“With barely a weekend separating us from whatever new products Apple has in store for us, it’s safe to say that the final version of iOS 8 will soon make its debut on an iPhone or iPad near you (and perhaps some other device that we haven’t yet seen), to be followed in a few weeks by OS X Yosemite,” Marco Tabini writes for Macworld.
“Among the many innovations that the new launch will bring us is a feature called Extensions, which allows apps to collaborate by securely bits of functionality to each other,” Tabini writes. “Extensions have been a long time coming, and they could well end up having a lasting effect on the entire Apple ecosystem.”
“Extensions are the perfect conduit for the kind of small, focused apps that attracted so many independent developers to Apple’s platforms during the App Store’s early years,” Tabini writes. “Just as larger players, with their deep pocketed marketing budgets, have started eating the lion’s share of App Store profits, extensions could bring about a new opportunity for indies to thrive and innovate.”
Much more in the full article – recommended – here.
Related article:
iOS 8’s extensions explained: Opening the platform while keeping it secure – June 9, 2014
Especially in the African-American market. I myself shave my head everyday though.
lmao. I had to think about that one for a split sec before it hit me.
Mother Nature has taken care of shaving up there for me.
Ditto. It doesn’t worry me that much, except that amongst Apple fans, a certain dancing, shouting, sweaty buffoon turned “bald” into an abusive adjective. I prefer to be associated with Ive.
Man, I hear ya!
Dude, you make me wonder about some things.
Extensions are the beginning of standardized modular software.
This is huge.
That would be interesting. We’ve been hoping for that for sooooooooooooo long.
“Among the many innovations that the new launch will bring us” I had to laugh at this it is a bit much to describe what is expected on the iPhone 6 and IOS 8 as innovations, including extensions.
I hope Apple have some surprises up their sleeve, but from current announcements and speculations it will just be incremental upgrades and catching up where the iPhone has fallen behind. This is a good thing, IOS 8 for sure will be improved a lot with the already announced enhancements but innovation is not catching up.
I love the extensions I am a senior citizen and then some, I bout a used 2008 iMac, A few years ago and installed the
Apple extensions and i have about a 1000 of them. It only cost about $3.50, I used them for sports, menus from favorite restaurants, Favorite web sites, travel destination and anything I wanted to find quickly. I have to buy a new iMac but I have no idea if i can transfer them to a new computer. Any one know? Thanks for any advice, I also used the radio, Tomatoes, Newpapers, weather etc.
Thanks for any advice!
Apple tried something similar to the Extensions idea in Mac OS 7.5, 1997. It was Apple’s OpenDoc project (not to be confused with the OpenDocument project that’s part of the Open Office projects).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc
It allowed independent applications to collaborate together on an overall document. IBM also implemented it into OS/2 Warp 4. Part of the project as to make a universal platform document format that competed with Adobe’s PDF. It also was to compete with Microsoft Ole (which evolved into Microsoft ActiveX). I owned a few different OpenDoc applications. Steve Jobs, after his return, “put a bullet through [OpenDoc’s] head”. It wasn’t very successful.
I used OpenDoc too. It was an extremely good idea, and clearly a big advance on how document software should work, but was not implemented well and was very unstable. I would never have thought that roughly 20 years later we would still not have really modular documents.
I concur! Maybe we’ll get another crack at it.
I was excited about OpenDoc. I really thought that it was going to take over. It makes so much more sense than the jumbled Microsoft Office way of doing things, where tables in Word are completely different than tables in Excel, and embedded “Microsoft Objects” carry so much baggage along with them.
Microsoft. So tired of their bumbling.
In iOS 9, extensions will be joined by Conflict Catcher.
Then we’ll get Multifinder, giving us a split screen.
Can’t wait for iOS Kai’s Power Tools!
This could be another reason for people to not jailbreak their devices too, which is another incentive for Apple to support this.