Apple Announces Lion OS, iCloud, iOS 5

Lots of announcements from Apple at the Worldwide Developers Conference today. CEO Steve Jobs came out of his medical leave briefly to introduce the new products which included:

• OS X Lion - The latest iteration of Apple's operating system, which is due in July. The most exciting/useful new features for musicians include AirDrop - a means of doing direct file transfers between devices over WiFi without need for a network, AutoSave - which does just what it says and is sure to save lots of people from the heartbreak of losing a song to a crash, and further integration of multi-touch gestures. Best of all? It'll only cost $29.99. For a full list of the new features, look here.

• iOS5 - Apple also announced the latest version of iOS, their operating system for mobile devices. Nothing among the new features really jumped out at me as being exciting for mobile music makers, but perhaps that remains to be seen.

• iCloud - You've probably noticed that "the Cloud" is the tech talk word du jour lately. If you're unfamiliar with it, it simply means that you can store your documents (in this case, your music files) on an offsite server that allows you to access those files from any device anywhere. So instead of storing your music on your phone, for example, you can stream it off the Cloud leaving you more room for ill-advised photos of yourself in compromising positions. It's hard at this point to know what this will mean for musicians at this point, but it is an intriguing idea. Given the recent hacker attacks on Sony and a disaster that left Blackberry users without their data a little while back, hopefully Apple has built a robust and secure infrastructure to handle all of this. The convenience of the Cloud is going to be a distant memory the moment someone's music collection gets lost or is inaccessible.