25 September 2014

iOS8 – 10 Handy Tips

ios8 So, you are now on iOS 8 and not sure what all new additions it has got. Well, I’ve tried to summarize all those features which I’ve explored/experienced so far and feel good about them.

Desktop: When you complete your upgrade, you will notice two additional app icons on your desktop.
- Health: All those apps that you are using to track your health, you will be able to consolidate all of that data in this app. This app is designed to work with all health and fitness tracking apps and developers should be releasing their app updates soon to work with it. However, the most important feature of this app is to help you in your emergency. You need to create an emergency card with all important health information like – your blood group, emergency contact, allergies, medical condition, current medications you are taking and your doctor contacts. This emergency information is available from the lock screen.
- Tips: This is Apple way to get connected with consumers and coach them on how best they can use their apple device. As name suggest, you can read about some cool tips about your device here and apple is continuously updating this section.

iMessage

iMessage: Probably, this is where apple has some big cool additions like:
- Quick type: as you type, you get predictive text and you can just click them to complete your message. (see yellow tag in picture above)
- You can send voice messages (see yellow tag in picture above)
- Create Groups, add people and name your groups
- Dictate a message real and it will type for you.(see yellow tag in picture above)
- Share your location instantly, it even connects to the map app and give directions to the person to reach up to you
- Send Photo’s and Videos instantly

ios Photos

Photos: Another some cool additions to the Photos and Video’s collection, here’s how:
- There are tons of Photo Filters and editing tools
- If you have enabled location services with your Camera, all your photos are tagged with the location, you can name them and eventually it all helps in sorting either by location, date taken, name, folder etc.
- You can create a Favorite Folder by clicking on little heart shaped tag on each photo and it will auto moved into a new favorite folder.
- Now there is a recycle bin of all deleted photos and videos and by default it will store for an additional 30 days from the time it is first deleted. You can manually remove them from here permanently or can also restore back to your main photos and videos folder.
- Time Lapse videos, a great new feature which will show an accelerated sequence of photos overtime.
Safari: New Safari seamlessly enable you to see the desktop version of websites. Not all websites are responsive and their mobile versions are clunky. New Safari browser is a boon for all these companies. New safari also lets you add a site to your favourite much easily.
Settings: It is important to pay close attention to the settings, as lot has been changed there in new iOS. Some of important ones are:
- Send Last location to Apple before battery dies – This new feature when turned-on automatically sends the last location information of the iPhone/iPad before battery drains out. This is particularly helpful when your device is lost/stolen. Earlier icloud use to store this information for about 24 hours but now it can hold the information for a longer period of time. To activate this: Settings – icloud – find My iPhone – ON – Turn on both Find my iPhone and Send Last Location.
- Double click the home button and you will see list of your favourite or recent call, facetime, message connections and with this you can reach them faster without going into phone or message app.
- Siri integration with Shazam: If you hear a song outside and don’t know which one is it, you can give a command to Siri – Which Song is playing?, Siri will listen to the song and will use Shazam to identify the music
- Find which app is using most battery life: A new feature that allows you to to view battery usage by App. This helps you to shut down the apps which are causing more strain on your device battery life.
- Assistive Touch button now moves up and down on its own, so you don’t need to manually adjust it if it is coming in between your type area.
- You can turn your phone completely into 60’s look by turning on greyscale.
Mails: See Picture above, you can do more within your emails now. If you swipe your email towards left, you will see additional features like Flag, Delete, More (Reply All, Forward, Flag, Mark as Read, Move to Junk, Notify Me). If you swipe your email message to right, you will see “Mark as Read button”. Apple allows you to do more with your emails by just swiping left or right. With Notify Me, you can add alert to an email message and whenever a new email comes in that email thread, you will get a notification and also a new folder is created alongside VIP as Notifications.
Hand-off: This is a great feature for those who have other apple gadgets like iPad and Mac. It lets you sync your browsing, notes, reading etc completely within these devices. You can leave drafting an email on your phone and continue it within ipad and eventually can send via Mac. All your devices need to be connected to same icloud account for Handoff to work seamlessly. It’s a great tool for developers as well to create apps using this feature.
Family Sharing: Now up to 6 members of the family can share purchases from iTunes, iBooks and the app store without sharing accounts. All it needs is to use same credit card for all the purchases and you need to set-up your family sharing accounts once. It also gives an advance feature for parents to let their kids ask their permission before purchasing anything from within apple ecosystem if family sharing is turned on.
TouchID is now compatible not only with buying Apps or playing around within Apple ecosystem, it has been open to external parties as well, which means buying from an online store using your phone and browser, you can use TouchID as well (with compatible eCommerce companies) to complete your purchase.
Interactive Notifications: Now you don’t need to unlock the phone or leave a particular app to reply to message notifications. You will get a notification with a reply button and can easily send a short reply, accept/decline a meeting request and continue working on the app. Apple has also opened this feature to developers so that chat apps like Hike, Whats app, Viber all can use this feature in times to come.