iOS 8: New possibilities? - part 3/3

By Morten Bek Ditlevsen | Jul 10 2014

And now for some new possibilities inside iOS 8:

App Extensions

Apple are extending the way apps can communicate with each other and the users by adding ‘App Extensions.' There are several different kinds of extensions that plug into the OS in different places, but two types of extensions are worth noticing:

Today Extensions

These are  widgets that show up in the Notification Center of your iPad or iPhone. We could easily imagine using this for today’s top stories, breaking news or other sorts of information that would give the user ‘at a glance’-updates and allow the user to jump into your app to get the full version of the story.

One mock-up of how such information could be presented can be seen here:

visiolink-iOS8-mockup-extensions

Share Extensions

‘Share Extensions’ can be added to the system along with Social Networking apps. This means that for instance, LinkedIn could make a shared extension (and I am guessing that they are probably already working on this right now) - and this would automatically be added to all apps that support sharing of articles.

Previously many of you have carefully been considering which services to allow sharing to - and there has been much hassle with having to register a ‘Facebook app’or a ‘twitter shared secret,' etc., etc. All of this is now taken care of by the extensions themselves, so sharing has never been easier. So instead of considering which services to allow sharing to - it seems like instead you should just consider: do we allow sharing of the article - and then let the user choose the service with which to share.

Handoff

Handoff is one corner of Apple’s new ‘Continuity’concept - which allows for seamless integration of the Mac and iOS devices. The Handoff feature is not one that we are seeing ourselves adopting as of yet, but it will certainly provide some interesting features for users and developers in the future. Handoff  allows users to work on a device like the iPhone and iPad - and then switch to a Mac and continue that work. Or vice versa if you are doing some work on your Mac and have to leave the office, and then you just pick up your iPad and continue working where you left off.

Rumors, rumors, rumors

Many of you will have heard the rumor that the next iPhone (probably named iPhone 6) will come with different screen sizes. We naturally do not have any information in that regard, but it does certainly seem like it will be possible to begin developing for new screen sizes. Now this is not an easy thing to do since we naturally have no idea what these screen sizes are. But of course we are giving this a lot of thought since it looks like the Apple device family is moving towards a situation with quite a lot of different screen sizes - and this definitely effect how the layout of your app should be. It may no longer be ‘one iPhone layout, one iPad layout’, but rather an adapting layout with all the possibilities AND constraints that this will present.

Also - these new screen sizes will of course only be supported for iOS 8, so this presents quite a challenge with working seamlessly inside apps that can also run on previous versions of the OS.

Furthermore: It has also been rumored that Apple will introduce some form of ‘Split Screen Multitasking’where several apps can be run next to one another simultaneously. Apple has mentioned  nothing about this feature and how it would work. If and when they add this feature, we will naturally consider whether this feature makes sense to implement in newspaper and magazine apps.

Wrapping up

Altogether the WWDC keynote had a lot of great surprises - and we look forward to working closer with you to find out how we can leverage the new features to create even better apps for your customers.

 

Part 1/3

Part 2/3

 


 

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Morten Bek Ditlevsen

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Morten Bek Ditlevsen