Top 5 iOS 8 features

Apple gave an elaborate 2 hour keynote at the WWDC 2014 yesterday, covering OS X, iOS 8 and the revolutionary new tools for app developers. In case you missed the live stream, here is a hand picked list of our favorite new iOS 8 features.

• Continuity

With the Continuity feature, your iPhone, iPad and Mac situated close by can interact with each other to detect exactly what you’re doing and enable you to just pick and continue the same task on another device – HandsOff!

For instance, imagine you’re composing a mail on your iPhone. Your Macbook Air on the desk will be showing a glowing mail icon which can be just clicked to continue writing the mail, right from where you left on the iPhone.

Even better, you’ll be able to answer calls, reply to messages or even initiate them directly from your iPad or Mac via Continuity with iPhone.

• App Bundles on App Store

As an avid follower of StackSocial and Envato MarketPlaces, I get really excited about offers and discounts on digital content. And like hundreds of others, I have been craving for the bundled sales on iOS apps. As it turns out, this will indeed be possible this fall, thanks to iOS 8. Developers will be able to bundle their apps and sell them together at a discounted price. Can’t wait!

• Direct response to Notifications

Though it may not appear to be significant for Android users, iPhone and iPad users can rejoice as iOS 8 will finally bring the ability to interact with the notifications. If you get an SMS notification, you can just pull it down to compose a reply right there without leaving what you’re doing. Or if you get a push notification from Facebook, you’ll be able to like or comment on it, without even entering the app.

• Third party Keyboards

The only reason my iPad is still jailbroken is that I just can’t stand the iOS keyboard, especially the way it deals with correcting errors – tap and hold to bring up the magnifier, move the cursor, delete, come back – too many steps for me as I do a lot of typing. SwipeSelection from Cydia is a free tweak that can actually quadruple my typing speeds.

Well, it seems that the tweak will be obsolete soon as iOS 8 is opening doors to third party keyboards. And as we talk now, the best guys in the business like SwiftKey, Swype and Fleksy are already working on their iOS builds.

• Family Sharing

iOS 8 will allow users to add up to 6 people as family members and to share content between them. Not only photos, but reminders and todos are also synced across all the member accounts so that they can divide and complete tasks efficiently.

Besides, if they have a common credit card, these 6 users will be install all the apps, download all the music and all other iTunes content which other members have purchased. That ought to save some bucks! Family Sharing also brings a feature whereby parents are prompted for permission when their juniors want to purchase from iTunes or App Store. Hopefully that will put some curb to all those in-app purchase court battles.

So these were 5 of the iOS 8 features which I personally liked the most from yesterday’s event. There are still dozens of other features like Health, new Mail app gestures, Shazam for Siri, Spotlight and third-party widgets, which are worth mentioning.

Catch the complete keynote video and visit the official iOS 8 page.