iOS 8 - page 8

Remember Picturelife? It was one of our top picks for online photo storage when Everpix bit it, and now it has been upgraded to version 3.0. The highlights are a new $15 per month unlimited plan, which is really truly unlimited and can be shared with up to three other family members, plus an all-new, redesigned iOS app.

Things in the online photo world are definitely heating up again. iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite will bring exciting new features for photographers and a recent update to Adobe Creative Cloud gives shutterbugs even more options for editing and storage.

But Picturelife has some pretty cool tricks up its sleeve to make it a worthy competitor to the big guns. Here’s why it deserves a shot at becoming your new super-awesome online photo library.

The iWatch is coming. No one really know what it will do yet, but Steven Milunovich, UBS’ top Apple analyst, claims that if Apple has its way, you’ll use the iWatch mostly to send voice messages back and forth with your friends, like Dick Tracy’s 2-Way Wrist Radio.

Because voice messaging is so huge among smartphone users in China, Milunovich says sending voice messages will be one of iWatch’s biggest features along with fitness. And even though it sounds a little silly that voice messages would be the main draws for iWatch, he just met with Tim Cook who couldn’t stop talking about it.

1Password is one third-party app that will directly benefit from Extensibility and Apple’s Touch ID API, two features coming in iOS 8 that will let apps work together like never before.

Made by Canadian app company AgileBits, 1Password acts like a digital vault for storing all your Web logins and sensitive data. 1Password for iOS 8 is already in beta, and AgileBits has taken advantage of Touch ID and the ability to directly integrate with Safari. The result is a frictionless experience that demonstrates how iOS 8 is ushering in a new era of powerful, desktop-class mobile apps.

For many people, Siri has been more of a nuisance than an empowering personal assistant since debuting on the iPhone 4s in 2011. Sure, she’s received some upgrades and is getting even more in iOS 8, but fancy new features mean nothing if she can’t understand what you’re saying.

Siri’s favoriting line, “Sorry I didn’t get that,” might soon be a thing of the past though as a report from Wired says the time is ripe for Apple to unleash a neural-net-boosted Siri.

With iOS 7, Apple already has the best anti-theft software protection of any smartphone in the business. If you lose your iPhone, or it’s stolen, you can easily use Find My iPhone to see where it’s last reported coordinates are, and send a beep and a message to the device. And thanks to Activation Lock, unless someone knows your pin, they can’t even wipe the phone, effectively meaning that thieves who steal iPhones can’t do anything with it except strip it for parts.

But while iOS gives great protection to owners from thieves, it also inadvertently “protects” them from the good Samaritans who might want to return a lost or stolen device to its proper owner. That’s not the way it has to be, though, as this excellent ‘Good Samaritan’ concept proves.

In the production cycle leading up to every new iPhone release, leaked iPhone casings give us a very good idea of the size and ergonomics of the new device months ahead of time. But one thing we don’t often get a look at before a new iPhone is released is what it looks like doing what it’s actually supposed to do: run the latest version of iOS.

With the iPhone 6, Apple is making the most radical change to the physical size of the device ever. To figure out what this means for the look and feel of iOS 8 when it is blown up to the size of the iPhone 6’s 4.7-inch display, YouTube video maestro Tom Rich has created a video that shows exactly that.

Apple gave developers an early preview of its upcoming Photos app this month at WWDC, but what it didn’t tell anyone is that new app for iOS will also overthrow Apple’s iPhoto and Aperture apps for OS X.

A new Photos app for OS X isn’t expected to land on Macs until next year, but in a statement released to The Loop, Apple says it has already stopped development on its professional photography application, Aperture.

Here’s the official statement:

With Apple’s mobile and desktop platforms growing closer in iOS 8 and Yosemite, I started wondering: Is the laptop inherently better for computing than a tablet, or does it just seem that way because we’re so used to the folding form factor?

Could it be that, if the iPad had launched before the Mac and we’d spent the last 30 years using touchscreens, we would balk at using keyboards, mice and dumb screens to do our computing work? Or, in my time-reversed world, if Apple unveiled the Mac in 2010, would we all cling to our iPads and claim Cupertino was nuts for foisting OS X upon us?

iOS 8 introduces many convenient features and enhancements designed to make your iPhone even easier to use. Among these is keyboard update QuickType and support for installing third-party keyboards on iPhones, iPads and iPod touches. In today’s video, we’ll show you exactly how third-party keyboards work — and how they will change your interactions with your device for the better.

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iOS 7’s Notification Center is useful, but Apple’s made a number of improvements in iOS 8. For one thing, they dropped the ‘Missed’ tab, which was always next to useless. There’s also support for third-party widgets in Today View, as well as interactive notifications and the ability to individually dismiss notifications that are no longer applicable.

They are all good changes, but unfortunately, you need to wait until September to make use of them… that is, unless you have a jailbroken phone, in which case, a simple tweak is all you need to get an iOS 8-style Notification Center today.

Let’s face it: We all have some photos on our iPhones or iPads we don’t exactly want other people seeing. When I hand my mother my iPhone to show her photos of my honeymoon in Turkey, there are some photos taken on that trip I don’t want her swiping to.

In iOS 8, you have the option to hide the photos you don’t want other people seeing in the Camera Roll, but it’s clunky and the photos still show up in other albums. A much better solution is Don’t Swipe.

Apple sure is looking friendlier these days.

This year’s Worldwide Developers Conference was geekier, more welcoming and less locked-down than any in recent history. Apple also bid farewell to Katie Cotton — the much-feared queen of PR, whose frosty relations with journalists made her only slightly less terrifying than an angry Steve Jobs — with a call for a “friendlier, more approachable” public relations face to warm up the company’s relationship with the press.

“For the past few years it’s felt like Apple’s only goal was to put us in our place,” Panic’s Cabel Sasser recently tweeted. “Now it feels like they might want to be friends.”

These recent moves represent a major change in the way Apple does business, even as the company sits atop a $150 billion war chest amassed thanks to innovative products, ruthless leadership and heavy-handed policies that fostered a culture of secrecy and utter domination. But in a world where it’s drummed into our heads that nice guys finish last, does Apple’s approach risk killing the company with kindness?

CEO Tim Cook certainly doesn’t seem to think so.

A cheaper iMac that proves you get what you pay for, fresh beta updates for iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, and a “rare” iPhone with a $15,000 price tag. You’ll get these stories and more in Cult of Mac’s video rundown of the week’s biggest Apple news.

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Custom keyboards are landing on iPhones and iPads this fall after Apple finally decided to give users more options than Jony Ive’s horrible shift key.

We’re still a few months away from finished keyboards being ready for the public, but this morning we got our first taste of using a custom keyboard on iOS 8 thanks to the guys at TouchPal. My fingers still need a lot of training before I’m able to sweep words together faster than an Android user, but the future of iOS keyboards promises to be swift, swipeable and super-simple.

Here’s what it’s like to install and use iOS 8 custom keyboards:

Yosemite is one of the biggest updates to OS X we’ve seen in recent years, bringing fresh looks and a slew of new features. This video takes a look at how Notification Center looks and works in OS X Yosemite, which is resembling iOS 8 more and more.

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Apple didn’t tell anyone during WWDC, but it wants iOS 8 to be the ultimate city tour guide.

Cupertino is adding a new Flyover City Tours feature to its Maps app. And even though the code has been hidden, developer Pierre Blazquez managed to unearth it from the latest iOS 8 beta release to give us a preview of the new feature that’s still in development.

Flyover tours are currently only available for Rome, Stockholm, Barcelona, New York, Paris and a few other cities, but in a video posted by Mac4Ever, we’ve been given our first glimpse of the tours in action.

With iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, Apple is finally showing us its idea of how we’ll compute in the future. Perhaps not surprisingly, this pristine vision of our computing destiny — unveiled after years of secret, patient and painstaking development — aligns perfectly with how we currently use our computers and mobile devices.

The keynote at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this month not only showed off a new way to think about computing, based on data not devices, but also silenced pretty much every criticism leveled at the company over the past few years.

Let’s take a look at Apple’s new way of doing things, which fulfills Steve Jobs’ post-PC plan by minimizing the importance of the Mac.

The second beta of iOS 8 upgrades Apple’s mobile platform visually as well as functionally. Along with plenty of bug fixes, iOS 8 Beta 2 delivers a number of neat tweaks that make the upcoming mobile OS even better than before. See some of the new enhancements in action in today’s quick-look video.

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We’re still crawling through the myriad of new features Apple added to the first beta of iOS 8, but now we’re about to dive back in. Apple just released iOS 8 beta 2 to developers this morning a mere 15 days after dropping the new OS on devs at WWDC.

According to the iOS 8 beta 2 release notes Apple’s mostly filled it with a ton of bug fixes, but we’ll update you on all the new features, big and small, once we’ve got it on our test devices.

Developers can pick up the new beta as an OTA update, from the iOS Dev Center or from the direct download links below:

New icons in OS X Yosemite will bring the Mac operating system and iOS closer than ever visually. While Yosemite doesn’t come out until fall, you can get this cool, flat look now — without downloading Apple’s Developer Preview betas, which are buggy at best.

This short video will show you how to give your computer a Yosemite-style face-lift — even if you’re running Windows. Get the downloads mentioned in the video at the links below.

Handoff was one of the most exciting iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite features announced at WWDC, giving you the ability to begin a task (say, an email) on one platform and seamlessly transfer it to another.

It’s a great illustration of Apple’s ecosystem at work — but will it work on your Mac?

With so many emails to send in a day, having an application that meets all your requirements is critical. Though Apple’s native email client might not always have been the fastest means of delivering messages, iOS 8 aims to fix that. In today’s hands-on video, we’ll give you a look at the new and improved Mail application, which comes equipped with quick tricks to speed up common activities.

For instance, you can swipe across emails in the enhanced Mail app to quickly access functions or go back and forth between your inbox and drafts. See how it all works in the video above.

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Back in 2008, basketball star LeBron James received a small stake in Beats Electronics in exchange for promoting the company’s headphones. Now that Apple has bought Beats, guess how much James is set to make? You really don’t want to know, but watch our news wrap anyway. The rest of it, including updates on split-screen iPad multitasking and the future of the iPhone 5c. will cheer you up.

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OMG y’all, it’s CultCast time. This week we bring to thee some more cool iOS 8 features you didn’t hear about at WWDC, plus we’ll tell you all about the new time-lapse video feature we’ve been playing with. Then, with rumors swirling that fall will bring us an iWatch, we have to wonder what features and price point would make us want one adorning our wrists. All that plus Apple’s marketing arm gets major renovations, and in honor of this week’s E3, we say why Nintendo absolutely needs to bring Mario to iOS to survive!

Cheerfully guffaw your way through each week’s best Apple stories! Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below and let the uproarious good time commence.

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What’s your take on iOS 8, Swift and OS X Yosemite?

Got your own favorite features in Apple’s latest releases? Let us know in the comments below.

Photos: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac