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The launch of a new iPhone is always big news, especially when
Note that in order to install the iOS 8 upgrade you'll need an iPhone 4s or later, an iPad 2 or later or an iPod Touch 5th generation. And if you're keen to use the desktop integration features Apple has demo'd, like answering iPhone calls on your Mac, you'll need OS X Yosemite, which isn't being released until October.
The iOS 8 upgrade brings time-saving features and a better way to manage multiple devices in your... [+]
Photos
The Photos app in iOS 8 has gotten a significant overhaul, with big changes to how you manage and edit your images. The most obvious difference is the addition of a search tool, available in the Albums and Photos views. Tap on the search icon and before you even start typing you're presented with auto-populated categories for photos shot near your current location (location services must be enabled), images shot exactly one year ago, pictures shot at your home address, photos tagged as favorites, and a list of recently found images.
The search screen in the new Photos app offers default search queries and uses autofill to narrow... [+]
For manual queries you can search by geographic location, capture date, or album name. As you type, Apple's autofill algorithms populate the screen with relevant image collections. Tap on a thumbnail and you get a Moments-style scrollable view of a collection's contents.
The Albums view adds new default collections for recently added or deleted images (more about the latter in a moment). There's also one for screenshots, though on my iPhone 5 I've yet to see any current or past screenshots show up in it. In iOS 8, when you delete a photo or video it is removed from the Photo Stream collection on your other devices immediately but is actually stored on the local device for an additional 30 days in a Recently Deleted album. This is great for preventing accidental deletion of course, but does mean that if you actually do want to get rid of a file you'll have to take the extra step of deleting it permanently.
Apple has made big changes to the image editing capabilities of the Photos app. Photographers who prefer to manually adjust their images rather than simply apply presets get more than a dozen different editing sliders grouped into three categories: Light, Color, and B&W. These offer a welcome level of control that may reduce the need to turn to third-party apps like Snapseed from Apple arch-rival Google. After I've had time to run a few dozen images through it, I'll write a detailed review of the Photos app's editing capabilities.
The Photos app gets a completely new editing interface with tools that allow slider adjustments for... [+]
Family Sharing
If you've got kids and multiple iOS devices in the house, you're familiar with the struggle to monitor their entertainment options while maintaining a Minecraft-free zone on your own device. With Family Sharing, Apple has made life much easier for multi-device households. For starters they've lifted to age restriction on Apple ID accounts. Now children under 13 can have their own account, linked for billing purposes to that of an adult. After enabling Family Sharing you can add a child simply by creating an Apple ID and password for them and agreeing to have their purchases billed to your account. An Ask To Buy option ensures that whenever your child goes to make a purchase from the App Store, iTunes or iBooks you get a message asking for approval.
With Family Sharing, up to six people can use a single billing method and share their app, music,... [+]
You can add up to five people to your family group and the beauty is that while they all have separate Apple accounts, new and existing purchases can be shared among everyone's devices. If you'd prefer that your kids not have access to your Breaking Bad episodes you can hide items on an individual basis, though this does require a trip to iTunes on your desktop computer. Families can automatically share their locations with each other. Once sharing is enabled you can track everyone's whereabouts using Apple's Find My Friends app. Anyone in the group can elect to stop sharing location info at any time. Both calendars and photo albums can be shared among family members as well.
Keyboard enhancements
With iOS 8, Apple users finally get two features that Android users have enjoyed for years: predictive typing and third-party keyboard apps. In Apple's new keyboard layout you get a three-item tab above the keyboard that displays suggestions for the word you're currently typing. Again, this isn't new technology. I've long appreciated this feature on my Nexus tablet. But that doesn't dismiss the fact that it's a really big time-saver. In a full day of playing with iOS 8, it's been rare that I've had to completely type out anything other than first and last names. When I temporarily switched back to an iOS 7 device I felt like a caveman banging rocks to make fire.
Apple brings predictive typing to iOS and the ability to install third-party keyboards like Swype... [+]
Even bigger news is that Apple is now allowing third-party keyboard apps on their devices. Quite a few were available the same day iOS 8 went live. Swipe-style apps allow you to drag your finger across the keyboard letters to spell out a word. The app's algorithms figure out on-the-fly what you're typing. Swype, a popular and highly rated Android app does this incredibly well. After installing this $1 app, you enable it as a keyboard option in the Settings menu. Even for first-time users, swiping on the smaller screen of a phone will be much faster than typing. The app also has a robust predictive engine, offers a custom dictionary and adapts to your input for even more accurate results over time. Apple's inclusion of predictive typing in its OS doesn't make apps like Swype quite the must-have they would have been in earlier iOS versions, but if you spend a lot of time crafting long responses to emails or texts, you owe it to yourself to give third-party keyboards a try.
Interactive notifications
With iOS 8, you can now respond to texts, calendar events, tasks, and manage incoming emails all from the app you're currently in, saving you the tedious round trip that earlier versions required. This is because the notification banner now offers either a text box and/or action buttons right below the alert. You can also respond directly in the Notifications panel by swiping to the right. Perhaps the best news here is that Apple has opened up this functionality to third-party apps, so as developers roll out their own iOS 8 updates, this feature will become incredibly useful.
When you receive a text you can tug on the notifications tab to reply without leaving your current... [+]
Contacts shortcut
Pressing the Home button twice still brings up the multitasking screen where you can move between open apps. In iOS 8, however, a scrollable list of contacts you've recently communicated with now appears across the top of the screen. A swipe to the right brings contacts you've set to favorite status into this list as well. Tap on any contact's icon to initiate a call, text, or FaceTime session.
Find My iPhone assist
The iCloud-powered Find my iPhone/iPad service is a great way to locate a missing iOS device...unless it has shut down, say due to a drained battery, or is otherwise offline. It's important to understand that iOS devices don't actively transmit their location to iCloud, a win for user privacy. It's only when you request a device's location, via the Find my iPhone app or iCloud webpage, that Apple's servers ping the device and show you its location. So when a device is powered off, iCloud can only show you where it was the last time you searched for it. And iCloud only holds that information for 24 hours after the device has gone offline.
Enabling Send Last Location instructs your iPhone or iPad to transmit its location just before the... [+]
In iOS 8 you can proactively improve the odds of finding your battery-dead device. In Settings>iCloud you can turn on Send Last Location to authorize your iPhone or iPad to automatically send its whereabouts directly to Apple in the event the battery is about to die. This provides a much more current location for your missing device, raising your odds of finding it. Unfortunately, Apple only makes the location info available to you for 24 hours after the battery dies, so don't delay if you think your device is missing. According to its privacy policy, Apple actually deletes the data within 7 days. Enabling this feature is a no-brainer. There's no obvious reason not to turn it on. But keep in mind this offers little help in the event of theft, as experienced thieves will have wiped the device (removing your ability to locate it) before letting a battery go dead.
Of course, there's lots more to explore iOS 8. My colleague Mark Rogowsky offers his likes and dislikes of the new additions. But these features alone justify making the upgrade. While millions of users await their iPhone 6s, this latest version of Apple software goes a long way to making your "old" phone feel like new.
