Apple WWDC 2013 liveblog – iOS 7 revealed

Apple’s gearing up for its annual Worldwide Developers Conference – with the keynote set to start at 6pm UK time. We’re expecting great things from Apple – a new iOS 7, iRadio music streaming service, and refreshed laptops running the new OS X are all on the cards for this evening. Read on for live coverage.

Newest comments first – scroll down for older posts (times are UK time)

20:00 “Have a great conference, enjoy the week, thank you” – and Tim’s off. And we’re going to try very hard to get a hands-on with something. Stay tuned to Stuff.tv!

19:58 No time for a One More Thing. This is a wrap-up.

19:57 So, we have three minutes left. Time for a One More Thing?

19:57 It’s available for iPhone 4 and up, iPads later than version 2 and the 5th-gen iPod Touch.

19:57 iOS 7 is available in Beta on the iPhone today. To developers only. Boo! Normal folk have to wait until Autumn.

19:56 Activation Lock prevents theives from being able to reactivate your phone after you’ve remotely wiped it.

19:55 Other new iOS features: notification sync across your devices, FaceTime audio for HD audio calls over Wi-Fi, per-app VPN, and something called Activation Lock. And Do Not Track in Safari.

19:54 It’s on iTunes, so works on Mac, PC, iOS devices and Apple TV. It’s free with ads, and available ad-free to iTunes Match subscribers.

19:53 Radio keeps track of everything you listen to, and allows you to scan back through your history to buy tunes as you like.

19:53 Eddy’s demoing it with Whole Lotta Love by Led Zeppelin. Good man. Next up on the same station is Gimme Shelter by The Rolling Stones.

19:52 iTunes Radio finds tunes that are trending on Twitter and offers other curated stations, but also allows you to create stations based on an artist or song. Just like Pandora.

19:50 It was never called iRadio after all! Sorry everyone.

19:50 iTunes has been refreshed, too. Cover Flow is finally out… and iTunes Radio is in.

19:49 New much-needed feature: background updating of all apps. Finally!

19:48 New feature in App Store: recommendations based on your location.

19:48 New feature: iOS in the car. This is far beyond Siri Eyes-Free Mode. Proper iOS integration, on a dedicated screen in your car, is coming to many car manufacturers in 2014.

19:47 Very controversial. Mumblings around the room.

19:46 Twitter and Wikipedia are integrated. And so, oddly, is Bing. Take that, Google!

19:46 There are lots of new Siri functions, like “play last voicemail” and ‘turn on Bluetooth’

19:46 Siri’s got an all-new interface, and an all-new voice. Sorry, John Briggs.

19:45 Eddy Cue’s here, talking Siri.

19:44 Otherwise… the results may be unpalatable.

19:44 Other people can now share pictures into your iCloud Photo Stream. Only let people you trust do this.

19:43 You can tap and scrub your finger across your collages to find a pic you like. And when you find it, you can apply filters to it. You can then share via AirDrop, iCloud, Twitter, Facebook and more.

19:42 Moments organises your photos by date and location data. Creates neat collages of photos by date – even up to year-level.

19:41 New iOS 7 feature 7: Photos. Photos now organises your snaps into moments, so you don’t just have an endless stream of disorganised pics any more.

19:40 New iOS 7 feature 6: Camera. It gets nice retro filters. Well, of course it does.

19:39 It’s a peer-to-peer Wi-Fi based sharing system that basically does the same as NFC sharing on the Samsung Galaxy S4 – but without the NFC bit. Apple really doesn’t like NFC. Shame.

19:38 New iOS 7 feature 5: AirDrop. “The easiest way to share with the people that are right around you”

19:38 New iOS 7 feature 4: Control Center. Pull up from the bottom of the screen to toggle controls, play songs (predicatbly, it’s Vampire Weekend), switch on a torch and more.

19:35 New iOS 7 feature 3: Safari. Lovely new 3D scrolling tabs browser, a nice full-screen mode that shrinks the menu bar as you scroll down. Swiping sideways will take you back a page. For the first time, you can have more than eight open tabs at the same time.

19:34 The multitasking interface is very Android like: double-click on the button, and you get previews of every open app on the bottom of the screen.

19:32 New iOS 7 feature 2: multitasking comes to all apps. Crowd loves this. iOS 7 checks on apps periodically to make sure they’re updating regularly.

19:31 New iOS 7 feature: Control Center. It’s a settings menu you pull from the bottom of your screen. Big improvement from the buried Settings menu.

19:30 “Installing iOS 7 on your phone is like getting an entirely new phone, except one you already know how to use”, says Craig.

19:30 You can now have multiple pages in folders, and every core app has been re-skinned. Mail gets full-screen pictures – looks like its nicked the best bits of Mailbox.

19:27 It looks even better than Yahoo’s beautiful weather app.

19:27 We’re looking at the weather app. Animated videos show off what’s going on, and there’s much more rich data than in the existing app.

19:26 The skeuomorphism, as predicted, is out. Game Center loses all the green felt and wood. It’s simple like Windows Phone 8, but has many of the prettier Android-like elements, too. Very Google Now.

19:25 The interface uses parallax scrolling to create the illusion of depth.

19:24 Craig’s back to talk us through “the biggest change to iOS since iPhone” again.

19:23 The crowd has erupted. ‘I love you” shouts a dev.

19:23 New window-based multi-tasking, a la Android. Translucent keyboard, so you can see what’s scrolling behind. Accelerometer use allows the background picture to move, creating an illusion of an interface with multiple layers.

19:21 Very flat icons, with pull-up widgets and new typography. It’s really, really lovely.

19:19 iOS 7 is SEXY.

19:19 It’s a video, with soporific voiceover by the chocolate-voiced Sir Jonny Ive. “There’s a profound beauty in simplicity”

19:18 Stunning new interface desgn, apparently. Whoop!

19:18 iOS 7 is the biggest change to iOS in its life, according to Tim. Whoop!

19:18 …and Android is still fragmented. iOS 6 is the world’s most popular mobile OS; the second biggest is Android Gingerbread, release in 2010.

19:16 A lot of stats, one message – people like iOS. People like iPhones.

19:15 Of course, that’s not a particularly fair comparison. Show us how much use people get out of their HTC Ones and Samsung Galaxy S4s, Tim!

19:14 According to Experian, iPhone users use their devices 50% more than Android users do. And they browse the web 2.5x more than Android users so.

19:13 Now, the main event – iOS 7.

19:13 iWork in the Cloud is coming to normal mortals later this year; devs straight away.

19:12 “And here you go – I’m editing a Keynote document in Windows 8”. That gets a laugh – but this is potentially a game-changer.

19:11 This cloud computing thing might take off after all. We want to try this on a Chromebook.

19:10 Back to iWork for iCloud. Rearranging slides looks faster than Powerpoint does on our work computer – and it’s running in a browser.

19:08 The app looks as powerful in a browser as the desktop app does. You can even drop in and reposition images.

19:07 This makes iCloud a closer competitor to Google Drive. Document editing was Drive’s killer feature. Not any more, it seems.

19:06 iWork is going cloud-based, like Microsoft Office 365. You can produce docs on your browser, on Mac or PC.

19:04 Sadly, we’re done on Mac Pro – and we’re on to iCloud.

19:03 Plus it’s made in the USA. This US audience is very, very happy about that.

19:03 And it’s tiny. 1/8th the volume of the old Mac Pro. The whole of the top is a handle, and it has a motion sensor that backlights its I/O ports when you turn it. Blimey.

19:01 In short, it’s a seriously powerful shiny black tube. It even supports up to three 4K displays on the built-in AMD FirePro graphics.

18:59 It’s twice as powerful as anything Apple’s made before, with PCIe flash memory that’s 2.5x faster than previous generations. And it gets, as we predicted, Thunderbolt 2. That’ll do 22Gbps.

18:58 It looks like a municipal dustbin. A very nice municipal dustbin.

18:58 “Can’t innovate any more, my ass” quips Phil.

18:58 Whoa. It’s a beautiful shiny black tube.

18:56 “The engineering team has come up with something truly revolutionary, truly radical.”

18:56 …and it’s the Mac Pro.

18:55 Ooh, we’re getting a sneak peek at something “Only because you’re 6000 of our most important friends”

18:55 The new Airs start shipping today at US$899 for the 11 and US$999 for the 13.

18:54 The Airs also get 802.11ac networking. Not much supports 802.11ac yet… so Apple’s got a new AirPort Extreme router/NAS with space for a 2TB or 3TB hard disk.

18:53 Despite the extra efficiency, the graphics are 40% faster. The 11in gets 9 hours of battery; the 13 gets an 11-hour life.

18:52 And the new ones deliver all-day bettery life. That’s thanks to Haswell chips.

18:51 “It’s become the ultimate everyday laptop”

18:51 Phil Schiller’s here – and he wants to tell us all about the MacBook Air.

18:50 The Mavericks developer preview is out today; final release is this Autumn. We’re looking forward to it.

18:49 iBooks textbooks demo looks an awful lot like Microsoft Encarta. Encarta was amazing! We had it on a 486SX with a newfangled CD-ROM drive.

18:48 Maps integration in Calendar is very Google Now-esque. Integration with Maps means you can add a destination to appointments and it’ll tell you when you need to leave to get there.

18:46 Maps, iBooks, Notifications and a Calendar that looks uncannily like iOS’s. All in, that’s a lot of iOS functionality that Mavericks has snaffled up.

18:45 And, finally, iBooks is now on the Mac. This, it seems, is very popular. But is there any device less suited than a laptop for book consumption?

18:44 All these app icons have curiously square corners. A sign of things to come?

18:44 And now, the Mavericks Maps app. Criag promises big improvements (there better be, Craig) – but one outstanding feature is the ability to send routes from your Mac to your iPhone. Genius.

18:43 Calendar has a dramatically stripped down look. “Absolutely no cows were harmed in the making of the calendar”. See ya, skeuomorphism.

18:42 New notifications allow the notifications you opt in to on your iOS devices will also show up on your MacBook’s screen. That could either be useful… or so annoying.

18:40 iCloud Keychain remembers your passwords across all of your Apple devices. It even suggests super-secure passwords for you, and then remembers them so you don’t have to.

18:38 Mavericks is the coolest OS name ever. Makes us want it regardless of what it does. But what it does looks rather good.

18:36 You can retweet from within Safari too. Social networking is deeply embedded in Mavericks.

18:35 According to Craig, Safari is faster and more resource-friendly than Chrome or Firefox.

18:34 Safari has a neat new sidebar with bookmarks, Reading List and Shared Links from your social networks: any links people you follow post on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn will appear.

18:33 So. Where are the Haswell-equipped MacBooks, Craig?

18:30 Mavericks has some clever power optimisation going on in the background, too. Craig says a system in use can be up to 72% more efficient. Combine that with Intel’s Haswell chips, and you could have a laptop with a massively improved battery life.

18:25 But the crowd’s really gone wild for Multiple Displays. You get the dock and menus across all of your displays – and can even use an AirPlay-connected TV as a fully-featured computer monitor.

18:24 Next: Tags. Add tags to any file, to organise simply without creating directories. Clever stuff.

18:23 First Mavericks feature: Finder Tabs. Tabbed browsing for Finder. Simple idea, but amazingly useful.

18:22 Instead, California is the inspiration for the next line-up of OS X names. OS X Mavericks: named after a famous surf spot.

18:21 OS X Sea Lion! Not really. But good joke, Craig.

18:20 “As we turn our attention to the 10th (OS X), we’ve hit a real issue”. They’ve run out of lions.

18:20 “We’ve got lots of innovation left”. Craig Federighi hits the stage to tell us all about OS X. What’s the follow-up to Mountain Lion?

18:19 And now we’re talking Mac. Macs have grown 100% in the past 5 years – PCs have grown 18%. Ouch.

18:18 Tim Cook’s thanking the iOS developers in the room. He knows that apps are iOS’ greatest asset. Android still doesn’t come close for quality or variety.

18:17 Anki Drive’s coming out in Autumn. And we want it, a lot.

18:16 …and you can shoot the other cars off the track. This is pretty incredible.

18:14 Anki are onstage showing off Drive – a roll-out playmat with real AI cars that zoom around of their own volition. Not sure yet how (or if) you actually play with it – but iOS gadgets are being used as the cars’ brains.

18:10 App Store developers been paid $10billion so far – three times more than all other platforms put together. Understandably, the developers are rather pleased about this.

18:09 The App Store is five years old next month. That’s pretty amazing. 50 billion apps have been downloaded so far, and there are 900,000 apps in the store – and 90% of them are still downloaded every month.

18:07 Oh no! An Apple Store opening video. Looks like a nice one – a 100-year-old theatre in Berlin. But now the players are all iPads, iPhones and MacBooks.

18:05 There are six million registered Apple developers and 25% of them registered in the past year. Tickets sold out in 71 seconds. This room is huge – but clearly not huge enough.

18:04 Tim Cook hits the stage to rock-star like adoration. The intro video, on design philosophy, was super-minimal – more of that minimalism to come we reckon.

18:03 Tim Cook’s up!

18:01 And we’re on.

18:01 Lights go down, audience starts clapping…

17:59 “Ladies and gentlemen, our presentation will begin shortly”. And EVEN MORE Vampire Weekend.

17:56 Four minutes to go. Selection of very MacBook-like MacBooks sit on a table on the stage. Nothing outwardly new – but they could be packing Haswell processors, couldn’t they?

17:39 More Vampire Weekend. Are Vampire Weekend the face of iRadio? Or is the DJ just a bit lazy?

17:35 Tim Cook’s just sauntered off backstage. Was it something Al said? Oh no, of course – he has a keynote to present in 25 minutes

17:34 Vampire Weekend are on the stereo. If Apple designed a band, it would look exactly like Vampire Weekend.

17:32 We’re in! Tim Cook’s hobnobbing with Al Gore just in front of the stage.

WWDC 2013 expectations

What time does Apple WWDC 2013 keynote begin?

UK – 1800New York – 1300San Francisco – 1000Sydney – 0300Singapore – 0100Moscow – 2100Paris – 1900

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