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iOS 8 is all about iCloud, OS X connectivity, and health

Michal Marek
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After OS X Yosemite, Apple also presented iOS 8 at WWDC, which, as expected, is based on the year-old iOS 7 and is a logical evolution after last year's radical change. Apple has prepared many interesting novelties that take its entire mobile operating system a step higher. Improvements mainly concern iCloud integration, connection with OS X, communication via iMessage, and the expected health application Health will also be added.

The first improvement introduced by Craig Federighi is active notifications. You can now respond to various notifications without having to open the relevant application, so for example you can respond to a text message quickly and easily without having to leave your work, game or e-mail. The good news is that the new feature works both for banners coming out of the top of the display and for notifications on the screen of a locked iPhone.

The multitasking screen, which you call up by double-pressing the Home button, has also been slightly modified. Icons for quick access to the most frequent contacts have been newly added to the top of this screen. Safari for iPad has also received minor changes, which now has a special panel with bookmarks and a new window clearly displaying open panels, following the example of OS X Yosemite presented today.

It is also necessary to remind the big news collectively named Continuity, which makes iPhone or iPad work much better with Mac. You will now be able to receive phone calls and respond to text messages on your computer. A big novelty is also the possibility to quickly finish divided work from a Mac on an iPhone or iPad and vice versa. This function is named Handoff and it works, for example, when writing e-mails or documents in the applications of the iWork package. Personal Hotspot is also a neat feature, which will allow you to connect your Mac to the WiFi network shared by the iPhone without having to pick up the iPhone and activate the WiFi hotspot on it.

Changes and improvements were not spared, even the Mail application, which, among other things, offers new gestures. In iOS 8, it will be possible to delete an email with a swipe of a finger, and by dragging your finger across an email, you can also mark the message with a tag. Working with e-mails is also a little more pleasant thanks to the fact that in the new iOS you can essentially minimize the written message, go through the e-mail box and then simply return to the draft. In iOS 8, as in OS X Yosemite, Spotlight has been improved. The system search box can now do much more and, for example, you can quickly search the web thanks to it.

For the first time since the early days of the iOS mobile operating system, the keyboard has been improved. The new feature is called QuickType and its domain is the suggestion of additional words by the user. The function is intelligent and even suggests other words depending on who and in which application you are writing or what you are specifically replying to. Apple also thinks about privacy, and Craig Federighi has guaranteed that the data the iPhone gets to improve its designs will only be stored locally. The bad news, however, is that the QuickType function will not be able to be used when writing in the Czech language for the time being.

Of course, the new writing options will be great for writing messages, and Apple focused on improving communication options during the development of iOS 8. iMessages have indeed come a long way. Improvements include group conversations, for example. It's now easy and quick to add new members to a conversation, it's just as easy to leave a conversation, and it's also possible to turn off notifications for that discussion. Sending your own location and sharing it for a certain time (for an hour, a day or indefinitely) is also new.

However, probably the most significant innovation is the ability to send audio messages (similar to WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger) and video messages in the same way. A very nice feature is the ability to play an audio message just by holding the phone to your ear, and if you hold the iPhone to your head a second time, you'll also be able to record your reply in the same way.

Even with the new iOS, Apple has worked on the iCloud service and greatly facilitated access to files stored in this cloud storage. You can also see better iCloud integration in the Pictures app. You'll now see the photos you've taken on all your Apple devices connected to iCloud. To simplify orientation, a search box has been added to the photo gallery and a number of handy editing functions have also been added. You can now easily edit photos, adjust colors, and more right in the Photos app, with changes instantly sent to iCloud and reflected on all your devices.

Of course, pictures are quite space-intensive, so the basic 5 GB of iCloud space will soon be out of reach. However, Apple has reconsidered its pricing policy and allows you to expand iCloud capacity to 20 GB for less than a dollar a month or to 200 GB for less than $5. In this way, it will be possible to expand the space in your iCloud up to 1 TB.

Due to the mentioned feature set, collectively labeled Continuity it would be nice to have quick access to photos from a Mac as well. However, the Pictures application will not arrive on OS X until the beginning of 2015. Nevertheless, Craig Federighi demonstrated the application during the keynote and there is a lot to look forward to. Over time, you'll be able to view your photos on Mac the same way you do on iOS devices, and you'll get the same quick edits that will be sent to iCloud just as quickly and reflected on all your other devices.

iOS 8 is also focused on family and family sharing. In addition to easy access to family content, Apple will also allow parents to monitor the location of their children, or monitor the location of their iOS device. However, the most surprising and very nice family news is access to all purchases made within the family. This applies to up to 6 people sharing the same payment card. In Cupertino, they also thought about the irresponsibility of children. A child can buy anything they want on their device, but the parent must first authorize the purchase on their device.

The voice assistant Siri has also been improved, which will now allow you to purchase content from iTunes, thanks to the integration of the Shazam service, it has learned to recognize music captured in the surroundings, and more than twenty new languages ​​for dictation have also been added. So far, it also looks like Czech is among the added languages. Also new is the "Hey, Siri" function, thanks to which you can activate your voice assistant while driving without having to use the Home button.

Furthermore, Apple is also trying to attack the corporate sphere. Company devices from Apple will now be able to configure a mailbox or calendar in a flash and, above all, automatically, and applications that the company uses can also be automatically installed. At the same time, Cupertino has worked on security and it will now be possible to password protect all applications.

Perhaps the last interesting novelty is the health application Health supplemented by the HealthKit developer tool. As expected for a long time, Apple saw great potential in monitoring human health and is integrating the Health application into iOS 8. Developers of various health and fitness applications will be able to send measured values ​​to this system application through the HealthKit tool. Health will then show you these in summary and will continue to manage and sort them.

Ordinary users will be able to install the iOS 8 operating system for free already this fall. In addition, beta testing for registered developers should be launched within a few hours. You will need at least an iPhone 8S or iPad 4 to run iOS 2.

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