So, WWDC Keynote has come and gone and we now have our first sneak peak of the two Apple operating systems for mobile devices and the Mac range respectively.
Clearly IOS is the most exciting with the new (Sir) Jonny Ive designed 'flat' interface which actually seems to be a total retool of the whole IOS experience. As an Apple developer I would hope to go hands on fairly soon but at first glance it looks to have a lot of the functionality and changes that bring the operating system close to on par with Android but also seems to share some design cues from Windows Phone 8 (e.g. the multi tasking tiles which look like a massive improvement on the current bottom of the screen trays). As a power user I'm most interested in how everything integrates and the shortcuts as it is all well and good creating a new 'experience' but if the work flow slows or is broken then what's the point ?
So for example the changes to the control functions that seem to enable quicker access to wifi or airplane controls would be useful to someone like me who literally lives on iPhone and iPad interchangeably.
OSX 10.9 Mavericks or as I will be calling it SeaLion is less impressive overall. Most of a 0.5 update in my opinion. The changes on power consumption and memory compression will have little or no impact for those of us running 2 or 3 generation ago machines and although 'tags' seems an interesting spin on the smart folder concept (available on line for some time) it seems to me that as I have a sophisticated file system set up between my Macs, IOS devices, iCloud and my 2 off site cloud storage backup and access services the introduction of a new capability is just going to add increased complexity to a system that works quite well for me. So I suspect I might try it but abandon if it caused me any extra work.
More interesting are some of the moves to integrate IOS features into the desktop : better push notifications, iBooks (although my ebook system of choice is actually Kindle which I've used on the Mac for some time) and Maps - I especially like the ability to plan journeys on the desktop and flip it straight across to the iPhone - sounds simple and effective - might be worth joining SeaLion for this alone.
All in all an interesting upgrade to IOS but I will hold fire on SeaLion to see the cost and of course if it will be available to my older machine - I may end up test installing on one Mac and keeping Mountain Lion on the other (which seems to me is about as good an OS as I need at present).
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