whats new in iOS 8.0

App Extensions

Touch ID authentication

Photos framework – New APIs for working with photos, videos including iCloud assets, replacement for ALAssets framework, PhotosUI framework

AVFoundation framework – Direct control over camera focus, white balance, exposure settings. Direct control over audio, video units, ability to provide filters for simulating special effects such as speed, pitch etc

Metal – Extremely low-overhead access to A7 GPU core enabling high performance Games. Moves the state validation out of the critical path

Scene Kit – Available in iOS 8.0, provides APIs for building simple games and rich user interfaces with 3D graphics, Physics simulation engine

Sprite Kit – Adds feature to make advanced game effects. Advanced Physics simulation engine. 

Health Kit –  APIs for Managing user’s health related information 

Home Kit – APIs for communicating and controlling devices at home 

Cloud Kit – APIs for moving data between application and cloud. Provides control over when the transfer should occur.  Data can be stored in a repository that is shared by all users. Document picker allows applications to provide ui to access files outside application’s sandbox, which is a mechanism for sharing documents across apps 

Handoff – a feature that  extends user experience of continuity across devices.  Apps can make use of foundation API to participate in handoff. Each ongoing activity in an app is represented by a user activity object that contains the data needed to resume the activity on another device. When user chooses to resume an activity, the activity object is sent to another device. 

Unified Storyboard for universal apps  - allows an application to have single user interface that works well with iPhone and iPad. We no longer need to create specific story board for iPad, instead create story board for specific size and tune it for iPad/iPhone.  Defines two size classes, regular and compact.  A regular size is used for denoting a large amount of screen space such as in iPad or iPhone in portrait mode. With this definition an iPad has regular size in both landscape and portrait orientation, while iPhone has regular height and compact width in portrait, it has compact height and compact width in landscape. 

AV Kit framework – Available in iOS now, this can be used to play video instead of media player framework. 

Core image framework – can now detect rectangles,faces and QR codes in an image,

      Core Location framework -  Now apps can determine in which floor the device is in. Alternative to            significant location change, a new service called visit service, can be used by app that need             location information about interesting places visited by the user

-     iAd Framework – APIs to play preroll videos when playing the video using AVKit, APIs to look up for  effectiveness of advertisements in the app. 

Ui Kit framework changes:

Changes in push notification display behavior. Explicitly needs to set the ui display settings as opposed to specifying the type at the time of notification registration 

Local and custom notifications can include custom actions in the notification, when user tap on it, application is notified to perform corresponding action 

UIVisualEffects class provides API to introduce custom blur effects. 

Application now can take user to application related settings by openURL method.

There are changes in Game Kit, Game controller , Media Player, Sprite Kit for adding additional APIs.

There are few deprecated APIs to note 

- Registering for remote notifications now needs to be using new APIs in UIApplication class 

- UIViewController methods and properties for interface orientation. Traits and size classes replace   them. 

- UISearchDisplay controller class is replaced by UISearchController.