The one killer feature of iOS 8 that I’ve been praying for these last two (three? four?) years has finally appeared, independently confirmed on a phone running the first beta: it will now be possible to see what applications on the phone are using up your battery by percentage. At long last, it will be possible to independently tell whether Tweetbot is better for the phone than the official Twitter client, or whether just having Facebook installed on the phone is enough to pummel the battery. The most critical thing I’ve wanted will finally be here, and it alone is enough to tempt me to get the beta into my work phone ASAP.
Beyond that? There are some interesting features out there, especially revolving around the interaction between the phone and the Mac and handing off functions from one to the other (including things like placing calls on the phone from your Mac or replying to SMS messages, not just iMessage). My friends will be happy to be able to opt out of group chats. My current healthcare provider is part of the Healthkit consortium so that could prove useful at some point. The keyboard improvements will be welcome, and the return of an actual file system to iCloud (as originally introduced in iDisk back in 2000, for god sakes, it’s not like Dropbox pioneered online webDAV-based storage) is long long long long overdue.
Siri is a bit of a red flag, though. I’m all in favor of being able to address myself directly to Siri and have it always listening, much more than I ever have with my Moto X. But the battery impact of having a phone always listening strongly suggests to me that either the 64-bit processor will be a lot more friendly about that, or the notional iPhone 6 will have a co-processor for that like the Moto X has, or that a notional iWatch will have the permanent ear out for your request so that the phone doesn’t have to. Regardless, I don’t see this feature making it to the iPhone 4S, just for instance. But having voice recognition that works more like the Google Search version would be very handy.
And speaking of Google search…DuckDuckGo finally makes it to the options list for search, along with Google and Yahoo and Bing. Don’t think for a second that it won’t be the very first setting I change on anything running iOS 8. One more piece of the puzzle for Google independence.
Beyond that, a lot of minor itches are being scratched. There will be an API for TouchID authentication, there will be widgets (of a sort) in the Notification Center, there will be “extensions” for apps such that you can more easily pass files between apps (for instance, take a picture and post it directly to Pinterest or Instagram, rather than just having Facebook or Twitter as options). And naturally, there are tons of new hooks and things for developers, including an entire new programming language called Swift that’s characterized as “Objective-C without the C” – which ought to be interesting. By and large, though, we’ve reached a point where there’s very little left to ask for out of iOS.
Meanwhile, Yosemite (aka OS X 10.10) shows even more iOS-ification, for better or worse, although at the moment it looks largely cosmetic. The fonts will change, there will be more translucency, Spotlight will become more of a command interface than just a search tool…nothing major, it sounds like, but just enough to keep my life interesting.
No new hardware today, which means tonight is probably a good time to pick up some fresh AAPL stock. The kinds of people for whom Tim Cook has to describe what SDK means are the ones who will almost certainly ignore that a new iPhone was last announced at WWDC in 2010 and complain that Apple is falling behind because of their failure to announce any exciting new products. Which basically means a complete failure to look at the last decade or so of WWDC and learn the lessons of history. I can explain it to you, but I can’t understand it for you.
Then again, it’s always fun to disappoint the meatballs who spent thousands of dollars just to get into the keynote and the bash. Serves you right, clownbros.