Posted on by Jay Lagare

iOS 8 Beta

As expected iOS 8 was announced at WWDC and I grabbed the beta as soon as I could. The newer iOS 8 doesn’t stray too far from last year’s iOS 7’s look-and-feel but there are many new features and enhancements. Notable changes are the following:
  1. Integration with Apple Devices – With Continuity you can go from any of your Apple devices and continue whatever your doing across devices. On supported applications of course. This includes Mail, Safari, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Maps, Messages, Reminders, Calendar, and Contacts. You can also answer calls and write messages. And finally there’s automatic WiFi hotspot.
  2. Integration with 3rd Party Apps – This means two things. First, Apple is seamlessly integrating features into iOS that used to be provided by 3rd party apps (either on iOS, Android, or elsewhere) :P And second allowing 3rd party apps access to the OS and hardware. For example, keyboard apps to replace the default keyboard and payment apps to access TouchID.
  3. HealthKit – the long-rumored foray of Apple into health and fitness. It’s basically an API for collecting health and fitness data as well as an app providing access to this data. Various health and fitness devices and 3rd party apps can register as data sources for the Health app which then consolidates all the health data including history, graphs, etc. Vitals is included. In addition, it provides About Me, health and medical details. There is even an emergency feature that will reveal About Me details that may be useful for emergency personnel that’s access from the lock screen.
  4. HomeKit – like HealthKit, this is basically an API for controlling and communicating with smart home devices. Since Apple doesn’t have Nest, it instead has a certification program. Which I think is actually good. Sticking to your core and not having to make everything yourself.
  5. Notification Center – you now take more action straight from the notification center including answering messages.
  6. Task Switcher – along (actually above) with running apps you now see the recent people you communicated with and call or write messages from there. I guess it’s for switching communication tasks.
  7. Camera and Photo Editor – Camera has new features such as timer, time-lapse. Photo editor has new features such as rotation and brightness and color adjustments
  8. Photos – new interface, new filing system (years, collections, moments)
  9. Siri – trying to get closer to Google Now. You can activate it by saying “Hey, Siri!”. It can now recognize songs (and buy them from the iTunes store).

Overall, I like where iOS 8 is heading and the beta itself is quite stable.