WWDC 2015: Round-up of announcements from Apple's conference

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook revealed the technology giant’s music service, OS X update El Capitan, iOS 9 and its Watch OS 2 at San Fransico recently. Soon after, Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, announced the new updates. Craig announced that the new OS X 10 will be called ‘El Capitan’ and will come with new features including Spotlight, Split View and window management. Spotlight will now be able to search for more places and provide more useful results, including weather and sports scores. With this, Apple seems to have prepared for the Windows 10 release and most of its intuitive menus seem to take a book from Windows’ play book and making it better. He also introduced Metal, Apple’s graphics processing technology which will improve rendering by 50 percent and will scale up efficiency to 40 percent. Several gaming companies like Unity, 2K games are already adopting metal which uses Open CL, he added. The new El Capitan will have “a public beta in July and rolled out in autumn via a free upgrade,” Craig added. Craig also revealed updates to the iOS 9 which will extend battery life, improve security and performance. He also showed advancements to Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant which will be more proactive after the update. Apple devices will now be able to anticipate what a user wants to do next based on location, the time, apps opened, or content the user is connected to and also offer suggestions based on upcoming meetings and communication patterns. A few updates on apps were also announced. The Notes app, which has been completely redesigned for iOS9, will allow users to add a checklist of to-do items and access camera app from Notes to add photos. The updated Maps app, will get a new Transit view. Maps will now include directions for public transportation like buses, trains, subways, and ferries. The service will be launched in London, Berlin, New York, Mexico City, San Francisco, Hong Kong and Shanghai. Susan Prescott, vice president of product marketing, introduced a new News app.and explained its functions. The app looked a lot like Flipboard and will include news, interactive stories, photo galleries, animations and video. Apple also announced the arrival of the WatchOS 2. Users will be able to add photos, add photo album and add time-lapse photos for the watch face. The watch will be capable of showing and aiding usage of car-battery charge, home-control systems etc. The watch will come with a time travel mode which shows the user about his schedule planned in his calendar. Features like alarms, replying to email, sketching ability and face time audio will also be present. The new OS for the watch will also support voice control for Siri, apple pay, along with the transit view on Maps app. The updated watch will be able to function with standalone Wi-FI and access microphone on it. Apple also launched its music service that will not only host a library of songs but also connect artistes with fans and will also run a 24/7 global radio station based out of three cities. IANS