High-level features like 3x larger emojis in an app? O.o

Yeah, I wasn't really sure what I was watching there... this is Apple?

These days, WWDC keynotes have the general public and media as their target audience.

Hey, one less reason for me to use FB Messenger. In complete honesty, I prefer FB Messenger because it seems a lot more expressive and it's way easier to access your photos.

FB is really stomping on iMessage in the chat realm, and I'm sad I have to wait for iOS 10.

To be fair, it's probably stomping iMessage because you can also talk to people who didn't buy the same electronics brand.

I'm very torn about this. I can see why they might want to keep this on Apple hardware only. I've yet to see a video chat solution work as well as FaceTime on iOS devices does on Android. Maybe Duo is it but I need to see it to believe it.

Still, it's very frustrating. I have an Android device as my main phone but have an iPod touch to iMessage and FaceTime friends.

Strange, I've had pretty bad luck using FaceTime. Anytime my wife goes away for work it seems to be laggy or calls don't connect, or it doesn't even ring on the other parties side.

Not trying to dispel your point, but my girlfriend uses her iPhone to FaceTime her relatives in rural Russia with where their main broadband is spotty 3/4g modems; and it performs better than anything else they've tried.

Well, for Messenger to work you can only talk to people on the same social network.

Honestly, MMS/SMS, and email seem to work fine for me.

Though I am a little bummed that we're not all on an end-to-end encrypted XMPP standard communication by now...

> Well, for Messenger to work you can only talk to people on the same social network.

You can casually install Facebook Messenger on your device. You can't casually have a second phone.

you can use messenger with just your phone number and no account. you dont need a facebook account.

I think a bigger reason it's doing so well is because you don't need a phone number to contact someone. I have several friends who I first talked to on FB Messenger before I had their phone number.

Their wifi/data-based group messaging is also far superior to MMS groups.

You don't need to use a phone number for iMessage and FaceTime, IIRC it also supports email addresses.

Then it would be nice if Apple simply supported your preferred email address wholeheartedly and didn't keep trying to always rope you into an icloud email. Seriously, those are dark patterns that people hated (and still hate) about Microsoft and Windows.

Huh? Apple lets me use my own email address, unlike say, Google.

I'm not sure if you'll find that helpful, but you can create a Google account with a non-gmail email. When you create your account, below the username textbox is a blue "I prefer to use my current email address". Never tried it myself though..

They've changed it now so if you want to signup for a Google account it asks for your existing email and has a text link to signup for a gmail. If you are on the gmail landing page and hit sign up then it's how you stated though.

It may well be that Google is worse, but I keep on having to opt-in my accustomed email address and shut off the icloud one. I've probably shut that thing off in Facetime over a dozen times. It keeps on coming back like some sort of boss zombie. It has even caused arguments with a girlfriend, when emails got sent to the icloud address because it keeps coming back. (Now forwarded.)

Google lets you use your own email address. Not sure what the complaint here is.

If you also have an associated Gmail account it won't let you use another email address as the primary one.

That said I'm in some apple limbo land where I need to switch to an email address for iCloud but it won't let me use mine since I had a pre-email appleID. Yay.

What do you mean by primary?

You can't change your "username", but you can set it to send all correspondence, recovery, etc, to your non-gmail address.

I guess I mean the username. It was previously [email protected] but now it's an ugly [email protected] in all the Google UI.

Oh well, I avoid logging in anyway :)

My Apple ID is a Gmail address. Never saw a problem with that.

Still, you can meet someone organically and follow up with talking to them the next day knowing just their name and what mutual friends you have. Email and phone numbers are both unnatural arbitrary strings compared to names.

Nailed it.

Any app or service that isn't cross platform has no real future.

Some features are not intended to maximize penetration; they are differentiators for their platform. Super Mario has a real future and you can only get it on Nintendo.

Right, but we are talking about a communication platform which inherently should be crossplatform

"Should be" does not equate to "no future"

I know this is purely anecdotal, but nobody around me with an iOS device uses Messages. Everyone is using Whatsapp, or Telegram.

Coincidentally, Super Mario is a single player game.

That is, indeed, purely coincidental. The parent could have just as well said "Pokemon." :)

Halo.

I really enjoy FB Messenger. There's a part of me that is disturbed by how deeply integrated into my life Facebook has become, but there's another part of me that just loves the convenience of it all.

Now if only they'd fix that random infinite-reload-loop bug that's been plaguing me for the past week...

> There's a part of me that is disturbed by how deeply integrated into my life Facebook has become

You have no idea. I thought I was just choosing not to use Facebook - I didn't realize I was choosing not to have a social life any more, too.

I was hoping that they will launch iMessage on Android. I would have uninstalled FB messenger from my phone then.

Problem is they don't want the dominate chat app, they want to sell iPhones.

Attracts attention in the press.

This is huge! I can understand that they wouldn't want to devote a lot of time to it, but I can't believe this wasn't even mentioned in the keynote. It is a developer conference after all.

They cover things like this in the "Developer State of the Union" which is the talk really focused at developers. That's later today.

Where can I stream that?

https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/live/#/. It's streaming there now.

Here, though not available just yet:

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2016/102/

Via the index for WWDC 2016 videos:

https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc2016/

"Streaming is available in Safari and through the WWDC app."

...is nobody else getting this message? Or am I just the only one who thinks this is bullshit?

Here is a direct link to the mp4: http://devstreaming.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2016/102w0bsn0ge83...

Apple's been using HTTP live streaming for a few years; to date, nobody else fully supports it (although Edge has some limited support).

Twitch also has HTTPLS support; you can watch their streams in Safari without Flash installed.

Sure, but seeing as the live stream is over, you'd think they'd just autoplay the saved video instead.

I didn't actually notice that there are links to the videos in the Resources tab, so I guess it's not as bad as I thought.

You can also open the HLS streams with VLC

You probably can't. You couldn't any previous year AFAIK, though they publish the sessions online afterwards (an other commenter posted the 2015 one)

So essentially a big middle finger from Apple to anyone not attending the conference. Sigh.

The fact that they publish the sessions online afterwards doesn't sound like a "big middle finger" to me. Is it that important to view it live?

Do you attend a lot of paid conferences that stream live for free in real time? That must be cool.

Google I/O does.

I/O streams every session live?

No, they only streamed a single track live.

Well that's still pretty neat.

CCC does it

Or, maintaining the feeling of exclusivity of the event.

developer.apple.com @2:30 pst

The WWDC app on HR new Apple TV has the live stream, starting shortly.

"Developer State of the Union", Jesus... you talk about a closed platform.

I've never been able to stand these ecosystems where you need to attend state of the unions to know what will be deprecated and how the "establishment" has decided you would run your business (tools, etc...).

I know there's good money to be made there but Apple is just too much for me.

If it's any consolation, I've been downvoted a bunch of times when I tell stories about my time working for Steve at NeXT. People just don't seem to like hearing things that disagree with whatever perspective they hold. (And Steve used to refer to our software as the "crown jewels" that needed to be kept secret at any cost - even if we lost business or bankrupted partners. Steve freely admitted that we would overcharge anybody who was naive enough to pay high prices. But people don't like to hear that - even though I was in many meetings with Steve where he said those things.) And I should add that I'm not anti-Apple. I think we need to be able to see people and companies clearly - warts and all. Otherwise, how can we react to the real world?

I think the problem you are facing is that you have made some pretty outlandish claims with some basis in fact but also with some embellishments as to your role in all this and that HN has a whole pile of old timers on board many of who might have been present as other parties to those very same happenings. Likely they have long ago figured out who you really are.

That coupled with a hatred for rich people, the '1%' as you call them, and the fact that almost every major development in computing - according to you - in the last 20 years had your hand in it makes it hard to believe anything you say.

Maybe just stick to the facts, leave out the embellishments. For instance 'your time at NeXT' was just a single year but if we're to believe your comments then you were the guy that singlehandedly saved NeXT, Apple, Linux and Oracle to boot and if it weren't for a small glitch in your thinking we might have had global internet some years earlier.

It seems a bit much for one person, even if they've been quite active, Forrest Gump was fiction, not a biography.

Hmmm...sounds like a lot of things being conflated. I do think that the 1% has too much of the wealth, but I'm not sure how that is related to other things that I've said. You may disagree with that, but I'm not sure that justifies any downvote about my observations of the 1%. And, as best I can recall, I've only described computer-related events that I was present for. You may disagree, that is your right, but I was actually there and involved with the projects I've described. (And I worked in three different groups and multiple projects during my time at NeXT - it was chaotic to say the least. If one of your "old timers" thinks they know everything I did there, I would be pretty skeptical about that person's credibility.) I've never claimed to have saved any company at all - so I'm not sure where that comes from. I can't help it if I happened to grow up and work in Silicon Valley - where a lot of things were happening related to computers. Just because you weren't around when such decisions were being made, doesn't mean that nobody was.

Let's just say that adding 'and in a court of law I'll claim I made it all up' doesn't do much to add credence.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure you're more than welcome here but HN is kind of skeptical and if you are anonymous and start making grandiose claims about conversations between the execs of the largest companies in the IT space at some point in time expect some pushback ;)

To be fair, you don't need to attend anything, just wait 24 hours and read all the blog posts.

Actually, they put up the videos on their site and you can watch them there or download them. So, complaining that you can't stream it is a really minor complaint. Plus, I tried to stream it on my Apple TV and it wasn't available to stream, so the complaint is completely invalid.

The Apple File System will be a preview in Sierra, it will be introduced in 2017.

I think I can hear John Siracusa cheering from the other side of the pond.