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iOS, OS X, music, Swift, and more: What you should know before WWDC next week

Every credible and semi-credible rumor, collected and condensed for your perusal.

iOS, OS X, music, Swift, and more: What you should know before WWDC next week
Apple

Apple’s WWDC keynote kicks off at 10am Pacific on Monday morning. Though the focus at the company’s developer conference is usually on the next versions of its flagship operating systems, Apple has used the stage at the Moscone Center in San Francisco to announce any number of things over the years.

To prepare you for the show, we’ve sifted through a few months of rumors to bring you the most credible stuff—this won’t all be correct, and we’re sure Apple has some surprises up its sleeve, but this is the basic information you should know going into the show on Monday.

iOS 9

If the rumors are true, iOS 9 could run on (and speed up) everything that currently runs iOS 8.
Enlarge / If the rumors are true, iOS 9 could run on (and speed up) everything that currently runs iOS 8.

Since we first began hearing about iOS 9, word on the street was that it would focus primarily on stability and performance. After two years of big visual (iOS 7) and functional (iOS 8) changes, that sounds like just what the platform needs.

More recent rumors have even suggested that it would run on older, weaker hardware like the iPhone 4S and the original iPad Mini, which could make it the first major version of iOS in many, many years that didn’t drop support for some older hardware (OS X hasn’t dropped any Macs since Mountain Lion was released in 2012).

Of the new features, the biggest one we've heard about is something called “Proactive.” 9to5Mac reports that this is an initiative intended to make Spotlight a more credible substitute for Google Now, and as the name implies it will focus specifically on offering you context-sensitive information before you ask for it. For instance, if Google Now sees tracking numbers or airline confirmations in your inbox, it will collect that information and show it to you without requiring you to dive into the mail app.

Proactive has its roots in Cue, a personal assistant service acquired by Apple in late 2013. Like Cue, Proactive will use location data and information stored in several apps—Calendar and Contacts are two of the big ones—to determine what kind of information to show you. A limited Siri API may also allow third-party apps to provide some data for Proactive.

Proactive apparently isn’t “a lock” for iOS 9, but it’s the biggest and most interesting change we’ve heard about so far. Others include an updated keyboard (with a fix for the confusing Shift key behavior among other things), the foundation for Force Touch support (it will also need new hardware, though), public transit directions for Apple Maps, the Apple Watch’s new San Francisco typeface, and the long-rumored split-screen multitasking mode for the iPad.

Expect Apple to release the first iOS 9 developer beta after the keynote. Once it’s had some time to stabilize, the company may put out a public beta for general consumption.

OS X 10.11

A new typeface could continue OS X's visual shift. Here we compare San Francisco Display Ultralight (left) to Helvetica Neue Ultralight (right).
A new typeface could continue OS X's visual shift. Here we compare San Francisco Display Ultralight (left) to Helvetica Neue Ultralight (right).
Andrew Cunningham

Leaks about OS X have been much less numerous than leaks about iOS, which isn’t entirely surprising. Macs account for a much smaller slice of Apple’s revenue, and at this point OS X is mature enough that it doesn’t change a whole lot from release to release.

We’d expect this year to be especially quiet, now that Yosemite’s brand-new look is in place. We’ve heard that, as with iOS 9, Apple’s focus for OS X 10.11 (or whatever it ends up being called) will be on stability and quality rather than huge new features. That doesn’t necessarily mean we’re going to get a Snow Leopard-esque “no new features” release, but we’d bet on a Mountain Lion or Mavericks-esque update with just a handful of banner improvements.

Apple will likely continue to tweak Yosemite’s UI as it did with iOS throughout iOS 7 and iOS 8’s runs, and one of the more noticeable tweaks will reportedly be the Apple Watch’s new San Francisco typeface. If Apple introduces any new Handoff or Continuity features, of course we’d expect the Mac to pick up the same things that iOS does.

9to5Mac reports that an iOS-like Control Center feature may also be slated for 10.11, as well as a new security mechanism that protects sensitive system files even from users with administrator access (it’s called “Rootless” and at least on OS X it will apparently be disable-able, much like the Gatekeeper feature).

As with iOS, expect Apple to put out the first developer beta for the new OS X build after the keynote. After a couple of updates, we may get public beta builds to play with like we did last year.

Watch OS

Apple's Watch OS is based on but distinct from iOS, and so far it has been updated independently of other iOS devices (unlike, say, the Apple TV, which receives most of the same updates iPhones and iPads get). So expect it to get some stage time independent of iOS.

We already know one thing for sure: Apple is releasing a preview of the watch's native SDK to developers the week after WWDC, and it's likely that Apple will go into more detail during its keynote. We don’t know what native third-party apps will be allowed to do just yet, but we know that they’ll have more access to the sensors and other hardware and that they ought to be able to do more of the things Apple's built-in apps can do. The current crop of phone-reliant WatchKit apps is mixed at best, and this will hopefully help.

As for the OS itself, it's likely too early to be thinking about Watch OS 2.0, but we'd be surprised not to see some kind of “Watch OS 1.1” release that set about the work of picking the platform’s lowest-hanging fruit.

Swift and Xcode

Apple first introduced its Swift programming language about a year ago at last year’s WWDC, and since then it has received multiple updates to improve its speed and utility relative to the battle-tested Objective-C. Apple is still working on it actively—Xcode 6.3, issued in February, advertised significant improvements to Swift compiler speed as one of its key improvements.

New iOS and OS X betas obviously mean that we’ll get new betas of Xcode 7 so that developers can actually test applications that target the new operating systems. We don’t know much about the specific features the new developer tools will include beyond updated APIs, templates, and simulators, but WWDC is a developer conference and no developer conference is complete without a few bouts of slightly awkward onstage coding.

One possible improvement coming with the next version of Swift: Apple is reportedly planning on integrating Swift code libraries with iOS and OS X rather than requiring developers to bundle them with each individual apps, something which will shave a little size off of apps that use Swift.

Channel Ars Technica