Yep, I couldn’t wait. I upgraded by iPhone to iOS8 earlier today. I thought I’d share some initial impressions. First off, this is a really big update…if your iPhone is pushing its limits like mine is, remember that instead of clearing all the space it’s asking for, you can plug it in to your computer and update through iTunes instead, requiring vastly less free space on your device. When installing, it’s best to NOT enable iCloud Drive just yet…you’ll need to do so for all of your Apple devices simultaneously, and that just won’t be possible on your Mac until Yosemite is released in late October. Resist the urge and move on!
I’m not going to get into all the details of what changed…I expect you’ve probably already read about that in the past week. I’ll just focus on what stood out to me. You’ll find the UI familiar; most of the changes are under the skin. The mail app has nice swipe features for marking a message as read/unread (swipe right) or flagging (swipe left a little bit) or deleting (swipe left more). I like the ‘hey Siri’ feature…yeah it’s creepy that she’s always listening but is handy, especially in the car…though this only works if it’s plugged in to power. I wonder how the AppleWatch will implement this…always on, or twist wrist to activate, something like that? Anyway. Cool feature. Family sharing in App Store is something I’m really looking forward to once I upgrade my wife and daughter’s devices to iOS8. The Health app looks cool….but so far, Withings has not updated their app to share health data with that, so it’s kinda useless for me. No word from Withings if/when they’ll be doing this, but I expect so…or else they’ll be losing users!
One aspect of the photos app scares me a bit…I have a ton of pictures on my iPhone, but there’s no longer a ‘camera roll’ to view them all. Now there’s a ‘recently added’ album, but to see the older ones, I need to go to ‘photos’ and scan through them by year. Which I guess is OK…just different. Considering how infrequently I’d access those older pictures…no big deal. It’ll be nice once that’s better integrated with the photo collections on my Mac…which I don’t think will truly be awesome until the new Photos app for OS-X is released sometime early in 2015.
Lifehacker has a cool list of lesser-known iOS8 features here. Such as, battery usage statistics, and a grayscale mode.
So that’s it for now…but I expect I’ll have more to say once I get my new iPhone6 on Friday!