Posts tagged with "featured"

iOS 8 Changed How I Work on My iPhone and iPad

When I reviewed iOS 7 last year, I took a different approach and tried to consider Apple’s redesigned OS from the perspective of someone who uses iPhones and iPads for work and personal tasks on a daily basis. I noted that a new structure enabled developers to make more powerful apps, and I concluded hoping that Apple would “consider revamping interoperability and communication between apps in the future”.

With today’s release of iOS 8, Apple isn’t merely improving upon iOS 7 with minor app updates and feature additions. They’re also not backtracking on the design language launched last year, which has been refined and optimized with subtle tweaks, but not fundamentally changed since its debut in June 2013.

Apple is reinventing iOS. The way apps communicate with each other and exchange functionality through extensions. How status awareness is being brought to iPhones, iPads, and Macs with Handoff and Continuity. Swift and TestFlight, giving developers new tools to build and test their apps. Custom keyboards and interactive notifications.

There are hundreds of new features in iOS 8 and the ecosystem surrounding it that signal a far-reaching reimagination of what iOS apps should be capable of, the extent of user customization on an iPhone and iPad, or the amount of usage data that app developers can collect to craft better software.

Seven years into iOS, a new beginning is afoot for Apple’s mobile OS, and, months from now, there will still be plenty to discuss. But, today, I want to elaborate on my experience with iOS 8 in a story that can be summed up with:

iOS 8 has completely changed how I work on my iPhone and iPad.

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iOS 8: Tips, Tricks, and Details

iOS 8 is, by any measure, a big update. A lot of it is refinement to last year’s drastic design overhaul, but there are also a lot of notable new features. Sitting amongst those refinements and big new features are little nuggets of delight in which Apple has designed or implemented something (whether it be a feature, design flourish or a shortcut) that you might not notice until one day you stumble upon it accidentally.

Just like we have in the past few years, we like to find those little gems that come with every brand new version of iOS. So in this post, you’ll find dozens and dozens of tips, tricks, and details of iOS 8 that we’ve collected throughout the summer since the first beta release of iOS 8.

For more iOS 8 coverage, check out our news hub.

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Nuzzel for iPhone Lets You Catch Up on News from Twitter

I’ve been using a free iPhone app called Nuzzel to catch up on interesting links and news shared on Twitter following a recommendation on Kottke and a tweet by Ben Thompson. I’m a fan of the underlying idea and the execution of filters in the app, but there are a few things that annoy me and that, I suppose, stem from this startup’s need to track clicks on links and “user behaviors” as much as possible.

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An Overview of iOS 8’s New Accessibility Features

Since this year’s WWDC keynote ended, the focus of any analysis on iOS 8 has been its features — things like Continuity, Extensions, and iCloud Drive. This is, of course, expected: iOS is the operating system that drives Apple’s most important (and most profitable) products, so it’s natural that the limelight be shone on the new features for the mass market.

As I’ve written, however, the Accessibility features that Apple includes in iOS are nonetheless just as important and innovative as the A-list features that Craig Federighi demoed on stage at Moscone. Indeed, Apple is to be lauded for their year-over-year commitment to improving iOS’s Accessibility feature set, and they continue that trend with iOS 8.

Here, I run down what’s new in Accessibility in iOS 8, and explain briefly how each feature works.

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Essential

The iPhone is good at many trivial tasks such as playing games and watching videos, but this week I experienced firsthand how much its portability and apps matter when dealing with an emergency situation.

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iOS 8 Extensions: Apple’s Plan for a Powerful App Ecosystem

Amidst the variety of announcements from WWDC 2014, Extensibility – a new set of technologies for developers to extend their apps – has been mainly regarded as Apple’s solution to the lack of inter-app communication on iOS.

Traditionally, iOS has been a closed platform in terms of software personalization and extensibility: due to a combination of design choices and strict enforcement of sandboxing rules, iOS users never enjoyed many of the benefits found on Google’s mobile operating system. Android users could, for instance, install system-wide replacement keyboards or pick documents from any app advertised as a storage location; iOS users, on the other hand, were forced to deal with unnecessary copies created by an outdated Open In system or stick with Apple’s dubious keyboard design in iOS 7.

Simultaneously, with Apple focusing on Maps improvements and a new design foundation for iOS, a few third-party developers took up on the task of creating apps and protocols capable of extending iOS as much as possible leveraging the tiny holes left by Apple in its sandbox.

We’ve seen a proliferation of apps that use URL schemes to facilitate the process of launching other apps and passing text to them; bookmarklets – pieces of JavaScript code executed in the browser – to let Safari communicate with third-party apps; developers creating their own SDKs and app ecosystems to solve document management; Fleksy – a popular Android keyboard – making an iOS SDK; a Python interpreter and a text editor with a workflow automation system, developed by a one-man shop in Germany.

The third-party iOS development community has been incredibly creative in spite of Apple’s longstanding limitations on iOS, but many of the devised solutions – especially URL schemes – were, ultimately, hacks and workarounds based on a protocol that wasn’t intended to let multiple apps communicate and exchange data.

With iOS 8, Apple wants to make iOS more flexible and powerful by letting developers extend custom functionality and content beyond their apps, making it available to users in other parts of the OS – and all while maintaining a secure design model, user privacy, good performance, and battery life.

As someone who’s invested in iOS as a productivity platform and uses the iPad as a primary computing device every day, I welcomed Apple’s move with excitement and optimism, but I also wanted to investigate the actual scope of the technology the company will ship later this year.

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More iOS 8 Features

iOS 8, announced by Apple at WWDC yesterday, will feature major improvements to Messages and inter-app communication, a new Health app and predictive keyboard, and changes to several system apps and features.

Among big additions and redesigns, however, there are always smaller features and hidden tweaks that the company only briefly mentioned during the keynote or described with a short paragraph on their preview website. In this post, I collected 15 other iOS 8 features that are worth noting and waiting for.

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