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Posts tagged with "iOS 8"

iOS 8 Now on Over Half of Active iOS Devices→

Juli Clover, writing for MacRumors:

After five and a half weeks of availability, Apple’s iOS 8 operating system is now installed on 52 percent of iOS devices, according to new numbers posted on Apple’s App Store support page for developers.

The number is measured by Apple through App Store stats.

iOS 8 has been, in my personal experience, “difficult” to explain: some of its new features like widgets and extensions are best demonstrated with third-party apps that not everybody has, and additions like Handoff and keyboards aren’t immediately noticeable like a new design. It appears that more people are now upgrading to a new major version of iOS after a few updates, but there are also new iPhones and iPads with iOS 8.1 pre-installed that may have influenced Apple’s statistics.

Still, iOS 8 numbers are going up and that should be good news for app developers, but it doesn’t seem like iOS 7 can be completely left behind yet.

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The New musiXmatch Widget for iOS 8

I’ve talked about musiXmatch, an app to find lyrics for songs playing on your device, before here on MacStories. Earlier this year, I covered the app’s new version for iOS 7, noting how an officially-licensed database of lyrics with a polished interface makes it a superior choice for anyone who wants to read song lyrics on iOS:

Overall, musiXmatch is impressive and accurate. I’ve discovered lyrics for hundreds of songs and finally learned some of my favorite ones thanks to musiXmatch. The app can listen to songs playing on the same device, and its integration with iOS’ local music library means it can display lyrics for songs you already have without having to use the microphone at all. I mostly find myself trying to find lyrics for songs that are playing on my computer or iPad, and the app’s on-time, licensed lyrics provide a great experience for those interested in knowing the lyrics of songs they like.

musiXmatch rarely fails to find lyrics for me, and I like its design and integration with Apple’s Music app. And last week, they released an iOS 8 update with one of the most impressive widgets I’ve seen to date.

Here’s how it works: start playing a song in Apple’s Music app, open Notification Center, and musiXmatch will show you synced lyrics that follow the song you’re listening to. If you’re used to the traditional musiXmatch experience (in the iOS app or one of their desktop integrations, such as Spotify), you’ll recognize the service’s display of lyrics and timeliness – only as a widget on iOS.

From both technical and user experience perspectives, this is excellent work from the musiXmatch team. Over the weekend, I tested the widget with music I had in iTunes Match, albums I synced locally, and, today, Taylor Swift’s new album, and musiXmatch always found lyrics and displayed them at the right time in the widget, which needs less than a second to appear (tested on an iPad Air 2 and iPhone 6; obviously, musiXmatch needs an Internet connection to work). The widget also has buttons to open the Trending, Music ID, and Search sections in the musiXmatch app as well as playback controls, but synced lyrics with artwork preview in Notification Center were the highlight of this update.

Unfortunately, due to iOS limitations, musiXmatch can’t display lyrics in the widget for third-party music streaming services such as Spotify, Rdio, or Apple’s Beats Music, but it’ll work for apps that use Apple’s Music as the background player. The widget can’t access the device microphone to identify a song without launching the app, and, for now, musiXmatch can’t display lyrics in the widget for iTunes Radio streams either. These limitations narrow the potential user base (people who only use Spotify or Beats won’t see lyrics in Notification Center), but hopefully musiXmatch will be able to develop some kind of integration with third-parties.

The musiXmatch widget for iOS 8 is too good to pass up. If you use Apple’s Music app and would like a way to see synced lyrics with a single swipe, download musiXmatch for free from the App Store.

iOS 8.1 and iCloud Issues

Since upgrading to the first beta of iOS 8.1, I started noticing that a few apps were randomly hanging or crashing at launch. I thought that the problem would be fixed for the public release of iOS 8.1, but soon after updating to the stable version, it occurred again.

I then thought that a clean install of iOS 8.1 would be the solution, but both my iPhone 6 and iPad Air 2 on a clean install of iOS 8.1 (not restored from a backup) are still experiencing the iCloud hanging/crashing bug. For the past week, apps like MindNode, Twitterrific, Pixelmator, and (before the latest update) Drafts have been hanging or crashing at launch on my devices, forcing me to force-quit them, reboot (with a hard reset), or manually copy data because iCloud wasn’t syncing. Each app was tested with existing document libraries as well as an empty database.

Greg Pierce has been investigating the issue with his app, Drafts 4, and he writes:

iOS 8.1 shipped with a serious bug affecting apps that use iCloud. If you have seen apps randomly hang, especially on launch, it’s likely you are seeing the effects of this issue. Many apps use iCloud for a variety of data storage needs, so even apps that you were not aware were using iCloud may exhibit issues related to this bug.

As he notes, there’s little third-party developers can do to fix the issue:

There is little developers can do to avoid this problem, so if you are a user seeing this issue, please be patient waiting on a fix and do not blame your friendly neighborhood app developer for this problem. Especially, do not blame them in an App Store review.

Greg managed to ship a workaround with Drafts 4.0.3, but that’s not a solution to the underlying problem of iCloud and iOS 8.1. Based on my informal polling on Twitter, the bug doesn’t affect all iCloud accounts but it is common, and even when an iOS device is affected the issue is intermittent and only partially “fixed” by rebooting or logging out of iCloud (read: it’ll happen again after a few hours or days). In short, there doesn’t seem to be a solution for affected accounts for now.

Hopefully the issue will be fixed soon by Apple, as it is a serious problem that makes apps with iCloud features unreliable and essentially unusable. If you’re developer, read Greg’s post for more technical details.

What Photographers Need to Know About iOS 8.1 and Yosemite→

The new OS X and iOS jive better now than ever before. Both platforms are packed with new features and I’ve only touched on the aspects that are especially significant for photographers. I’m personally most excited about iCloud’s ability to give us access to our image archive at all times and AirDrop between Mac and iPhone.

Photographer Austin Mann (you may have heard of him before) has shared a good collection of tips and tricks for taking pictures and managing files on iOS 8.1 and OS X Yosemite. I’m trying iCloud Photo Library as my main photo management solution, and I’m positively (and surprisingly) impressed so far.

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Fantastical 2.2: Interactive Notifications, Share Extension, and Today Widget

Fantastical, developed by Flexibits, has long been one of my favorite calendar apps for iOS. Since the app’s first release over three years ago, I’ve come to expect my calendar to support natural language input; after the launch of version 2.0 for iPhone, Fantastical showed me why I wanted my todo list to be integrated with the calendar with excellent and seamless support for iCloud calendars and reminders in a unified experience. Reminders, however, turned out to be a problem for me as I switched to Todoist earlier this year: I’ve started using Sunrise – which is a great app – to see my events and todos in a single list, but I’m constantly missing Fantastical’s natural language support, advanced features, and polished design.

Fantastical 2.2, available today on the App Store, brings iOS 8 features that allow the app to be more easily integrated with iOS workflows thanks to a share extension and that extend the app beyond its silo with actionable notifications and a widget.

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Apple Releases iOS 8.1 – Here’s What’s New

Following an official announcement at a media event last week, Apple today released iOS 8.1, the first major update to iOS 8, which was originally launched in September.

As Apple’s Craig Federighi noted last week, Apple uses the launch of major new versions of iOS to collect “feedback” and quickly release bug fixes, address questions and concerns, and ship improvements that didn’t make the cut for the first release.

iOS 8.1 brings bug fixes, speed improvements, and interface changes, but it also enables Continuity features such as Text Message Forwarding and Instant Hotspot, allowing iOS devices to better integrate with each other and Macs running OS X Yosemite. With iOS 8.1, Apple is opening access to its iCloud Photo Library beta – an iCloud service that stores all your photos from all your devices, in a single library that relays changes to every device. And last, iOS 8.1 marks the debut of Apple Pay, the company’s new payment service that rolls out in the US today.

iOS 8.1 is available through Software Update now. You can find a list of the most notable changes below; you can read our previous iOS 8 coverage here.

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Drafts 4 Review

Drafts is one of my all-time favorite apps on iOS, not only for its amazing utility, but also because it was the app that got me started writing about technology, so it has a special place in my heart. However, surveying what the app has looked like since its last big update over a year ago, it’s been clear to me that an unchanged Drafts would stagnate in the post-iOS 8 world. In the face of new methods of inter-app communication such as extensions, documents pickers, and widgets, surviving on URL scheme-based utilities alone would likely not be enough to keep Drafts relevant.

This is Drafts though, an app that has been at the forefront of iOS automation since the field began. I should not have been worried. Released today on the App Store as a new, iOS 8-only, and Universal app, Drafts 4 is an evolution which boasts a huge number of improvements and represents a much needed shift in direction. With a UI refresh, a smarter and more accessible interface for building actions, a fantastic Share extension, a customizable extended keyboard, an enhanced URL scheme, and the intriguing introduction of JavaScript scripts for text manipulation, Drafts 4 is Agile Tortoise’s statement that they are ready for the challenges of a modern iOS.

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Holding iOS Back→

Bradley Chambers writes about the limitations of Safari for iOS:

When the iPhone was released in 2007 with a “desktop class” web browser, it was widely praised. You could view entire websites on a mobile device. Coming from the days of WAP optimized sites on my Motorola Q, this was incredible. If we fast forward to 2014, Mobile Safari has become the app that is holding the iPad back from becoming a fully featured laptop replacement for a lot of people. While Mobile Safari is fast and loads website reasonably well, it cannot upload and download files. It can upload pictures, but that is it. Mobile Safari needs a way to upload and download any type of file into iCloud Drive (a mirrored from the Mac downloads folder).

Safari is probably my favorite Apple app in iOS, but Bradley is right – it’s still lacking when compared to desktop browsers for simple tasks such as downloading and uploading files.

I was surprised to see features such as extensions in Mail and uploads in Safari being absent from iOS 8 when it launched – and it looks like iOS 8.1 won’t introduce them either. iOS users need these features, but I wonder if part of the reason Apple hasn’t added them yet may be security-related. In particular, I had a couple of readers suggest that lack of extension support in Mail could be an enterprise security requirement, and while that could make sense, it doesn’t sound like something that Apple can’t work around. Or maybe the problem is simpler: Apple didn’t have time to turn email messages and “Upload” buttons from webpages into attach points for document pickers and extensions, so the feature was nixed.

There’s also an argument to be made about storage. How quickly would those 5 GB of free iCloud storage fill up with a full download manager built into Safari for iOS and iCloud Drive? Macs come with plenty of local storage; iOS devices still start at 16 GB and 20 GB is a paid tier in iCloud Drive.

Hopefully Apple will keep extending iOS 8, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see these features delayed until next year.

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