iOS 8

Google updates Chrome for iOS with support for App Extensions in Share menu

Christian Zibreg ∙ September 22, 2014

The Internet giant Google on Monday issued a minor update to its Chrome browser for the iPhone and iPad adding support for the new third-party App Extensions in iOS 8 using the multi-purpose Share sheet.

This allows you to download apps which advertise their own extensions and actions to the system, making them available in any app that makes use of the standard Share menu, Chrome included.

This edition of Google's web browser also includes iOS 8 compatibility as well as stability improvements and bug fixes.

Awesome Screenshot now available as Safari extension on iOS 8

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated March 24, 2023

As our own Jeff told you before, Awesome Screenshot, a desktop web app for Google Chrome, Firefox and Safari, is arguably the best way to capture an entire web page as an image on OS X.

Thanks to the various extensibility features introduced in iOS 8, this nifty little utility is now available as a screenshot extension for Safari on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad devices running iOS 8.

Upon downloading the free app from the App Store, Awesome Screenshot will allow you to capture a screenshot of any webpage simply by choosing it in Safari's Share menu.

Not only can you capture images of web pages on mobile devices with ease, but also annotate and share them with others using Apple's stock sharing choices or a number of third-party Share extensions available in the App Store.

Photo apps optimized for iOS 8

Timothy Reavis ∙ September 20, 2014

Back in June, Apple announced PhotoKit, a new way to edit photos using third-party apps and filters – all from the stock Photos app. Many legacy photography apps have received updates enabling these features, making accessible a great deal of functionality, all in one app. iOS users can now apply watermarks, filters, effects, and more directly in Photos, a feature iPhoneographers are sure to love.

We've brought together a list of the photo apps that have been updated to support Apple's PhotoKit and can be downloaded now.

Where did your iOS 8 Camera Roll go?

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated February 11, 2016

Following Wednesday's public release of iOS 8 and today's launch of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, the Apple Support Forums are already buzzing with disgruntled users who are venting their frustration with iOS 8 presumably removing some of their photos, a point driven home by the company's inexplicable removal of the Camera Roll album in iOS 8.

Indeed, it looks like Apple has introduced a major customer pain point by not elaborating whether the missing Camera Roll has anything to do with iOS 8's newly gained ability to access large photo libraries in iCloud within the Photos app.

So, where did your Camera Roll go and is there anything sensible to be done about it?

TeeVee 3 updated with iOS 8 Today widget, interactive alerts and now free

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated October 13, 2018

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’s iPhone app gains interactive notifications on iOS 8, revamps profile pages

Christian Zibreg ∙ September 18, 2014

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.

SwiftKey’s new iOS 8 keyboard surpasses 1 million downloads in first day

Cody Lee ∙ Updated April 18, 2018

SwiftKey has announced today that its new iOS 8 keyboard has already surpassed the 1 million downloads mark. The news comes just 24 hours after Apple released the software update, which activated support for third party iOS keyboards.

At the time of this writing, SwiftKey is the #1 app in the Top Free chart of the US App Store. Other third-party keyboard apps like Swype and Fleksy are also sitting at the top of their respective charts, as users rush to try out the new feature.

Gameloft updates Modern Combat and Asphalt with iOS 8 Metal-powered graphics

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated November 19, 2018

Following up on yesterday's public release of the free iOS 8 software update for Apple's iPhone, iPad and iPod touch mobile devices, French games maker Gameloft on Thursday unleashed a pair of updates for its two highly-successful titles: Modern Combat 5: Blackout, a first-person shooter, and Asphalt 8: Airborne, a crazy racing game driven by a powerful physics engine which has you performing dynamic, high-speed aerial stunts.

Both games are now powered by iOS 8's new Metal framework which provides low-level access to the GPU inside the Apple-designed A7 chip (the iPhone 5s, iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina display) and its A8 counterpart (the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus). When played on these devices, both of these games benefit from close-to-the-metal access to graphics cores, without the overhead of the OpenGL graphics run-time.

Staged rollout could explain slow iOS 8 adoption rate

Timothy Reavis ∙ Updated September 28, 2016

Apple's implementation of what appears to be a staged release of iOS 8 could very well explain why adoption numbers have been lower than past rollouts. Reports of iOS 8 having a significantly slower adoption rate than previous iterations of iOS have been attributed to a variety of factors from its large download size to a lack of visible changes, but over yesterday's rollout, many users saw "Update Requested" messages when trying to update to iOS 8, notifying them they will be alerted once the software has been downloaded and ready to install.

Epic releases Metal-powered ‘Zen Garden’ demo free on App Store

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated October 13, 2018

Demoed at WWDC back in June to show off the power of Apple's new low-level graphics framework, Metal, Epic Games' Zen Garden is now available to download on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad devices running iOS 8 and powered by the Apple-deigned A7 or A8 processor.

Built on the recently-unveiled Unreal Engine 4, the first game engine with built-in support for the Metal API, Zen Garden classes as a technological showcase.

The latest iPhone 6, for example, renders the demo in a whopping 1,440-by-1,080 resolution at a smooth thirty frames per second.