What to Expect from iOS 8?

New Applications in iOS 8 including Watch Utility, TextEdit and more!

iOS 8 will be unveiled next Monday alongside Mac OS X 10.10 and maybe some new hardware. In this post I will just talk about iOS 8 and what to expect from it. Part of me believes that we might not be getting any huge upgrade like we did from iOS 6 to iOS 7 and thats perfectly fine since we had a really significant upgrade just last year. However, just like hardware leaks, screenshots of iOS 8 have been surfacing the inter web for the past 3 to 4 months.

Majority of these screenshots show us the same grid like appearance with apps arranged in grid fashion. However few new applications can also be seen in these photos.



Let's start from iTunes Radio. iTunes Radio was introduced alongside iOS 7 last year. It's a streaming service just like Spotify however it is free of cost and up till now its been buried in the music app. Its not available globally and as of right now its only available in United States. It's a neat little service that works exceptionally well. I have been using it on my iPad and I love it. However it seems as if it really needs its own app and should be seperated from music app.

Second new app is Preview,something we are all quite familiar with. Preview is an app available on Mac for quite sometime and its essentially an app that can open PDF and pictures of different formats. Having this app on iOS should make it easier for us to open PDF and photos though I still can't think of any concrete reason behind this app since there are plenty of apps that can perform same function for example, Documents by Readdle.

Third app is Healthbook, nothing major here to be honest. We already know a ton about such applications. The main reason behind this app is to get on power with Samsung's S Health app on their Galaxy devices. This app is essentially going to monitor how many foot steps you take on a particular day, calories count, and stuff like that. Obviously external hardware is needed with health monitoring applications and I think iWatch will be the top contender for this.

Then we have TextEdit and Tips. Text Edit will be used for quick notes taking or allowing us to open text documents and have the functionality to edit it as well. Tips well be just a manual for those who don't know how to use iOS 8. Having its own proper app seems useless to be honest.

Side by Side Multitasking

Now just recently we got more info on iOS 8 multitasking. A report suggested that Apple might be bringing side by side multitasking in iOS 8. This is not something new or revolutionary and it is already implemented by Microsoft in their Surface Pro tablets. Its quite astonishing to think that a whole ad was made by Microsoft on this feature of  Surface tablet and it was even compared with iPad. Essentially, when you are having a video Skype call on your iPad and you close the app, the video chat kinda turns into voice chat since the other person cannot see your face. This is not how multitasking is done and this particular scenario was being demoed in that Microsoft Surface ad as well.

Side by side multitasking has many more advantages as well. You can open YouTube app on one side and browser on the other and watch the videos while browsing the internet or if you want to take help from internet while you are writing your report in Pages app on iPad, then you can open Safari next to Pages and can easily read the text on the website and jot it down in the Pages app.

We should be seeing some UI improvements and I really hope Apple worked more on improving those cartoonish  icons.


What do you want from iOS 8? Leave it down in the comment section.