Thought I'd make a post, been pretty tied up lately with Senior Design and another design class. Here's my thoughts on iOS8 and some nifty things that I've noticed.
iOS 8 First Thoughts: It's exactly the same, but better.
The first thing I noticed when it booted up was that my default home screen looked 100% exactly the same. The only real "looks" that changed here are the control center (the one that swipes up from bottom) has become more vector art-ish, and the notification center (swipe down from top) has changed to a little more flat vector look as well. The overall design of iOS8 seems to be moving more toward a flat vector design more so than iOS7 did, and away from the skeuomorphic iOS6 and prior designs.
They dropped the "Missed" tab on the notification center, and the widgets in the "Today" tab have changed a little too - the calendar shows more of an agenda view instead of a block calendar view, and you can set Dropbox to display things in this tab as well.
The lock screen now has a line separating notifications from different apps.
When you get an alert that rolls in from the notification bar at the top of the page, swiping down quickly will pull up either a quick reply for messages, or the option to reply to or trash an email.
When you double click the home button to switch between or kill apps, you now have a list of recent contacts that displays at the top for quickly contacting them (message, call, facetime). Swiping right on this line of contact circles will reveal your favorites (contact favorites). You still kill apps by swiping up on them from this screen.
Within messages, you can now send audio and video messages, recorded by holding the microphone icon on the right side of the text bar.
Voice-to-text now shows you what it recorded word by word instead of having to finish the entire recording before it displays.
Swiping left or right on emails within the mail app allows for various new features, such as Mark Unread, Flag, Trash & more.
You can set email threads to notify you specifically when someone replies to the thread.
Siri now has Shazam music identification integration, and can pull up mathematical plots and calculations through what I can only assume is Wolfram|Alpha.
Camera now includes a delayed photo timer.
Family Sharing looks cool but I haven't really dug into that one yet.
iCloud Drive seems to be Apple's solution to Dropbox (which is weird because Dropbox is integrated into the notification center now too).
You can now choose 3rd party keyboards, such as Swype (popular on android). The new default keyboard includes a predictive text bar, which you can turn off in the Keyboards menu (Predictive -> off).
The whole Handoff feature looks cool but I haven't figured out what apps it works with yet (allows you to start something, then pick it up on another iOS device via iCloud).
The new Healthkit functionality is pretty cool, but it's pretty useless without an app integrating with it via API. A lot of the data sets are arbitrary things that you can't measure on your own.
But good news! GBA4iOS and NDA4iOS still work! Facebook still requires you to download Messenger to see/use messages. Can't win them all.
Will post edits as I find more cool features.
