I paid precisely zero attention to yesterday’s WWDC coverage, what with work and all, but today, catching up, I was pretty unimpressed with the announcements.
A lot of the noteworthy iOS stuff reminded me of the South Park Simpsons Already Did It episode.
I am more excited about OS X Lion, where iCloud will have a much bigger impact, at least for me.
The one nugget that has been sparsely reported and might be overstated is that iOS 5 will finally have garbage collection.
My WWDC highlight: iOS5 will have Garbage Collection | Joachims Small World
Sure, a minor detail that only Objective-C developers care about, but a huge win, if it’s true.
Thoughts?
I think that’s a huge win. Objective-C has garbage collector since Leopard, don’t know why Apple decides to take it out for iOS. After coding in iOS, you would find that the most work you are doing is actually trying to figure out 1) where should I be releasing an object 2) Should I use a autorelease object 3) Do I need to release objects created by others etc. Having a garbage collector just makes a developer’s life much easier. And now there is no need to have an entire lecture talking about handling object’s life cycle and can talk about the more interesting things in iOS.
Haven’t had time to read into all the announcements, but I don’t suppose iO55 offers the prospect of better notifications on the iPhone does it? As for iCloud… can a cloud be anywhere except in the ‘i’? Way to go though. All those cables…
Agreed. I guess the rationale was that bc iOS devices have comparatively less RAM and no swap, that memory leaks would be far more damaging to the overall behavior of the OS.
Not that I’m much of an iOS developer, but learning all the fine points of allocating and deallocating was a major headache. Devs want to build something interesting, not track down memory leaks.
Yes, they’ve revamped notifications. Word leaked out over the weekend that they hired the guy who posted his notification redesign a few months ago; I posted the video somewhere.
A lot of the stuff people were excited about were Android features, and iOS 5 feels like an incremental update of cherry-picked stuff from Android.
Don’t really get what you’re asking about iCloud.
I was alluding to the fact that cloud is hardly radical at this point. Sees like Apple have been ‘informed’ by a lot of other people’s ideas. Nothing wrong with that. But sticking an “i” in front of it doesn’t change the fact this kind of approach has been done, however I am sure the “i” excites journalists…
Any images of what the new notifications could look like? (Not being lazy, just leveraging the power of the eh, icrowd…)
Ah, right. This might be the iteration that finally gains some adoption. Apple has tried and failed at internet-based products several times. Someone pointed out that this iteration reveals no web apps, but rather integrates networked features into their existing OSes and software. Smart move.
New notifications from the horse’s mouth, along with the other new stuff: http://www.apple.com/ios/ios5/features.html
The phrase you’re looking for is “lazyweb” 🙂