Apple Releases iOS 8 Beta 5 to Developers

[wizard]

Almost certainly not the final beta. The Swift language and its interoperability with APIs (Cocoa, Sprite Kit, etc.) still have a TON of issues, including some fairly major ones (and this is including the changes in this beta). They are making some progress, but there will be a few more betas, at least IMO.

They will make it final before the new iPhones ship. As for Swift, Apple has told developers to expect continual updates. I'm expecting iOS 8.1 late November or early September. Even then I wouldn't expect Swift to be 100% or even 90%.

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Yes, but all the Swift libraries get embedded in to the App package, so Swift can continue to evolve even after the 8.0 final release.

In the open source world Swift would be a 0.7 app. That is actually a good sign as it puts developers in the loop early. Frankly it isn't Apples intention to have Swift fully fleshed out until after at least a year and possibly two. They have been very clear about this.

 

[wizard]

Awesome. That 'Optimize iPhone Storage' is exactly what I was hoping for. Previously, I was disappointed to hear that iCloud still stored full sized photos on your phone, as that's a real waste of space. It's great to see that setting implemented.

It is absolutely not a waste of space. Sometimes you want all the resolution you can get on the phone itself. At least until you are done with the pic and can afford to ave it sitting in the cloud. I don't want reduced size photos on my iPad/iPhone until I tell it to move originals or edits to the cloud. The latency of moving things back and forth from the cloud just sucks.