With iOS 8 round the corner, and Apple gently nudging to update apps with shiny new versions in time for the big release on 17th, the past week has been busy, and the rewards, well, shall soon be ‘available on the App Store’.
Managing the different screen sizes with larger iPhones turned out to be quite easy, the only thing extra that was really required was a new 3x res app icon for the high pixel density of the 6 Plus screen. A few other issues regarding access to system services like notifications, location services and background tasks were sorted out.
The interesting part was trying to implement some of the new features in the latest iOS. As mentioned in the last WWDC, iOS 8 is a big release for developers and opens up a lot of the system to developers.
- Notification actions – which are small optional buttons that can be added to notifications to provide faster and meaningful interaction with the information. This was relevant for the Train Alarm app, so that a new option has been added, “View in Map” for the alarm notifications.
- Widgets – yes, iOS finally has widgets, but they are implemented in a unique way that is both unobtrusive yet seems quite powerful. They live in the “Today” view. This also was relevant for Train Alarm, to have a widget that would update the location to the latest alarm station, this has also been added in the update.
So look out for these exiting new features in the next release!
