iOS 8 Review - The Good Things

Photo from Macrumors.com

So, iOS 8 isn't all a complete train wreck. In fact, it's mostly good improvements! Here are a few of my favorite new features that have been added.



Messages

The new "Details" tab.

Okay, so I know in my last post I was ranting about picture messaging in the new update, but here is where they went right with the Messages app. They added a cool new voice message feature where you can send quick audio clips to your friends that self destruct after a certain amount of time.  Speaking of self destruction, they also made it so that your pictures and videos that get sent will also disappear after a little time, that way Messages isn't taking up your phone's entire storage capacity.  They also added a new "Details" tab, where you can see contact info, make calls, and also see every saved picture, video, or audio file that has been sent between yourself and a contact. 

You can also send your current location to a contact from the details menu, which would be great if you're trying to meet up with a friend and you want to know exactly where they are. It's actually a little scary how accurate the location data is, but mostly just useful.

Photos

The new Photos app.

In the new and improved Photos app, you can now edit your photos with much more precision than you could in iOS 7. You have more individual controls to adjust the exposure, brightness, contrast, colors. You can add filters, and all that other fun stuff as well. You can also favorite your pictures to add them to an album of just your favorite shots. 

They've also made it easier to crop pictures, which is nice for if you want to crop a picture before uploading it to Instagram.  They've also added a Time-Lapse setting to the camera app, which can be really fun. The time-lapse functionality is included on the iPhone 5 as well, and I think it is also on the 4S, but I don't recall (I don't have my 4S anymore). 

Speaking of the camera app, they also added exposure control in addition to the tap to focus, so you can have better control while taking the picture, so you won't have to do as much editing later.

Health

The new Health app.

One of the big additions here is the new Health app, where you can store your medical information and could be extremely useful in emergency situations. You can include your height, weight, blood type, organ donor status, and any allergies you might have or what medications you're currently on. 

This app is hard to really review now, since a lot of the features rely on other apps and hardware being linked up to it, which won't happen until this fall when it's fully released.

There is another feature that would be useful, and that is that you can set it to be accessible even when your phone is locked, which could potentially save your life. This would be useful if you're in a car accident and the medics need to access your basic health information for blood transfusions or any other things they need to do, the info will be right there so they don't have to wonder. Just make sure you enter the right blood type!

Notification Center

The new Notification Center.

This is a huge improvement in my opinion. They finally narrowed it down to just "Notifications" and "Today", so no more "Missed" tab, which always confused me and was never used. You can also swipe to remove individual notifications, which is handy if you want to remove some of the notifications from an app, but leave others. 

Another huge improvement that I haven't really been able to test yet is that you can add widgets to the "Today" tab, I'm really excited to play with this feature in a couple months when the public release is out. 

Something weird I noticed (probably just a bug) is that the today tab doesn't always show the current weather conditions like it used to in iOS 7, and I'm not sure if that's just a bug or what's going on with that. I've always thought it was quite handy to just swipe down and see the current weather conditions.

All in all, the notification center received a lot of love in this update, and it shows! I really like this update, it's a lot cleaner and makes more sense than it used to.

Other Things

Some other things I liked are the new keyboard with predictive text (which is usually quite accurate). They've made it so it analyzes how you talk to who you're currently texting, and adjusts it's suggestions appropriately. This is something that has been executed fairly well, and gets better the more you use it.  I'm also really curious to try Continuity with Yosemite, however my computer has the old style Bluetooth, so I haven't been able to test that out yet.

Overall I feel like iOS 8 is a solid update, and I'm excited to try it out again once it's a bit more polished, and I'll update the blog here when there is more polish on it, and of course I'll post a proper review when the public release is out.  What do you think? Have you noticed anything that I missed? If you have any questions about the update let me know and I will gladly answer any questions you have.