Continuity: Apple is now moving in new directions and beyond where Steve Jobs might have gone

12 years ago

“Apple’s ‘Continuity’ initiative is all about using the right device for the right task at the right moment and shifting between devices seamlessly,” Ryan Faas writes for Computerworld. “It very much leverages all of Apple’s solutions to create a very smooth flow from iPhone to Mac to iPad and, in some instances, to iCloud.”

“AirDrop will work between iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite — both due out this fall. One of the biggest advantages of AirDrop, in both its Mac and iOS iterations, is that the technology functions completely without any configuration,” Fass writes. “Macs and iOS devices won’t even need to be on the same network to share content — as long as they’re near each other, they can detect and establish ad-hoc access. This allows for immensely easy collaboration at a moment’s notice and is so much simpler than signing onto a corporate network share, attaching a file to an email, or using a flash drive to transfer information.”

“Building on that effortless ease-of-sharing is Handoff, a new feature that will allow users to, well, hand off a task from one device to another,” Fass writes. “You can, for instance, begin composing an email on an iPhone and then finish the process on a Mac. Handoff really demonstrates, perhaps more than anything else that Apple announced at the keynote, the value of its ecosystem and the company’s focus on delivering an end-to-end user experience.”

“The ability to relay text messages and voice calls (complete with caller ID and the contact information associated with the caller) from an iPhone to a Mac, or to answer or initiate calls on a Mac — using an iPhone or making the call directly from the Mac — give us another peek at the unified vision, centered around the user, that appears to be Apple’s goal moving forward,” Fass writes. “Another feature Apple execs highlighted, sure to be a hit with road warriors and those of us who occasionally work in coffee shops, is an automatic hotspot feature. Using your iPhone as a hotspot isn’t new, of course… but Apple has made using it completely effortless. There’s no need to configure a network or pair your Mac to your iPhone using Bluetooth; the connection simply occurs automatically with your iPhone appearing in the network menu in the Yosemite menubar.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: With chintzy network PCs and a morass of incompatible iPhone knockoffs, Google’s garbage “platform” (or anybody else’s, for that matter) simply cannot compete.