“Now you can start writing an email on your iPhone and pick up where you left off when you sit down at your Mac,” says Apple of Handoff. Hell, there’s even the Mayo Clinic Patient app for those who want the most accurate medical information possible. For those who want a great health app, there’s Runtastic, Endomondo, Noom and thousands more. Perhaps Apple’s new Health app and the Healthkit framework for developers can fix that? Right now, all that Apple’s doing is squashing together a few different apps and bringing them into one place. Samsung was first when it came to an overzealous health focus on mobile devices, but it never really followed through with its plans or delivered anything truly useful for the consumer.
On top of all of this, there’s the mighty Dropbox which works on all platforms and smartphones and accepts files of any size, and syncs photo and video automatically. These have all been available long before iCloud’s new improvements. Office Online is excellent for documents and PicMonkey, Pixlr and Ribbit work well for images. On all your devices,” says Apple of iOS 8, but it’s déjà vu once again. “Edits you make on one device appear on all of them. Pity everything its added has already been done. Apple wants you to truly feel the cloud with iOS 8. I love the concept of the cloud, despite it being a stupid buzzword with no real meaning (we’ve been accessing our data remotely since the beginning of the internet). Apple will make it as slick and attractive as possible, but it’s old news and keyboard options should have been added years ago. Android’s had third-party keyboard support and word suggestions since 2009, and swipe since early 2013. New to iOS 8: word suggestions hovering above the keyboard, Swipe typing and third-party keyboard support. Third-party keyboard support, Swipe and more SMS Popup may not look as attractive as iOS 8’s attempt, but it certainly is a working solution. On Android, there’s an app for that and it’s almost a year old. IOS 8 will let us reply to notifications straight from the banner. And it’s clear that Apple wants its users to migrate from WhatsApp to Messages, and many will, but iOS 8’s cut-and-paste job is a little too blatant to forgive. It’s shameful that Apple had to borrow so much from WhatsApp just to remain on top of its “innovation” game. Very flattering to see Apple “borrow” numerous WhatsApp features into iMessage in iOS 8 #innovation It’s so bad that WhatsApp’s co-founder even tweeted this:
WhatsApp offers all of this, and has done so with each update to its app. Apple announced push-to-record voice and video, group messaging, location sharing, multiple image and video sharing, and attachment viewing from within the Messages app. Everything about Messages for iOS 8 has been ripped from WhatsApp. It’s one of the best features about Android, and Apple pilfered it. My photos are then available on practically anything, from my crappy old laptop to my TV.
With it, I can edit a photo on my phone or on my Macbook Pro and any changes are instantly uploaded to the cloud. Apple will make this as pretty as possible for iOS 8, but Google’s been in the photo backup game for well over a year now.
Make an edit on iPad, and it appears on the connected iPhone, plus images are uploaded in their native RAW, the full file size. New to Photos is deeper iCloud integration.