iOS 8 Images Leaked On Chinese Website
Apple just released, this week on Monday, the first major update to iOS 7. iOS 7.1 introduces CarPlay (which is basically the iOS experience designed for your car), updates Siri (with more natural sounding male and female voices for Mandarin Chinese, UK English, Australian English, and Japanese and the ability to manually control when Siri listens by holding down the home button while you speak and releasing it when you’re done as an alternative to letting Siri automatically notice when you stop talking).
iOS 7.1 also updates the iTunes Radio and the calendar and offers more accessibility options, such as the bold font option that now includes the keyboard, calculator, and many icon glyphs, the Reduce Motion option now includes Weather, Messages, and multitasking user interface animations and there are new options to display button shapes, darken app colors, and reduce white point. There are also many user interface tweaks and other minor changes like a new Camera setting to automatically enable HDR for the iPhone 5s, iCloud Keychain support in additional countries, the fix of the infamous home screen crash bug, improved Touch ID recognition, improved performance on the iPhone 4, a fix for the display of Mail unread badge for numbers greater than 10,000, and many others.
Not even a week after the release of iOS 7.1, we have the first leaked images that are supposedly from the next iteration of Apple’s mobile Operating System, iOS 8. The images were seen on a Weibo (a Chinese web page) account and they show the icons of a few upcoming apps, such as the long rumored Healthbook app which seems to be a very important part of iOS 8, a Preview app and a TextEdit app (both of which are familiar to OS X users). There is also a mysterious Tips app with a yellow icon that has a light bulb in its center; unfortunately we don’t know much about the Tips app at the moment.
Unfortunately, you shouldn’t really expect the Preview app and the TextEdit app to be exactly as they are on OS X. Rumors suggest both apps will actually be used to preview and edit text files over iCloud. Alos, it is worth mentioning that they both feature the Mac icons which are most likely placeholders; expect the iOS 8 Preview and TextEdit apps to feature slightly different icons as the current ones do not blend well with the overall design of iOS 7 (and probably iOS 8 as well since we don’t expect another re-design of the mobile OS’ user interface, like the one from iOS 6’s skeumorphic elements to iOS 7’s flat graphic design).
Also of interest is the Healthbook icon which confirms recent rumors suggesting the Healthbook app is going to be a central element of iOS 8 and its integration with the upcoming iWatch. We wrote an article last month and we told you why iOS 8 and the iWatch may be this year’s health game changers. Healthbook is an important part of this. “What little is known about Apple’s upcoming health app is that it will released together with the eighth iteration of iOS and it will track stats like burned calories, miles walked ans how many steps you have taken, all thanks to the M7 motion co processor. The app is also said to be able to track your weight. The Healthbook app fits in the same category as other fitness trackers, like Fitbit or Nike’s free activity tracking app, but it seems that its advantage will be represented by the fact that it will be paired with the iWatch, a wearable device that will include next gen hardware.
The health monitoring app has a difficult task: it needs to pair the upcoming version of iOS with the iWatch and for this, it needs an user interface that would work well on a small wearable device, such as the iWatch. It seems that Healthbook’s user interface will be similar to that of the Passbook app, which allows users to store coupons, boarding passes, event tickets, store cards, ‘generic’ cards and other forms of mobile payment. As with Passbook’s user interface, Healthbook’s user interface will be formed by a stack of cards that represent diverse fitness activities or health related activities. Below, you can see a mockup of the Healthbook app icon.”
The inclusion of the Healthbook app in this leaked iOS 8 screen shot, basically confirms what we said in last month’s article: iOS 8 will be closely connected to the iWatch and they will be this year’s game changers when it comes to health and fitness tracking. Which is not an easy task as competition just got fiercer with the recent unveiling of the Samsung Gear Fit, which against all odds, was the star of this year’s Mobile World Congress, despite the fifth Galaxy S also being unveiled at the same event.
However, the iWatch’s advantage could be the biosensors that it is rumored to feature, which will allow the smartwatch to analyze the user’s blood. This would automatically make the iWatch a very important device for diabetic population as it could analyze the glucose levels of the user. The Healthbook app will likely be very important in tracking glucose levels and other health parameters. However, at this point the inclusion of a such a biosensor (capable of analyzing the user’s blood) in the upcoming smartwatch from Apple is just a rumor and we will have to wait until this Fall to find out if the iWatch (together with iOS 8) will revolutionize health tracking.
iOS 8 is also expected to introduce more changes and features, like discarding missed notifications and making the Notifications center simpler. iOS 8 is also rumored to to include an auto delete function for the iMessages app and remove the Game Center entirely; instead, it will be included in-game for all supported games. While it is very early to talk about iOS 8 yet, the leaked image is confirmation that Apple is indeed working on the eighth iteration of its popular mobile Operating System. If the leaked images are indeed from the next generation iOS, then we are going to receive some interesting features, in addition to Healthbook. Of course, at this point it is too early to know if the leaked image is fake or not, though we should mention that it is not hard to make such an image in Photoshop, especially if you are an iOS registered developer. Take this news with a grain of salt. However, as soon as we have some news on the upcoming version of iOS we will tell you about it.
