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Posts tagged with "iOS 8"

iOS 8 Manual Camera Controls→

Writing at AnandTech, Joshua Ho details the manual camera controls that iOS 8 will add for third-party developers:

For the longest time, iOS had almost no camera controls at all. There would be a toggle for HDR, a toggle to switch to the front-facing camera, and a toggle to switch to video recording mode. The only other tool that was accessible would be the AE/AF lock. This meant that you had to hope that the exposure and focus would be correct, because there was no direct method of adjusting these things. Anyone that paid attention to the WWDC 2014 keynote would’ve heard maybe a few sentences about manual camera controls. Despite the short mention in the keynote, this is a massive departure from the previously all-auto experience.

From Apple’s description:

The AVFoundation framework makes it easier than ever for users to take great photos. Your app can take direct control over the camera focus, white balance, and exposure settings. Your app can also use bracketed exposure captures to automatically capture images with different exposure settings.

This means that, for developers, it’ll be easier than ever to build alternative, (possibly) pro-oriented camera apps without writing those controls manually as they will be exposed in the official APIs. It’s a big change.

Combined with the ability to delete photos from the Camera Roll and save edits back to the original files, Apple is making third-party camera apps first-class citizens of iPhone photography, which should result in better photos, more available storage, and a more fluid experience.

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FiftyThree Announces “Surface Pressure” Coming to Paper and Pencil with iOS 8

FiftyThree, makers of the popular iPad sketching app Paper and Pencil hardware accessory, have today announced Surface Pressure, a feature that will allow Paper to determine the thickness of lines drawn with the Pencil on iOS 8.

In the current version of Paper, Pencil users can’t control how lines are drawn on the screen by changing the angle of the stylus’ tapered tip or applying a different pressure as they would with regular pen and paper or a tablet that supports pressure sensitivity, such as Microsoft’s Surface. Pencil, which was launched last November in an effort to provide Paper users with an official hardware product specifically designed for the app, connects to an iPad via Bluetooth, but more advanced features for tip recognition on a multitouch surface require deeper integration with the OS.

According to MacRumors, iOS 8 will add a new “variable touch sizing” technology that will let developers recognize the size of touch points on a device’s screen and modify the behavior of their apps. As shown in a promo video published today, FiftyThree is taking advantage of the new APIs in iOS 8 to bring a more natural experience to Pencil users: thin lines and fine details will be possible by touching the screen with the Pencil tip, while the larger surface of the Pencil’s angled edge will allow to draw shades and broad strokes smoothly and without changing settings on the screen.

From the blog post:

Surface Pressure unlocks new capabilities for each of Paper’s tools—fill faster as you draw, shade as you sketch, or carve away in varying widths as you erase.

Stay in the flow and change drawing styles simply by changing the way you hold Pencil—no stopping to fuss with the settings menu. This new feature is unique to Pencil and will be unlocked for all existing Pencil users with an update to Paper this Fall.

According to FiftyThree, Surface Pressure will be released this Fall with iOS 8, and the company is working to bring Pencil to more international markets. You can watch the promo video below.

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Beyond the Silo: How Apple Plans To Reinvent Document Management with iOS 8

With iOS 8, announced last week at WWDC, Apple is going to bring deep changes to one of the most controversial aspects of its mobile platform: document storage and management. While iCloud will play a big role with a unified iCloud Drive for iOS and OS X, third-party developers will also get a chance to add better file management functionalities to their apps.

The new features and APIs have been detailed by Apple during its opening keynote and in developer sessions throughout the week, and they follow a common thread: apps can now extend beyond their sandbox, accessing documents stored in other apps without creating unnecessary copies. To better understand the importance of these technological changes in iOS 8 and the inherent complexity that they’ll add for developers and users, I want to take a step back and contextualize how iOS currently handles file storage and management.

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Learning from iOS 8’s iMessage Changes→

Scott Hurff put together a good overview of the changes in the Messages app for iOS 8, nicely illustrated with animated GIFs. He concludes that Messages for iOS 8 shows Apple has considered the ways their customers use the app and iterated accordingly:

Apple’s iMessage announcements can teach us a lot about the value of knowing our customers. It’s not enough to build products based on rumor, anecdote or speculation. We have to know exactly how and why our customers do what they do, and in what context they’ll be using our products.

Messages was especially lacking in terms of attachments and group conversations, and I’m glad to see that fixed.

I was initially surprised to see voice messages getting such a prominent spot in the app but, considering how popular audio snippets are among WhatsApp users, I think the addition makes a lot of sense.

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iOS 8 APIs→

Mattt Thompson:

The announcements from iOS 8 & OS X Yosemite alone would have made 2014 a bellwether year for the Apple platform, with Extensions, Continuity, SpriteKit enhancements, SceneKit for iOS, Metal, Game HealthKit, HomeKit, Local Authentication, and a brand new Photos framework. Not to mention the dramatic improvements to Xcode & Interface Builder, a revamped iTunes Connect, TestFlight, Crash Reports, and CloudKit. And oh yeah—Swift.

The kicker? Apple has graciously relaxed its NDA for new technologies, meaning that we don’t have to wait to talk about all of the shiny new toys we have to play with.

This week, we’ll take a look beneath the headline features, and share some of the more obscure APIs that everyone should know about.

If you’re a developer, this is an excellent look at some of the “obscure” APIs that Apple is including with iOS 8 but that they didn’t mention publicly last week. I’m particularly interested in the possibility to share tasks between apps and the fact that GPS metadata can be easily excluded from images (I use an app for that). The improvements to M7-powered data are also impressive.

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iOS 8 Improvements for Education→

Fraser Speirs, writing at Macworld, has an overview of why iOS 8 will bring important improvements for education:

Overall, I’m delighted that iOS has come out of a slightly awkward stage in its development. iOS 6 and iOS 7 really didn’t move the platform forward in substantial ways that had obvious impact on users. iOS 8 promises to take the experience of the serious iOS user to a whole new level. I can’t wait to see what developers do with it.

For context, Speirs implemented the first whole-school, one-to-one iPad program – also featured by Apple.

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Explaining iOS 8’s Extensions→

If you’re looking for a more technical overview of extensions in iOS 8, Andrew Cunningham has a great one at Ars Technica:

A simple way to summarize all of this: Apple doesn’t want one app to be able to get into another app’s sandbox. Extensions are like little sandboxes-within-sandboxes that facilitate communication between different apps while never sharing all of their containing app’s data directly with the host app.

It’s good to know that Apple is making iOS more flexible and powerful while keeping an underlying model designed for security, performance, and user control.

One of the questions I’ve received over the past few days is whether enabling a lot of extensions in iOS 8 could cause issues similar to the ones found in, for instance, Safari for OS X with multiple browser extensions installed. Based on what Apple has shown, the answer shoule be “no”: the technology is different, extensions will run in separate sandboxes, many of them will be user-triggered, and iOS will check memory usage and stop them if necessary (as Andrew notes, older devices will likely suffer for this).

It’ll be interesting to see how developers will take advantage of extensions this Fall.

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iOS 8 Extensions: Apple’s Plan for a Powerful App Ecosystem

Amidst the variety of announcements from WWDC 2014, Extensibility – a new set of technologies for developers to extend their apps – has been mainly regarded as Apple’s solution to the lack of inter-app communication on iOS.

Traditionally, iOS has been a closed platform in terms of software personalization and extensibility: due to a combination of design choices and strict enforcement of sandboxing rules, iOS users never enjoyed many of the benefits found on Google’s mobile operating system. Android users could, for instance, install system-wide replacement keyboards or pick documents from any app advertised as a storage location; iOS users, on the other hand, were forced to deal with unnecessary copies created by an outdated Open In system or stick with Apple’s dubious keyboard design in iOS 7.

Simultaneously, with Apple focusing on Maps improvements and a new design foundation for iOS, a few third-party developers took up on the task of creating apps and protocols capable of extending iOS as much as possible leveraging the tiny holes left by Apple in its sandbox.

We’ve seen a proliferation of apps that use URL schemes to facilitate the process of launching other apps and passing text to them; bookmarklets – pieces of JavaScript code executed in the browser – to let Safari communicate with third-party apps; developers creating their own SDKs and app ecosystems to solve document management; Fleksy – a popular Android keyboard – making an iOS SDK; a Python interpreter and a text editor with a workflow automation system, developed by a one-man shop in Germany.

The third-party iOS development community has been incredibly creative in spite of Apple’s longstanding limitations on iOS, but many of the devised solutions – especially URL schemes – were, ultimately, hacks and workarounds based on a protocol that wasn’t intended to let multiple apps communicate and exchange data.

With iOS 8, Apple wants to make iOS more flexible and powerful by letting developers extend custom functionality and content beyond their apps, making it available to users in other parts of the OS – and all while maintaining a secure design model, user privacy, good performance, and battery life.

As someone who’s invested in iOS as a productivity platform and uses the iPad as a primary computing device every day, I welcomed Apple’s move with excitement and optimism, but I also wanted to investigate the actual scope of the technology the company will ship later this year.

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