Apple Watch Announcements from the September 9 Apple Keynote

The Apple Watch didn’t receive a hardware update, but it was the subject of a number of other big announcements at today’s Special Event keynote from Apple. On the software front, it was revealed that watchOS 2 would be released to the public next Wednesday, September 16. Apple also took the time to unveil a number of new watch bands, new variations in each of the Apple Watch collections, and a partnership with Hermès to deliver a fourth Apple Watch collection.

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The New Apple TV: Our Complete Overview

As was widely expected, Apple today unveiled the new Apple TV at its Special Event keynote at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. The new Apple TV (fourth generation) features a familiar but overhauled user interface, a redesigned remote which features a touch surface for navigation and Siri for interaction, plus there’s now an App Store for apps and games.

Tim Cook: This is the new Apple TV and we believe it is the future of television.

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Apple Seeds First iOS 9.1 Beta, Includes New Emoji→

Following its event in San Francisco today, Apple released Golden Master seeds of iOS 9 and watchOS 2 (both launching next week), as well as the first developer beta of iOS 9.1, likely coming with the new iPad Pro in November.

As spotted by Owen Williams at The Next Web, the beta release includes new emoji from the latest Unicode specification:

Once you get the update to iOS 9.1 when it’s released at some point in the future — its only available to those with a paid Apple developer account right now — you’ll see a ton of new emoji on the keyboard including taco, unicorn, a stop hand, turkey, burrito and block of cheese.

Almost every category has had new emoji added — we saw a racecar, satellite, prayer beads, award medals, new square images showing camping and a ton more.

Adding new emoji may be the best way to convince millions of people to upgrade to the latest version of iOS.

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Apple Posts September 9 2015 Keynote Video & New iPhone 6s, iPad Pro, Apple Watch, and Apple TV Ads

For those who didn’t follow the live stream or announcements as they unfolded on Twitter and blogs, Apple has now posted the video of its September 9 keynote held earlier today at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco.

The video can be streamed here, and a higher quality version should be made available in a few hours through iTunes (on the Apple Keynotes podcast). To avoid streaming errors, Safari is recommended for the best viewing experience.

In addition, Apple has also posted new commercials and product reveal videos for the iPhone 6s, iPad Pro, Apple TV, and Apple Watch on its YouTube channel. You can find all the videos below.

You can also follow all of the MacStories coverage of today’s Apple’s keynote through our September 9 Keynote hub, or subscribe to the dedicated September 9 Keynote RSS feed.

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Apple Announces iOS 9, watchOS 2 Launching on Wednesday, September 16

As widely expected, Apple has today confirmed the official release date of iOS 9 and watchOS 2 at a media event held at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. iOS 9 and watchOS 2 will be released on Wednesday, September 16th, for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.

Announced at WWDC in June, iOS 9 includes new and updated built-in apps, a major focus on improving the experience and capability of the iPad, and better performance, security and battery life. Apple significantly improved the functionality of the built-in Notes app, adding support for sketches, checklists, and a share extension. Apple Maps now has support for Transit directions (in limited locations) and there’s a new News app. iPad users with one of the more recent models can now use multiple apps at the same time with the introduction of Slide Over, Split View, and Picture in Picture modes. Siri and Spotlight also got a little smarter and can now answer more questions whilst attempting to proactively surfacing information and content that is relevant to you.

Apple hasn’t announced a Golden Master seed of iOS 9 yet, but it will presumably be released to developers today. Typically the last developer release before a public launch, the GM seed will allow developers to make final preparations to their iOS 9-ready apps and submit them to the App Store.

You can also follow all of the MacStories coverage of today’s Apple’s keynote through our September 9 Keynote hub, or subscribe to the dedicated September 9 Keynote RSS feed.

Twitter Aims to Unify iOS Apps, Updates its iPad App

Brendan Donohue, writing on the Twitter Blog:

Previously, Twitter for iPhone and iPad offered very different experiences. Now, Twitter apps on these devices will be more consistent regardless of which one you’re using. Starting today, iPad users will be able to create and see revamped quote Tweets, explore trending topics in search, visit product and place pages, and more. We’d like to tell you how we made this happen.

Although they shared some code, Twitter for iPad and Twitter for iPhone were originally developed and designed separately. Each app was tailored to its platform — but required a lot of extra effort to develop. All too often, this meant that Twitter for iPad features lagged behind other updates. To fix this, we had to rethink our approach.

The good news is that Twitter’s iPad app is now mostly at feature parity with the Twitter iPhone app. The bad news is that Twitter’s iPad app doesn’t exactly use the extra screen space of the iPad efficiently, and instead is mostly just a scaled-up version of their iPhone app.

This is probably explained by the fact that Twitter has been working hard on rebuilding a solid foundation across all their platforms to ensure feature-parity, as they explain in their blog post. It may just be that they wanted wanted to get something out the door and (finally) update the iPad app and they didn’t get a chance to fully adapt the design for the iPad. That might be naive of me, but I’m sure there are some at Twitter who recognise that this update still leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to a good iPad Twitter app and will work hard to continually improve it.

What we’ve got so far is a baseline to make everything work well. It’s been a huge effort to rewrite the system in place as seamlessly as possible. One of our first steps was building landscape support, which we shipped for the iPhone 6 Plus earlier this summer. From this effort, we learned a lot about how and when to adapt to changing conditions. This was the foundation on which we built our updated iPad support. Now, we have new tools that are more robust and allow faster iteration. Adaptive UI gives us the ability to support new devices and bring new Twitter features to people faster. But as you might expect, from time to time there are going to be some differences in features and functionality between devices. In the future, we aim to get Twitter for iPad and iPhone to complete feature parity.

Apple Events Channel on Apple TV Updated to Stream Today’s Apple Keynote

The ‘Apple Events’ channel on the Apple TV has been updated and is ready to stream today’s Apple keynote. The channel will allow users to stream Apple’s keynote from 10am PDT, as Apple previously announced. If you’ve got some time, the channel also allows you to stream previous Apple events, including the 2015 WWDC keynote which introduced iOS 9, OS X El Capitan and Apple Music.

For those without an Apple TV, you will also be able to stream Apple’s keynote from Apple’s website from Safari on iOS or OS X and from Microsoft Edge on Windows 10.

You can also follow all of the MacStories coverage of today’s Apple’s keynote through our September 9 Keynote hub, or subscribe to the dedicated September 9 Keynote RSS feed.

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