I’m an admitted Apple fanboy. And for all you Fandroids, I’m aware the majority of iOS 7 updates are features already found on Android. If that is your argument, fantastic — there’s some good points to this end.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, I think the WWDC 2013 keynote had a lot of pop for a keynote that lacked a new iPhone, iPad or iPod. In a keynote that was void of product announcements, minus the new MacBook Air, Apple attempted to make it up with software updates.

Let’s rundown all of the announcements from Monday’s keynote at WWDC 2013 in a bit more detail.
 

OS X Mavericks

 
OS X Mavericks, the latest release of the Apple’s desktop operation system, is packed full of updates. iBooks, Maps, Calendar, Safari, iCould Keychain, Multiple Displays, Notifications, Finder Tabs, Tags, and Advanced Technologies are the bread winners of the Mavericks update. As you’ve undoubtedly noticed, Apple is moving away from the big cat names for its 10th release. Mountain Lion, #9, has sold to date 28 million copies, Apple’s best selling release of all-time.

In the six months its been out, Apple has seen 35 percent adoption rate. For all future releases, Apple is going with California-themed names. The first being Mavericks, a surf location in northern California that is known for its waves.
 

iBooks

 
Syncing book purchases from your iPad, iPhone, or iPod just got a lot easier. Now, those purchases will automatically appear in iBooks on your Mac. Additionally, if you start reading on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, you can pick up right where you left off on your Mac. Currently there are over 1.8 million books on iBooks, and purchasing is just one-click away.

A very cool feature for students is that when you quote an excerpt while writing a paper, iBooks adds a citation for you. With iBooks on the OS X Mavericks update when you take notes, highlight passages, or add a bookmark on your Mac, iCloud pushes them to all your devices automatically.
 

Maps

Maps attempt to harness the full graphic prowess of Apple. Zooming, Flyover, Interactive-3D are all crisp and responsive. Maps has point-to-point directions, rea-time traffic conditions, and suggested alternate routes. When producing local points of interests like a hotel or a restaurant it shows phone numbers, photos and Yelp reviews. With the OS X Mavericks update, Maps are built into Mail, Contacts, and Calendar too which is an end-to-end solution that proves to be very helpful.
 

Calendar

 

 
Calendar gets more intuitive and much smarter. There is a new event inspector allows you to create and edit events based on location, travel time and weather. It will give you expected travel time and add that to your calendar as well as give you the weather forecast for the location of your event. It will add a “notify me when to leave” alert for your calendar, so that you’ll never be late. It can make recommendations too. For example, if you were to start to type pizza, it would auto-recommend pizza locations near your destination.
 

Safari

 
Safari gets some significant updates in OS X Mavericks too. Safari Top Sites has a new sidebar, bookmarks, and folders. There was a huge upgrade to Shared Links in the new Sidebar that shows links posted by people you follow on Twitter and LinkedIn, so you can keep up with interesting new content. And with the redesigned Top Sites, it’s easy to organize your favorites.
 

iCloud Keychain

 

 
Remembering passwords is something we all loathe. iCloud Keychain is another service that remembers passwords for you. On devices you’ve approved, it stores your website username and password with AES 256-bit encryption. It keeps passwords updated across all of your devices. Additionally iCloud Keychain has a new feature called Password Generator. iCloud Keychain works great with credit card information and online shopping.
 

Multiple Displays

 
A huge upgrade on OS X Mavericks is there is no longer primary and secondary displays. You can move dock, screens as display only — giving you different full displays on different full-screen apps. Each screen has its own dock, its own menu bar, and apps can be full screened independently. TV’s connected to Apple TV can be used as an additional display, wirelessly too. Mission Control gives you a birds-eye-view, making it easy to drag what you want where you want it.
 

Notifications

 
With Notifications, you can now get updates to everything you’ve setup to receive updates on, without leaving the app you’re in. With OS X Mavericks you’re able to interact with your notifications too: reply to a message, respond to FaceTime video calls, or even delete an email right from notifications. You can sign up to receive push notifications to your Mac from apps like fantasy football (whether Safari is running or not). Notifications also show on your lock screen and updates apps in the background. If you step away from your Mac for any length of time, when you return there will be a digest of all of the notifications you missed.
 

Finder Tabs

 
As an Apple fanboy, Finder Tabs is a huge win for OS X Mavericks. Clutter with desktop tabs is something we all fight, and Finder Tabs lets you consolidate multiple windows into just one. In one Finder window you could have 4-5 different tabs. Switching between tabs is easy, and you are able to customize and reorder how you view tabs. Moving files between tabs is as simple as dragging and dropping. Each tab has its own location and view mode making organization on your Mac significantly better.
 

Tags

 
Tags finally brings tagging to the Mac. With Tags, you can organize and find your files and documents — even those stored in iCloud on other devices. Once tagged it will appear in the Finder sidebar. You can add multiple tags to a file, assigning it to multiple projects. Let’s say that you’re planning a surprise birthday for your best friend. You could tag #bestiesbirFFFday to your guest list saved in Numbers, flyer you designed in Pages, and embarrassing photos you added to iPhoto — all just one click away organized in a single project in Finder.
 

Advanced Technologies

 
With OS X Mavericks, Apple aims to take battery life and performance speed to a higher level. Timer Coalescing, App Nap, Safari Power Saver and Compressed Memory were the big announcements. Let’s quickly detail each:

• Timer Coalescing – Transitions consume a lot of power, Timer Coalescing intelligently aligns transitions to reduce cpu utilization. Apple reports you’ll see 72% less CPU activity.
• App Napp – Helps you save power when you’re working with multiple apps at the same time. OS X can tell when an app is completely hidden behind other windows and will subsequently stop using power for it. In a demo that was showed at the WWDC keynote, we saw a demo of famo.us, which was a pretty intense CSS 3D demo. He showed a power meter on the right that showed its CPU usage; of about halfway. He hides the window behind iTunes — the meter dropped significantly.
• Safari Power Saver – Recognizes the difference between what you came to see on a website and the stuff you in the margins that you most likely didn’t. Safari Power Saver will show you a static preview but will require you to run it before it drains on your battery.
• Compressed Memory – OS X Mavericks automatically compresses data from inactive apps, making more memory available. OS X Mavericks is 1.4x faster in responsiveness under load than OS X Mountain Lion and 1.5x faster in wake from standby. OS X Mavericks auto

 

iOS 7

 

 

• Much flatter UI

 
iOS 7 was the leading lady today, as Apple served up some breathtaking photos of a new operating system. My first takeaway is that everything is much, much flatter. With depth and vitality, iOS 7 redesigns the UI with distinct functional layers that have a hierarchy of order. The iPhone that was demoed responded to movement, as the phone shifted so did the view of the homescreen — the angle of the entire UI adjusts as well as the lightening. With iOS 7 you get a new experience of depth with an interface that is un-intrusive.

• New swipe – app toggle

 
iOS 7 introduced swiping with a new app switcher — app previews are shown on-screen and you have the ability to slide smoothly from app to app. The keyboard is now translucent, showing the content that is behind it. Settings are now only a slide away. A slide up drawer brings up setting toggles including: volume, wifi/bluetooth, music playback, air-plane mode and yes, even a flashlight app!

“We’ve always thought of a design as the way something looks. But it’s the whole thing; the way something works on so many levels. Ultimately, of course, design defines so much of our experience,” – Apple Lead Designer Jonathan Ive.

 

• Homepage

 
Folders on the home screen now support multiple pages. The new Calendar is much more responsive. Based around pinching and zooming, you can move from screen to screen very effortlessly. Example: you can pinch out and go from day to week to month view. Does the new weather app look like Yahoo’s weather app to anyone else? There’s some subtle shots fired at the beloved Yahoo Weather app for iOS — Apple’s new iOS 7 Weather app has a very similar look, minus those beautiful Flickr photos.
 

iRadio

 

 
iRadio is Apple stealing food off of the plate of Pandora, Spotify and the broder Internet radio industry, as witnessed by a stumble in Pandora’s stock when news of Apple’s rival iRadio emerged.   Sticking with its native-first approach, iRadio is built right into the music app for easy access within Apple’s ecosystem.

• Built-in app with song streaming + sharing

 
“The first thing you notice, we’ve got a set of ‘featured stations’ that show the music that is trending on Twitter right now, or, in this case, the music you’ll hear this week at WWDC. But right now, I feel like listening to Summer Songs,” said Eddy Cue, presenting iRadio to the WWDC crowd.  Cue is the senior VP for Internet services and software at Apple.

Once a song starts playing, you’re able to share that station with your friends, or create a new station based around that artist. It’s not featured stations only — you can create (just like Pandora or Spotify) your own station based on artists, genre or song.

You can modify by hitting the star and see more, less or never again based on any one song. iRadio functions across all stations on all of your devices. iRadio is built into iOS7 as well as iTunes on your Mac and AppleTV. iRadio lets you preview and purchase music right from the point of listening. iRadio is free with ads, and it is free if you’re an iTunes Match subscriber. iRadio will launch first in the US, and make its way to other countries soon.
 

New MacBook Air’s

 
In our current age of tablets and mobile phones, the future of the NoteBook is up in the air. Here are the details of the new MacBook Air’s starting at $999 for the 11-inch and $1099 for the 13-inch:

• 4th Gen Intel Core i5 and i7 processors
• 2x GPU execution units
• Intel HD Graphics 5000 offers up to 40 percent faster graphics
• Now supports 802.11ac Wi-Fi
• 11-inch 5 to now 9 hours of batter life
• 13-inch 7 to now 12 hours of battery life
• All based on flash 45 percent faster than previous version
• Two USB 3 ports

 

Mac Pro

 

 
In what was just a brief ‘teaser’ by Apple, we were shown the future of desktop computing with the Mac Pro. Engineered around workstation graphics with dual GPUs, PCI Express-based flash storage, high-performance Thunderbolt 2, new-generation Xeon processors, ultrafast memory, and support for 4K video. New-generation Intel Xeon E5 chipset. With configurations offering up to 12 cores of processing power, up to 40GB/s of PCI Express gen 3 bandwidth, and 256-bit-wide floating-point instructions. Four-channel DDR3 memory controller running at 1866MHz. It delivers up to 60GB/s of memory bandwidth. PCI Express-based flash controller technology to deliver the fastest solid-state drives available standard in a desktop computer.

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