Well the WWDC keynote for another year has come and passed and, as someone who has become increasingly critical of Apple in the last few years, I can say I was completely blown away by it. Make no mistake about it: Apple is back in the game. For the last several years it seems like Android was out-innovating Apple, but the Cupertino company has come back with a vengeance, inventing entirely new features--or stealing the best ones from other OSes and apps. Here are the 8 best new features of iOS 8. They’re going to make you fall in love with your iPhone and iPad all over again.
Touch ID
Yes, Touch ID was a hardware feature originally introduced last fall with the iPhone 5s. But with iOS 8 Apple has made massive improvements to it--and in the process made developers very happy. That’s because Touch ID under iOS 8 will allow developers to use the previously off-limits biometric sensor with their apps. Currently Touch ID only allows you to unlock your iPhone and make purchases in the iTunes and App Stores. Now that developers have access to Touch ID (but still never an image of your fingerprint) all the banking apps you use or file storage apps or any other app will be able to let you authenticate yourself instead of having to enter another four digit PIN.
iCloud Drive
iCloud Drive is Apple’s much-needed answer to Dropbox. It is essentially one location to store all the files on your Mac, PC, iPad, and iPhone. The big thing about iCloud Drive is that it makes all your documents available to any app on Mac, iOS, or Windows PCs from one location: your iCloud Drive. But it gets even better because if you open a document in one app, the edits you make are immediately available in that document to all the other apps that can read it.
This is a huge boon as previously iCloud documents were very limited as to which apps could access them and most of the time when you made a change the changes wouldn’t reflect in the other apps. Indeed, previously opening up a document that was stored in iCloud would often times create a new, separate copy of that document instead of opening the original.
All that has changed with iCloud Drive. It essentially gives iOS OS X’s Finder combined with the power of Dropbox. The only drawback is that there is no dedicated iCloud Drive app on iOS. You need to launch an app that supports iCloud Drive integration in order to browse through your files.
Extensibility: Interoperability For Apps
A new developer feature which will have huge benefits for users is Extensibility. This essentially allows third-party apps to talk to one another and share data instead of being sandboxed off from one another as in previous iOS releases. For example, a contact management app could allow a contact to be sent to another contact management client in iOS. Or as demoed on stage at WWDC, a third-party photo app could make its filters available to the Photos app in iOS (or other photos apps) so users can use that app’s filters anywhere.
Extensibility derives its name from “extensions” which we are all familiar with in our desktop web browsers. In that regard Extensibility will also allow for third-party apps to install extensions in iOS’s Safari so you could, for example, see a Bing Translate button in Safari’s share sheet which will allow you to instantly translate a web page.
Third Party Widgets
Another part of Extensibility is that it now allows developers to make third-party widgets that can show up in Notification Center. Previously widgets in Notification Center were limited to Apple’s Stock and Weather widgets. Now that developers have the ability to add widgets, Notification Center can become a lot more useful. For example, a fitness app could have a widget that shows you your current interval times at a glance or a finance app could have a widget that shows you your current bank balance or latest transactions.
Custom Keyboards
If there has been one universal “want” from users since the first iPhone was unveiled it has been for the ability to allow custom keyboards in iOS. Android has offered this support for years, yet us iOS users have been stuck with what Apple decided to give us. Well, no more! In a very wise move Apple is allowing apps to have custom keyboards in iOS 8. More than that though, if you like a custom keyboard so much you can actually give it permission to propagate out to the enter system so it completely replaces iOS’s default keyboard. The example Apple showed on stage was the popular Swype keyboard, but no doubt plenty of other keyboards will quickly make their way to iOS.
HealthKit
There was much speculation over what the rumored “Healthbook” would be--and now we know. It is in fact called “HealthKit” and is a developer API that allows health app developers to pipe a user’s health data through to a single app called “Health” in iOS that shows a user all his or her health stats. This is the first example of how our mobile phones will increasingly become the source of where we get real-time health information about ourselves, so it’s a big deal. I also suspect both HealthKit and the Health app will be expanded later this year to sync up with Apple’s rumored iWatch, which is rumored to have heavy biometric features.
Massive Mail Improvements
Mail is always kinda the “boring app”. It’s necessary, but it usually doesn’t drum up any excitement in people. I think part of the reason is because Mail has always been frustrating to use in iOS. But in iOS 8 Apple has fixed two big issues. The first allows users to quickly delete, mark unread, or mark as junk any email message just by swiping one way or the other. But the second feature solves a much bigger problem: now users can begin a new email message and simply swipe it down to the bottom of the screen to move it out of the way so they can go to another email message to find, for example, text they want to copy and paste into the new message. Does this make Mail exciting? No, but it sure as hell is 100 times easier to use now.
Messages Gets Voice & Video Replies
Apple seems to have added a ton of feature requests to Messages. For starters there are now many more controls for group messages: you can add or remove people, leave group messages, and name message threads. In Messages you can now also share your location with anyone quickly and easily and also view all of a message’s attachments in one window so you don’t need to scroll up through hundreds of texts to find them anymore.
But the best thing about Messages is now you can quickly record and send a voice reply to anyone. You simply touch and hold the new microphone button to record your message and then swipe up to send it. This voice reply feature is something Apple has “borrowed” from Facebook’s Messenger, but it’s very welcome. Sometimes a voice reply is a lot more useful and fun than replying with a text. Apple also gets extra points for the swipe feature which allows you to send it with just one gesture. And as you can with audio, Messages now support video replies using the same gestures.
iOS 8 will be a free download for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch users this fall.
by pbriden via Featured Articles
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