Apple WWDC 2013 Announcements: Day 1 [LIVE BLOG]

Thanks for watching the Livestream with us! Soon we’ll release more in-depth looks at Apple’s updates.

Here come the updates:

2:15pm: Now the moment we’ve all been waiting for: iOS 7. The biggest change to iOS since the iPhone.

• Stunning new look, from typography to colors, to functionality: No more mimicking real-life items, gone is the green felt of Game Center and apps’ wooden backgrounds
• Weather gets a makeover
• Calendar: Cleaner look. Turn your phone landscape to get a view of your week ahead. Zoom out to see a year view of your calendar
• Messages: Horizontal swiping makes one-hand messaging easier
• Mail: Clean type, full-screen photos, as well as horizontal scrolling to move between your inbox and messages
• Notifications: New Today view lets you see your friends’ birthdays, the weather, and upcoming invitations and appointments. The notifications center is now also available directly from the lock screen.
• Control Center: Swipe up from the bottom of your device to access settings widgets, even access to your music and to a flashlight. Control Center features a beautiful translucent background that lets you peek through to your wallpaper or open app
• Multitasking: Multitasking is now available for all apps, with great battery life. iOS measures how you use your apps and uses intelligent scheduling to update your running apps in the background. iOS now adapts to network conditions, coalesces updates and responds to push triggers so your most-used apps are always up-to-date
• Safari: New fullscreen look. Pulling down from the top gives you a one-tap access to search and your favorites. Horizontal scrolling allows you to navigate back and forth in your browser history. New bookmark control at the bottom of your app gives you access to your bookmarks as well as to suggested links by your social media connections. Click at the bottom of the Safari app also gives you access to your device’s tabs as well as open tabs on your other iOS devices
• AirDrop: Now share files with others over peer-to-peer WiFi. All it takes is a few taps, no bumping or pass codes involved
• Camera: Your iOS Camera now includes more functionality and photo filters
• Photos: iOS now organizes your photos into Moments, sorted by location and date. Collections are group Moments into larger groups of photos taken around the same place and geographical area. Zoom out to your year views, where the photos you took each year are sorted and labeled by location. You can now share your photos through AirDrop, Mail, Twitter, and iCloud. When sharing to iCloud, you can choose the photo streams you want to share to. You can even share photo streams so other users can upload photos to your stream, too. iCloud photo sharing now also supports video sharing
• Siri: Siri gets a new, cleaner interface. Siri now gets two new voices, one female, one male. You can now ask Siri to control your device, including turning on WiFi and playing your recent voicemails.
• Car integration: Now access Siri from the screen of your car call friends, listen to messages, and use maps eyes-free
• App Store: It’s easier to find apps than every before. Now search for apps based on age range or your current location. The App Store will now update your apps automatically – no more of that dreaded red notification circle
• Music: Now, access all your music and videos uploaded to iCloud directly from your music library. Plus, artist images are now viewable directly from your library
• iTunes Radio: The much-rumored “iRadio” app helps you discover new music directly within your iOS Music app. Apple has created a set of featured stations, like “Summer Songs” and “Artists on Tour.” Similar to Pandora, you can tap a song to purchase, share with a friend, or create a new station around that song. You can also create stations based on artists and genre. iTunes Radio keeps track of all the songs you’ve listend to on all of your devices so you can continue to preview songs and, if you like, purchase songs through iTunes. iTunes Radio will first become available in the US and will eventually expand to other countries
• Activation lock: A theft deterrent, now no one can access your iOS device if they do not know your iOS password. Period.
• Release dates: iOS comes to iPhone 4 and later, iPad 2 and later, iPad mini, and the 5th generation iPod touch in the fall

2:06pm: iWork for iCloud: Now create and edit beautiful documents directly within your browser. All your changes are synced to the crowd. You can even edit Office documents in iWork for the iCloud. Plus, use iWork for iCloud in Chrome and Internet Explorer, even on a Windows machine

1:58pm: Mac Pro

• New generation Intel Xeon chip
• Fastest ECC memory, double the performance of the previous generation
• New generation flash PCIe controller
• Thunderbolt 2
• Dual workstation GPUs for better graphics: 2.5x faster than the graphics performance of the previous generation
• Connect up to three 4K displays
• All this for 1/8th the volume of the previous generation

1:54pm MacBook Air updates

• Aiming toward all-day battery life
• New Haswell ULT processors
• For the 11″ Air: nine hours promised battery life
• For the 13″ Air: 12 hours promised battery life
• New MacBook Air starts shipping today

1:53pm: Mavericks is set to release this fall.

1:47pm: iBooks. Book reading now comes to the native Mac atmosphere.

1:46pm: Calendar

• Creating events: Creating events is now easier with suggestions for locations, travel time estimations that are automatically added to your calendar, and location-based weather forecasts
• Notifications Now receive notifications for when to leave for appointments, etc.

1:45pm: Maps. Faster, more fluid. Plus, now send directions directly from your Mac to your iPhone so you can easily navigate without having to go through any extra steps.

1:43pm: Notifications

• Respond to notifications without leaving the notifications app
• Push notifications Notifications can now appear on your Mac whether Safari is open or not
• Updating apps in the background

1:42pm: iCloud Keychain: Now, don’t be afraid to use powerful passwords across the web. Safely save your passwords and credit card numbers to the cloud.

1:35pm: Safari

• Bookmarks sidebar for easy web browsing
• Shared links feature: Browse through links shared by your contacts on social media sites like LinkedIn
• Improvements to JavaScript
• Power saving improvements
• New look for Reader: Smoother, better, more efficient

1:32pm: Advanced Technologies

• App Nap
• OpenGL 4
• Timer coalescing: Helping reducing 72% of CPU activity for better battery performance
• Compressed memory: Makes free space available to apps you’re using. 1.4x better performance under stress compared to Mountain Lion

1:25pm: New OS X features:

• Finder Tabs: Tab your windows into on screen, similar to on your web browser.
• Finder goes full-screen which improved functionality
• Tagging capabilities in Finder: This will improve search functionality on your Mac
• Multiple displays: Now you can use your menus and your dock across multiple displays. You can also take an app full-screen on one display and it won’t mess with your displays on your other displays

– – –

1:23pm: Apple announces a new version of OS X Mavericks, named for its California home.

Today is heaven for Apple enthusiasts. At 10 AM Pacific Time (that’s 12 PM Central, 1 PM Eastern) the Worldwide Developers Conference launches, where Apple’s keynote will finally squash the iPhone and Mac rumors that have been spreading over the past few months and fill us in on what’s been brewing at Apple headquarters. The most expected announcement is iOS 7, which is rumored to feature a “flat” design and maybe even live-updating widgets.

Business Insider reports we should also look out for these features:

• The ability to automatically upload pictures to Yahoo’s Flickr service, which recently updated free storage space to 1TB per user (wow)
• Integration with YouTube rival Vimeo
• AirDrop capabilities, previously only available on Mac devices, which would allow iOS users to share files over WiFi
• A new version of OS X that makes using a Mac even more similar to using iOS
• The unveiling of iRadio, Apple’s music streaming service that will work with iTunes
• Updating MacBooks and Mac desktops with faster processors

The WWDC livestream will begin playing right here at DashBurst at 1 PM Eastern. For those of you who can’t watch Apple CEO Tim Cook’s keynote, we’ll keep text updates rolling in. Until then get some work done, enjoy your lunch, and we’ll see you this afternoon.