An In-Depth Look at App Extensions in iOS 8 and Yosemite

[edenwaith]

Rather, is Dashboard gone in Yosemite?

I think being able to add the Widgets into the side bar would be a much more useful implementation of them rather than hiding the Widgets into their own space/screen. Dashboard Widgets were an interesting amusement when they were first released in Tiger, but I don't feel that they ever made much of an impact. I rarely have used them outside of quickly glancing at the weather, but more often I would use a phone for that.

 

[minimo3]

That's guaranteed security for your card information. As we've seen on Android, there are many keyboards that harvest far more information (like contacts) for the privilege of using a different keyboard for free.

I'm sure Apple will open it up in the future, but only once they have a rock solid way of ensuring there are no flaws in implementation.

I suspect that if iOS 8 is jailbroken, a flaw in extensions will be the main exploit.

http://thehackernews.com/2013/03/android-swiftkey-keyboard-turned-into.html

 

[AppleInLVX]

i mean, yea, that's what they say. but it's a pretty bad UI experience to me.

So will you only be able to enter contact info through the Apple keyboard too then?!

I'm quite possibly wrong, but if TouchID is open too, wouldn't the password field be fillable through that, meaning you don't need to change your keyboard, and passwords are handled at an entirely different level, ergo more secure?

 

[edenwaith]

Finder Sync

Finder Sync for OS X has become my new favorite feature that has been announced. I wish this was available several years ago. It would have made my job much, much easier with file watching and badging.

I imagine services like Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and other similar services will gain great use from this functionality rather than having to inject their own custom code into the Finder.

 

[Amplelink]

This is unquestionably a game changer and one of the biggest announcements at the keynote. This effectively levels the playing field with Android at least with respect to functionality, and it allows iOS to really act like a PC replacement. This is what iOS should've been all along.

 

[sfwalter]

To me the extensibility of iOS and OS X was best announcement at the keynote. Would love to be able to see integration of Instagram and the popular analog effect camera apps.

Also I think having widgets on the today screen is a great compromise while keeping the simplicity of the home screen.

 

[erikdonohoo]

Music API

What about apps that let you play music from the Music app? Will extensibility let you listen to music from other apps that have music? (Pandora, Spotify, Rdio, Google Play, etc?) That would be awesome

 

[grumple]

This is unquestionably a game changer and one of the biggest announcements at the keynote. This effectively levels the playing field with Android at least with respect to functionality, and it allows iOS to really act like a PC replacement. This is what iOS should've been all along.

Not sure I agree with this. If apple had allowed infinite extensibility from the beginning, who knows what bugs, stability issues and vulnerabilities would have been manifest, irreparably harming the reputation of the nascent platform, not to mention, how slow and incapable the hardware was at the time. Those who wanted that flexibility could jailbreak. It's not like they had any trouble selling phones.

Apple certainly could have but chose not to, deliberately. Now they are doing it in a way that will compete quite well with the Android platform, from a timing and marketing perspective, without any of the well known issues, giving Apple a distinct advantage.

This has been planned for quite some time, and from a strategic and technological standpoint, it's a brilliant move. I think they know what they are doing quite well.

What I find interesting is that the people who REALLY want to tinker, who actually KNOW how to tinker i.e. DEVELOPERS, now have a set of powerful and vastly superior set of tools at their disposal, vs Android which really is a bunch knobs to play with until you are bored.

 

[kcyal8tr]

I think this is all laying the groundwork for Apple wearables and future AppleTV development. It's not much of a stretch to see something similar to widgets on a watch and phone call notices on your television.

 

[RMo]

The only other problem? Look at the disaster that browser extensions have created, my Dad has like 20 tool-bars and tons of extra buttons in his Firefox browser simply because of the rampant "extensibility" allowed. Hopefully Apple will reign in the proliferation of crapware that will be allowed to extend their apps.

I sincerely doubt that add-on type programs in iOS will be a free-for-all; I'm sure they will be offered through the App Store with Apple's usually diligent reviews. So sort of like addons.mozilla.org (AMO), but unlike with Firefox, I don't think there will be any other way to install these (I think Firefox allows AMO by default, but I know it allows you to permit any site to install them, which is probably how the situation you described happened).

Worst case scenario, if something is problematic, Apple can remove the offering as they have done (rarely) in the past. But I don't expect much of a problem in the first place.

 

[ppdix]

Jailbroken iOS7 is better than iOS8...

i can do so many more things now…

 

[Arndroid]

So you'll be using a custom keyboard and then when a password or credit card box comes up, the regular apple keyboard will appear? This is a pretty bad user experience in my mind.

Not really given how often that happens, versus what you are doing.

You already get different keyboards in different places in iOS.

 

[Cod3rror]

- Storage Provider (iOS): an interface between files inside an app and other apps on a user's device

So, they're using cloud storage services as "file system".

Why don't they just add a microSD slot to the iPhone (especially with a much bigger iPhone rumours), and add an iOS Finder? Why is Apple against a local file system?

It would be a very nice addition.

 

[Arndroid]

Nice, but needs more Safari extensions.

I'm not 100% behind adblock (after all, ad revenues are the only thing keeping many of my favorite web sites afloat) but things like ghostery? Click-to-flash? It is increasingly painful and disruptive to me not to have access to them on my iPhone, and the dedicated browsers that include them (Ghostery's browser, the Adblock browser, etc) are uniformly awful: so buggy and poorly designed that they are simply not usable for serious browsing.

Click to flash? Seriously?

 

[bunchofpenguins]

Can someone clear something up for me because I'm a little confused.

So, for example, say Pinterest implements a share to Pinterest button. You would obviously only get that option if you install the Pinterest app, I get that.

Would the other app, say Safari, need to implement a hook into the Pinterest "share to" option or would it automatically work? I'm assuming it will automatically work but I'm just confused so I wanted to check.

 

[Tech198]

Any reason why its possible to handle third party extensions only with iOS and not iPhoto on Mac ?

 

[ThunderSkunk]

Very exciting.
Thank you for this...

 

[Rogifan]

What about apps that let you play music from the Music app? Will extensibility let you listen to music from other apps that have music? (Pandora, Spotify, Rdio, Google Play, etc?) That would be awesome

Yes please! I would love to use the SRS iWow app (right now I'm using a dongle that plugs into the lightening port) but it only works with the music app. I would love it if this app could work with Spotify or Pandora.

 

[Redsky]

And is that it...?

You would think with the amount of Money Apple makes, that they could employ / train up more thought leaders and programmers.

Even basic stuff is so lacking competition and more importantly my expectations eg ability from iPhone/iPad to forward outlook meeting invite, have meetings colour coded (not by email account), but by meeting type so it's beautifully synced with my work Office email.

To be honest, after being advocate of Apple since first iPhone, I'm now seriously thinking of switching to Microsoft Surface, now the hardware has caught up. And I'm not the only one in my group of friends, family work collages coming to this conclusion.

 

[PhiLLoW]

Quick Question.

Files can be stored on the app-specific finder / icloud drive now.


Are those files available offline and sync when the phone has internet connection?

 

[dannys1]

I think being able to add the Widgets into the side bar would be a much more useful implementation of them rather than hiding the Widgets into their own space/screen. Dashboard Widgets were an interesting amusement when they were first released in Tiger, but I don't feel that they ever made much of an impact. I rarely have used them outside of quickly glancing at the weather, but more often I would use a phone for that.

I use them every day - theres no quicker way to do currency conversion, check my parcel status or use a calc. One button, boom they've swopped in top of everything else.

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To be honest, after being advocate of Apple since first iPhone, I'm now seriously thinking of switching to Microsoft Surface, now the hardware has caught up. And I'm not the only one in my group of friends, family work collages coming to this conclusion.

You're probably the only one of these message boards though.

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Would the other app, say Safari, need to implement a hook into the Pinterest "share to" option or would it automatically work? I'm assuming it will automatically work but I'm just confused so I wanted to check.

When you install the app, it'll activate the extensions upon first opening (with a yes/no question for the user) after that, like location, notifications, background app activity etc, you'll be able to go into iOS settings and enable/disable different settings.

 

[xPad]

So you'll be using a custom keyboard and then when a password or credit card box comes up, the regular apple keyboard will appear? This is a pretty bad user experience in my mind.

You can't really SWYPE passwords and credit cards anyway. Those other keyboards function primarily via predictions based on fuzzy logic. You don't type/swipe things exactly, you just get them close enough.

With passwords and credit card numbers, you have to get them exactly right. Most people tap them in, even on SWYPE-stye keyboards, by necessity.

So this doesn't seem bad at all. In fact, it also provides feedback to the user that "this data entry is secure", but we'll have to wait to see it in action to see how it pans out.

 

[jonnysods]

This is such a great move.

 

[groovyd]

i'd rather just see apple purchase the 3 or 4 best keyboard apps and offer them as options instead of apps. this way they don't need to worry about the security issues since they would be all part of apple. buy swype and integrate it properly deep into iOS itself and keep the walled garden secure.

 

[Fattytail]

i'd rather just see apple purchase the 3 or 4 best keyboard apps and offer them as options instead of apps. this way they don't need to worry about the security issues since they would be all part of apple. buy swype and integrate it properly deep into iOS itself and keep the walled garden secure.

As far as I know, you'll have the option to disallow these keyboard apps from transmitting your data out of your phone. So you can be as secure or not as you want.