The Notification Center in iOS 8 received a significant revamp, and the same can be said about the Notification Center in Yosemite. New in this year’s OS X revamp is the appearance of the Today View.
The Today View contains pertinent information about your day from your Calendar, Stocks, Weather and more. It even has the ability to host widgets—both stock and third-party—directly within Notification Center. Watch our walkthrough video inside to see what I mean.
As I discussed on Let's Talk iOS episode 39, Bjango's iStat Menus is one of my favorite Mac apps. It's an app that places a wealth of system status information right in the Mac's menu bar.
The same folks behind iStat Menus have come up with a new app geared towards OS X Yosemite. The app, which is cleverly entitled iStat Mini, places a simple widget in Notification Center's Today View.
Like its big brother, iStat Mini allows you to quickly view the CPU usage, disk usage, and memory usage on your Mac. It also allows you to monitor your Mac's upstream and downstream bandwidth.
Have a look at our 4K ultra-high resolution video walkthrough after the break for more details.
I'm not a slug but I'm also far from being a health freak. You won't find me at the gym, and if you ever see me running, then call 911 because it means something went terribly wrong. Yet, with the introduction of the M7 coprocessor in the iPhone 5s which helps you keep track of how many steps you made in a given day, I became more aware of little things I could do to maintain my health. I quickly established a daily goal of 6,000 steps, which I usually track with Pedometer++, a beautifully simple step tracker.
Federico Viticci of Mac Stories recently introduced me to a similar application called Activity by LogYourRun. Just like Pedometer++, Activity tracks your steps but it also helps you visualize the intensity of your activity in a very original way.
Now that iOS has finally adopted third-party widgets, many developers have been scrambling to update their apps to include them. While I think that widgets can be useful, I find that a lot of the widgets released so far have been somewhat unnecessary, or at best, poorly implemented.
But that’s not to say that the idea or concept of a widget is necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, widgets can be a very good thing if implemented properly.
That just happens to be the case with the following five widgets that I discuss in this post. Check inside for a video overview of five of my favorite iOS 8 Notification Center widgets.
TapToShare is a new widget for Notification Center that lets you quickly post to Twitter or Facebook. The widget adds shortcuts to both social networks in the Today tab, and when tapping on one of these shortcuts, it launches the TapToShare app and automatically opens up a share sheet for the selected service.
First demoed at WWDC 2014 back in June, Microsoft's Bing translation widget and custom actions for Safari and the Notification Center in iOS 8 is now available by way of an update to the free Bing Search app for the iPhone and iPod touch devices. Available free of charge in the App Store, the new Bing Search 5.0.1 also contains bug fixes.
As shown on the screenshots top of post, enabling the Bing Search Translation action in Safari requires that you bring up the Share sheet in Safari.
TeeVee 3, a TV show-tracking app that I reviewed in May by Tomas Perzl of the Czech Republic and Slovakia-based CrazyApps Team, now lets you tweet out upcoming episodes or mark the ones you've seen as watched, directly from the notification itself, and also see which shows are coming next in the Today view of the iOS Notification Center, thanks to its iOS 8-focused update released yesterday.
Other new features available in this excellent iPhone and iPad app include new sorting options (Alphabetically, Reverse, AirDate and Unwatched), the ability to delete a show by long-pressing it in the list and several bug fixes.
As a cherry on top, the team has decided to discount the $2.99 app to zero bucks, for a limited time, in an effort to bring in new customers. If you're going to grab the latest TeeVee 3.1 update, please keep in mind that the app now requires iOS 8.
Twitter, the popular micro-blogging service, is rolling out a brand new profile experience on Twitter for iPhone, in addition to another cool new feature — support for interactive notifications for incoming tweets on iOS 8 devices — the startup announced in a blog post Thursday.
While the new profiles will be available for everyone using iOS 7 or above, the ability to interact with alerts on the Lock and Home screen is not because this capability is part of the great new features available only in iOS 8.
Admittedly, the myriad of new and useful capabilities that Apple's just-released iOS 8 brings to your iPhone, iPod touch and iPad are going to prove hugely popular with mainstream users, to say the least. With iOS 8, Apple is appeasing harsh critics who'd frequently point out that Android is capable of things iOS cannot do, and then some more.
iOS 8 opens up Apple's mobile operating system to third-party development to a much greater extent than ever before. And stemming from relaxed policies, iOS 8 boosts on-the-go productivity with deeper inter-app sharing while implementing some of the features our Android friends have grown accustomed to, but in a typical hassle-free Apple fashion, things like third-party keyboards, custom actions, photo editing extensions within the context of Photos and Camera apps and way more.
And though evolutionary rather than revolutionary, we have no doubt in our minds that iOS 8 is going to significantly improve the functionality of Apple's mobile platform, and perhaps even give some folks less reasons to jailbreak.
To celebrate today's release of the free iOS 8 software update, we proudly present you this detailed overview of more than two dozen iOS 8 features we think you're going to fall in love with at first sight.
Now that iOS 8 is here, developers are releasing updates to their apps and launching new apps altogether that take advantage of iOS 8's many new functionalities. Many popular apps are being updated to support Notification Center widgets in the Today view for displaying information and performing actions without having to open the app. We've compiled an extensive list of apps that support iOS 8's new Notification Center APIs and are available to download and install on iOS 8. We're working to populate the index continuously as more updates are released, so check back frequently. If you know of an app that currently has iOS 8 Notification Center widget support but isn't listed below, send us an email at tips@idownloadblog.com or comment below with a link to the app!
Normally, swiping up from the bottom of the screen will launch Control Center, which provides toggles, quick launch, media controls and more. Centered is a new jailbreak tweak that doesn't provide a new feature but rather changes the way you can access Control Center.
Developed by Noeliel, Centered allows you to access Control Center directly from Notification Center. Everything that was previously accessible from the original Control Center will now be added to a new tab in Notification Center called 'CC' right next to Notification Center's 'Missed' tab. This allows you to view notifications as well as access Control Center all in one place.
Compared to iOS 6, Notification Center has been upgraded a little in iOS 7 but there's still some room for improvement. Just like iOS 6, there is a lot of jailbreak tweaks on Cydia that will bring new features to iOS 7 Notification Center and allow you to customize it. These range from providing additional statistics about your device to placing your favorite apps right at your finger tips.
This is why we have compiled a complete list of the best jailbreak tweaks for Notification Center on iOS 7 that will help you get the most out of it.