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iOS 8 Review
An anonymous reader writes: Apple is releasing iOS 8 today, and Ars Technica has posted one of their huge, thorough reviews of the updated operating system. They have this to say about the UI: "iOS 8 tries to fit a whole lot more stuff onto a single screen than iOS 7 did. The operating system was clearly developed in anticipation of iPhones with larger screens." The biggest new feature is Extensions: "Older versions of iOS limited what third-party applications could do to communicate with external services and other third-party applications. ... Extensions remove some (but not all) of those barriers." The biggest examples of extensions are custom keyboards, a feature iOS users have been requesting for years. Downsides to iOS 8 include increased storage and processing requirements, which are bad news for older iPhones, and a host of new bugs associated with the new features.
The crappy keyboard is one of the biggest reasons I hate my iPad. It is almost unusable for me. There is a reason why all the autocorrect humor is screenshots of iOS.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Highly doubt it. I worked at Swype. We had deals at the OEM level and shipped preinstalled. That means we made money on every phone shipped. (Some of those deals fell apart post buyout, because the buyer was hard to deal with). They won't get that deal from Apple. So they may make more money per download, or get more paid downloads. But they won't make more money overall.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I know there's a lot of hate for Windows 8, but the onscreen keyboard for my Surface 2 (RT) is probably the best on screen keyboard I've ever used. I simply can't stand my Android phone keyboard anymore. I don't have an iDevice, but whenever I go to use my wife's iPad, I cringe at how bad that keyboard is. Always showing the keys in capitals so you can never figure out if you are typing in capitals is probably the most annoying part. Having left and right arrow buttons on the default keyboard for the Surface helps out so much. Also, having Ctrl key is extremely nice because I can use Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+X, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+Z, just like I would on a regular keyboard.Tab needs 2 clicks, but it's still much easier than clicking on the next form field. You can switch to the full keyboard for those times when you really want access to all the keys, although I don't use it all the time. The iOS and Android keyboards might work OK on small screen 4-5 phones, but on a 10 inch tablet, where you have the extra room, there really should be some extended functionality. The iPad keyboard really needs to be different than the iPhone keyboard.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I have an iPhone 6 on order, and I plan to use it either way, but I couldn't find the answer to this in the article: Can I use a playlist for an alarm, or can alarm apps work correctly in the background? Since the built-in alarm app only plays one song, you had to use another app if you wanted to wake up to a random song off a playlist. iOS 7 and older versions required that app to be in the foreground for it to play the song. Normally not a big deal, but if you answered a text message in the middle of the night or couldn't sleep and did a little websurfing and forgot to switch back to the alarm app, your alarm wouldn't go off. This isn't an issue with Android, and I'm hoping Apple has fixed this serious limitation - either by allowing the alarm app to use a playlist, or by allowing 3rd party apps to play a song without being in the foreground. It's my biggest pet peeve about iOS, especially after having an Android phone without this limit for the last two years. (If you read reviews in the App Store for alarm apps, most or all of them have people complaining about the app having to be in the foreground - they don't realize it's a limit of iOS rather than a limit of the app. So, I know it's not just me that's annoyed by this.)
The alarm only works if it's the foreground app? Holy fucking shit LOL!