a seperate event.

Cheers
Dave

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