iOS 8 : Release Date, Features and Rumours

Earlier this week, Apple announced the newest version of their mobile operating system iOS 8, at their annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). The new iOS version is aimed at extensively integrating the use of Apple devices into daily life activities. Therefore many new exciting features and upgrades have been added. The new improvements are as follows:

Touch ID

Application developers will be able to use fingerprint authentication to protect apps, especially those that involve handling sensitive information.

Siri

Users will be able to activate Siri hands-free with the phrase “hey, Siri”. It supports 22 new dictation languages and has streaming voice recognition to show users results as they speak. There’s also integration with Shazam for song recognition.

Keyboard

Apple has now added support for third party keyboard apps such as Swype. A new feature called QuickType also adds predictive suggestions based on users’ habits.  

iMessage

Apple has singled out iMessage to be its most used app and has added some pretty interesting improvements. You will be able to add message threads and remove people from them. Audio and video messages, and location sharing within the app are notably interesting additions; with the ability to reply audio messages by putting the phone to your ear, and the message automatically sending when you lower the phone.

Healthkit

This is a new app which will enable access and retrieval of health data and also integration with other health apps. The app is also expected to enable healthcare institutions exchange health data remotely with their patients.

Notification Center

This improvement interests me the most; users can now have basic access to applications from the notification center without having to launch the app. For example: reply messages or like posts on Facebook. All this can be done without having to close an app that you are already using. I’m looking forward to seeing how this will look.

Extensibility

This feature will enable apps to extend their features with other apps. For example: being able to edit a photo with a third party photo editing app, within the native photo app. Widgets have also been introduced.

Family Sharing

A family or group of people of up to six will be able to share reminders, photos, calendar events etc. A particularly cool thing is that music and app purchases can also be shared so long as the family uses the same credit card. Therefore parents will be notified about purchases their children make and can approve or disapprove them.

Release Date

The exact release date has not been announced yet but it should be somewhere around autumn. I will however keep you updated. Unfortunately, iphone 4 users will be left out of this upgrade; here is the list of devices that will support iOS 8:

• iPhone 4S
• iPhone 5
• iPhone 5C
• iPhone 5S
• iPod Touch 5th generation
• iPad 2
• iPad with Retina Display
• iPad Air
• iPad Mini
• iPad Mini with Retina Display

How to Download Files With BitTorrent (with pictures)

If you haven't read my post : "What is Bittorent Networking?", please click here to read it. So you can have a better understanding of what this post is about.

Note that My use of the word "BitTorent" in this post is not to be mistaken with the client software - BitTorent®  but is rather in reference to the networking protocol. The torrent files showing in the images have the vuze logo (the frog) because it's my default bitTorrent client program.
I will be giving all tutorials using Vuze and uTorrent on windows 7.

BitTorrent is a very convenient way to download all sorts of files from the internet. There are many, many ways to download all the files that we need. However, bitTorrent presents users with stability, pause/resume capability and even more control over the download process. For the sake of my readers who are new to this, this tutorial is going to be quite detailed but simple. Follow the steps and you’ll be just fine.

Getting a BitTorrent client Program  

(don’t know what a BitTorrent client Program is? Click here)

To download using bittorent, you first need a Bittorent client software. Vuze and uTorrent are free client programs but paid versions with more features are available as well. Vuze can be downloaded from the official website - http://www.vuze.com/  . Here's the website for utorrent  - http://www.utorrent.com/ 

After you have downloaded and installed either of the clients, the next thing is to search for and download torrent files.

Finding torrent files  
(don’t know what a torrent file is? Click here)

Torrent files can be found on file sharing sites and BitTorrent search engines like torrentz, kickass, thepiratebay . These sites host torrent files for games, movies, music, e-books, etc. You could also just google the name of the file you want to download and add the word “torrent”; you’re most likely to find a direct link to its torrent file among the search results. You can get all the cool stuff you want for free, however be wary of the fact that some of these files may be copyrighted.

When you find the torrent file that you want to download, click the download button and the file will be saved on your computer. Be sure to download a torrent file with a high seed to peer ratio (ie. More seeds than peers). This will let you know that the torrent actually represents what content it says it does. Remember the torrent file is not what you actually want to download. Its just a small file that contains information about what you want. It has the extension “.torrent” just like some songs have extension “.mp3” and some images have extension ".jpg".

Downloading your content

Now that you have both the torrent file and the BitTorent client program, you can proceed with downloading your content. I will be demonstrating the process with both Vuze and utorrent like I earlier stated,with an e-book titled ; "Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, CSS & HTML5 Step-by-Step".

Using Vuze

Launch vuze and follow the steps in the images below. The blue arrow is there to guide you.

The first thing to do is to open the torrent file you downloaded, click "add files" and trace its location and select it, and click "open". In the next two dialog boxes, click "ok". The content download starts a few seconds or minutes later depending on your internet connection.

Using uTorrent

Launch uTorrent, and click the "+" button to add a torrent file. trace its location and select it, and click "open". In the next dialog box, click "ok". there the download screen appears and the content begins downloading after a few seconds or minutes later depending on your internet connection. 

 

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