iOS 8:A preview of some of the lesser talked about

features

Built in Apps:

The home screen has a couple of new additions.

The Health Center received coverage at WWDC, and is worth exploring just to think about the potential once app developers start connecting to this platform. Soon I’ll be able to tell you exactly how much magnesium I had yesterday.

iBooks is the other new addition, presumably to battle Kindle. It’s a straightforward service, and automatically syncs all of your previously purchased books (with the apple ecosystem).

Battery Usage:

In settings, you can look up which apps are consuming the most battery.

Find My iPhone:

If you lose your phone, it used to be you had a window of time to use the find my iPhone feature before it died and just went “offline”

Now your iPhone will send you the last place your phone was when it died.

Nice if you lost your phone in a hidden place, but more likely if you lose your phone, it’ll be stolen or returned before the phone dies.

Messages:

iOS 8 allows for multiple apps to function from the lock screen.

When you receive a text, it allows you to reply without unlocking your phone.

Messages:

Simply swipe left to either mark a text as read or reply to the message straight from the lock screen.

Messages:

Here I am replying to a text from a friend asking me when I was coming back to Seattle.

Even though the screen is locked, Predictive Text knows that he asked something regarding time. It’s not quite at the point where it knew that none of these were reasonable responses to his question.

Messages:

When sending a picture within the Messages app, it auto generates your most recent pictures for easy selection.

As someone who sends a lot of screenshots, this is really helpful, although I still wish there was a Command+Control+Shift+4* for the iPhone

*Mac’s hotkey to copy screenshots to your clipboard)

Messages:

For group messaging, a number of features were added.

You can add people to group threads at any point

You can share your current location, or make your location visible for an hour, for 6 hours, or indefinitely

You can mute individual message threads- a godsend for people who have lots of friends in different time zonesAnd finally, if you’re done with a conversation, you can leave…

Messages:

And of course predictive text. This admittedly did get coverage at WWDC, but I thought it was worth noting that after almost 2 weeks of using iOS 8, it was still almost twice as fast to text without predictive text.

You can see an animated gif of predictive text here: http://bit.ly/1sr75u6

Messages:

You can also send voice texts. This was also previewed during WWDC as a way to share experiences like concerts. I found it much more useful on a daily basis for replying when my fingers were dirty, or I simply didn’t know how to explain something in writing.

Swipe up to send, left to delete. After sending, it also gives you the option to “Keep” the message or not.

Lock Screen:

Other apps that allow lock screen functionality include Mail, although there is no way to reply without unlocking your phone.

Lock Screen:

Similarly, missed calls can be dismissed with a swipe left. Swipe right functionality to return a call still works the same.

A few other fun, random additions:

You can request the desktop version of any website by pulling down on the browser

Email:

And you can now work on multiple emails at once, without having to save drafts. Active messages simply get minimized and can be selected the same way you navigate between mobile safari browser windows

That’s it for now!

We’ll keep adding to this deck as more updates are released- make sure to follow us on twitter to stay up to date.

@d1a