APIs introduced in iOS 8

iOS 7 was something big for its designers and now its time for developers. Yes, iOS 8 is really huge for developers with all new Swift, Unified Storyboards, Handoff and so forth.
Some new features of iOS can surely change the way we achieve our business logic, like CloudKit and Cordova can do really amazing work together. With App Extensions now its easy to interact with iOS, Some interesting things we can do with App Extensions:

1. Sharing for most of data e.g;
   • Audio
   • Video
   • Photos
   • Comments
   • Links
2. Actions to Transform data
3. Photo editing in native iOS App
4. Safari extensions to access and manipulate DOM
5. Interactive notification center widgets
6. Document providers to access additional storage
7. Third party keyboards with more languages and input methods

PFB- A high level idea of new APIs introduced in iOS8;

1) CloudKit

From iOS8+, user can access there files from third party document providers within an app, CloudKit provides APIs to code the same. It is a network depended Cloud access framework for shared cloud storage. Its classes can't be subclassed. Its synchronous and for asynchronous transfers it relies on NSOperation/GCD. Good to know things before starting with iCloud Drive;

• User can access shared files from Finder in Mac
• We need to use UIDocumentPicker to access iCloud Drive files in iOS because there is no shared storage app in iOS for it
• We can manage Records, Relationships and Queries with CKRecord framework and Assets/Larg data blobs with the help of CKAsset framework
• We can use CKSubscription framework to get notified in case of change in cloud with a cute puch notification
• We can access the cloud with the help of Developer Portal
• No need to create user accounts as we can use user's iCloud Account
• Storage is free, but Apple have reserved the access rights for it to prevent misusage

2) CoreAuthentication

Device owner authentication with/without biometrics (Touch ID - iPhone5S+)

3) HealthKit

Access users health related data managed by Apple Health, i.e; Sex, BloodType etc. Access health accessories sensors reports i.e; Body temperature, Heart rate etc.

4) HomeKit

It provide support to work with Apple's Home Automation Protocol. It will help you Discover, Communicate and Manage the supported accessories.

5) LocalAuthentication

To use Biometrics Authentication (Touch ID - iPhone5S+). It will only tell you if user authenticated successfully or not to take appropriate action.

6) Metal

It provides support for GPU-accelerated (Apple A7+) advanced 3D graphics rendering, precompiled shaders, state objects, explicit command scheduling and data-parallel computation workloads. It works efficiently Metal shading language.

7) NotificationsUI

Used to create an iOS notification centre widget of an app

8) NetworkExtension

Manage virtual private network with IKEv2/IPSec

9) Photos

Access/Observe/Manage the shared photo library available in both Swift and Objective C

• Direct photo access in native app and iCloud with PHAssetCollection
• Full manual control on native camera and Bracketed Capture with the help of AVCaptureDevice

10) PhotosUI

Used to create custom view-controller class as an extension which provide a user interface for editing photo or video assets in iOS Photos app.

11) SceneKit

Processing and animating 3D vector-based graphics, It can work together with SpriteKit as well

12) WebKit

It provides an extended web content rendering support with Java, JavaScript and Media Playback configuration.

13) AVKit

Yet another optimised audio video player view-controller

14) CoreAudioKit

Manage inter app audio player controls

15) NotificationCenter

Both a widget and its containing app can use this API to communicate and specify whether there is content in the widget should display or it should be visible in the Today view or its most recent snapshot is still valid, etc.

16) PushKit

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Apple made its admirers quite busy for next few months, cheers folks :)