This meeting’s main topic was Apple’s recent announcements at WWDC, concentrating on the new version of Mac OS X, 10.10 Yosemite. We covered the major new features discussed at Apple’s press conference as well as a number of smaller improvements which beta testers have found. A list of these features is being compiled on the Mac Rumors forums here:
OS X 10.10 Yosemite: All The Little Things
There’s also a similar thread for iOS 8:
Smash Hit
DavidK demoed the iOS game Smash Hit on his iPad. In the game you automatically move forward “into” the screen and have to smash glass obstacles with ball bearings to proceed. The game has a beautiful surreal art-style and music. Smash Hit is free to play and an in-app purchase allows you to skip levels you have already completed.
Time-Lapse
At the April meeting, Ben, a professional photographer, set up his iPhone 5S and took a time-lapse video of the entire meeting. Today Ben showed us the video, it was fun to see the meeting in a completely different way. The entire three hour meeting played back in about 90 seconds!
News
In the news section we discussed:
Apple’s recent purchase of Beats Audio.
The 2014 Apple Design Award winners.
Transcend’s new JetDrive Lite memory cards designed to fit flush into the SD card slots of Mac Book Air and Retina Mac Book Pro computers.
Moves Apple has made recently where they appear to be more open and “friendly” including looser NDA’s for developers, free session materials from WWDC and the public beta of Mac OS 10.10.
Apple getting a top rating in the recent Electronic Frontier Foundation “Who Has Your Back“ report on how companies deal with government requests for data..
Following on from the of the Who Has Your Back report and discussion of security, DavidB mentioned to general agreement that members should consider enabling 2-step verification on their Apple ID. This helps prevent your Apple account being taken over even if your password is compromised. Apple has an article explaining 2-step verification for further information.