Yes, I know that Yosemite is the newer OS, but I feel like I’m just hitting my stride with iOS 8. After a month or so with Apple’s latest mobile OS, I’ve made it past proficiency and I’m embracing the little things—and I’m figuring out which of the hyped features I’m actually using day to day.

Here are some of my favorite iOS 8 features, in no particular order, with an emphasis on things that haven’t been exhaustively covered elsewhere. I hope you discover something new and useful.

[Updated 11/4/2014, 9:45a PT, to add a tip about .zip files in Mail. Updated 11/6/2014, 7:40p PT, to add a step to the screen-brightness tip confirming that Zoom Region is set to Full Screen Zoom.]

Mail: Minimize messages, per-thread notifications, and more

There are still many features I’d like to see added to Mail, but with each new version of iOS, Mail takes baby steps toward being the email app I’d love to have.

Minimize in-progress email How many times have you been composing an email message on your iPhone or iPad and wished you could browse another message for some info? It happens to me all the time. There’s now a way to do so: Just swipe the in-progress message’s title bar down to the bottom of the screen, and there it stays until you tap it again. While the message is minimized, you can browse messages, mailboxes, and accounts; and you can compose new messages and replies—you can even minimize multiple messages and get back to each later. (When multiple messages are minimized, tapping the bottom of the screen lets you choose which minimized message to edit, as shown in the image here.)

Notifications for Mail threads One of my favorite Mail features introduced in iOS 6 was the VIP view: Any Inbox messages from people you designate as VIPs are shown here, and you can set up a special notification sound for new VIP messages. (Trivia: On my iPhone, that sound has long been the Macintosh II startup chime.)

In iOS 8, you can now designate specific email threads as “very important”: When viewing any message in the thread, tap the flag button at the bottom of the screen, then tap Notify Me, and then Notify Me again. Messages in that thread will display a small alarm-bell icon, and whenever a new reply to that thread arrives, you get a notification. (Trivia: My thread-notification sound is the startup chime for the Macintosh LC.) Tap the flag button again and tap Stop Notifying to turn off notifications for the thread.

Automatic zip-archive expansion For years, receiving a message with a zip-archive attachment meant waiting until you could get back to your “real” computer to expand the archive and view its contents. iOS Mail didn’t know what to do with .zip files, and iOS had no native app for handling them. (You could install a third-party app for dealing with .zip files, and use the Open With feature to send an archive to it, but few people did.)

Under iOS 8, if you tap on a zip-archive attachment in Mail, you can preview the archive’s contents, just as if the message had separate attachments. You can swipe left or right to browse the files, and you can share any individual file using the standard iOS share sheet. (Thanks to my former Macworld colleague Serenity Caldwell for catching this one.)

More swipe actions When viewing a mailbox’s message list, you can now perform many more actions on a message without having to view it first. Swipe a message preview to the right, and you get the option to mark the message as read/unread. Swipe slightly to the left, and you get buttons to trash the message, flag/unflag it, or More; tapping More displays a list of additional options, including Reply/Reply All, Forward, Flag/Unflag, Mark as Read/Unread, Move to Junk, Move Message, and Notify Me (for enabling the aforementioned per-thread notifications). One complaint I have here is that if you swipe too far to the left, you immediately delete the message—I do this accidentally All. The. Time. (I’ve never been so happy to have the shake-to-undo feature.) In Settings > Mail > Swipe Options, you can choose which swipe direction provides which options.

Easy contact adding I haven’t used this feature much, but the few times I have, it’s been a real convenience: If you receive an email message from someone who’s not in your contacts, and the message has a signature containing the sender’s contact information, Mail will display a small banner at the top of the message with that info; tap Add To Contacts to create a new contact record that includes all the information.

Today & Thread Notifications views Last year, I wrote about iOS 7 Mail’s new special views, and iOS 8 gets a couple more of these views. Tap Edit on Mail’s main Mailboxes screen, and you can enable Today and Thread Notifications views. Today displays all messages in your Inbox received today, while Thread Notifications lists all email threads for which you’ve enabled notifications. I’ve been using the Today view much more than I expected.

Siri: Live dictation, Song ID, Hey Siri

Siri has received a few nice upgrades in iOS 8—the kinds of things that will make Siri even more appealing to those of us who already use it, and might bring more people on board the Siri bandwagon.

Live dictation Perhaps my favorite new Siri trick is live dictation. Siri used to work by listening to you talk, then sending a recording of your dictation to the cloud, then (a few seconds later) returning results. Under iOS 8, Siri shows you its interpretation of your speech on the fly—there’s just an ever-so-short delay for each word.

Not only does this improvement make Siri faster and more responsive, but it means you see immediately if Siri has made a mistake in transcription. Instead of speaking a long text message, for example, and waiting to see if the results are what you intended, you see, as you’re talking, if the message is correct.

Song ID I’m a fan of SoundHound, which uses the iPhone’s microphone to listen to whatever song is playing on the radio, on a friend’s speakers, or during a TV show and then—usually—identifies it. (Yes, I still listen to the radio sometimes.) Under iOS 7, I used SoundHound often enough that I had a SoundHound button on my Launch Center Pro home screen, with SoundHound configured to automatically listen on launch.

Under iOS 8, I can instead activate Siri and say “What song is playing?” Assuming Siri is working at that particular moment , a few seconds later my iPhone displays information about the track (along with, of course, a button to buy the track on the iTunes Store). I haven’t used SoundHound in weeks.

My only complaint here is that—as with All Things Siri—there are times when talking to my phone isn’t socially appropriate. I’m still pining for a text-interface option for Siri.

Hey Siri Finally, a feature I didn’t think I’d use much, but I’ve come to like, is the new “Hey Siri” option. Hidden inside Settings > General > Siri, enabling this option lets you activate Siri by saying—wait for it—”Hey Siri” instead of holding down the Home button. The catch is that this works only when the device is connected to a power source (i.e., charging). I initially assumed that this restriction would reduce the usefulness of Hey Siri, but then I realized that the place I’m most likely to use Hey Siri is also the one place my phone is always charging during use: in the car.

OS X iOS AirDrop

If you’re running OS X 10.10 Yosemite on your Macs, you can (finally) use AirDrop, Apple’s super-easy file-transfer feature, between Macs and iOS devices. (It used to be iOS-to-iOS and Mac-to-Mac, but not across platforms.)

When writing about iOS, I’m constantly taking screenshots on my iPhones and iPads, and I need to get those images to my Mac for production. After testing Dropbox, Photo Stream, innumerable specialty photo apps, and more under iOS 7 and earlier, I had settled on simply emailing screenshots to myself. It worked, but it was a pain. With iOS 8, I just tap the Share button in Photos, wait a couple seconds for my Mac to appear in the AirDrop area, and tap the Mac’s icon.

What’s especially nice about this feature is that if your iOS device and your Mac are configured with the same iCloud account, you don’t even need to approve the transfer on your Mac—the files are automatically transferred and saved in your Downloads folder. I suspect this is only a minor improvement for many people, but for me, it’s huge. As I mentioned on Twitter, “universal” AirDrop alone is a compelling argument for upgrading to Yosemite. This is the AirDrop I’ve been waiting for.

Phone/Mac SMS relay, Instant Hotspot, phone handoffs

iOS 8 debuted over a month ago, but two of its best features weren’t available until the release of the iOS 8.1 update. When used with a Mac running Yosemite, your 8.1-running iPhone essentially adds cellular capabilities—specifically, SMS and MMS messages, and cellular Internet—to your Mac. (These features could fall under the “covered everywhere” category, but they’re so much better than I expected them to be that I had to include them here.)

SMS relay On the SMS front, if you go to Settings > Messages > Text Message Forwarding, you can enable message forwarding for any or all of your Yosemite Macs (as well as for other iOS devices). Once you do—you’re required to enter a code on your phone; that code is provided by the device to which you’re forwarding—any SMS or MMS messages you’d normally receive on your phone will be relayed to Messages on your Mac (or iPad), and you can send SMS and MMS messages from your Mac (or iPad), as well.

Yes, this means that we’re finally getting closer to the promise of “all my messages on all my devices” that Apple teased back in mid-2011 when iMessage was announced.

Instant Hotspot When Yosemite was previewed earlier this year at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, the iOS 8/Yosemite Instant Hotspot feature didn’t exactly excite me. But in retrospect, that was likely because I’d never had a cellular plan that let me use my phone’s cellular-data connection with my other devices. When I upgraded to the iPhone 6 Plus last month, I finally switched from the legacy “unlimited” data plan for iPhone to one of AT&T’s current Mobile Share plans.

Now that I can do hotspots, I can take advantage of Instant Hotspot, and it’s pretty fantastic. I had to initially set up the hotspot the old fashioned way: Turning on the hotspot in Settings > Personal Hotspot; configuring a password; and then connecting my MacBook Air to the phone’s ad-hoc Wi-Fi network. But after this initial setup, using Instant Hotspot is dead simple: My iPhone-provided network always appears in my MacBook Air’s Wi-Fi menu; when I choose it, my laptop essentially tells the phone, “Hey, I need Internet access!” The phone automatically enables its hotspot, the laptop automatically connects to it, and I’m online. I don’t even need to take my phone out of my pocket or bag. This sort of integration is why people buy Apple. (One minor complaint: I wish I could give the hotspot a custom name—the hotspot feature uses the phone’s name, and I always name my iOS devices with an email address.

Phone “handoffs” The other iPhone-Mac feature I’m really liking is phone handoffs. The best way to explain this feature is with an example: The other day, I was doing some work on my MacBook Air in the kitchen when my wife called. My iPhone was in my office at the other end of the house, but a phone-call notification appeared on my MacBook’s screen; I clicked Accept, and I took the call on my laptop, which acted as a speakerphone.

Similarly, I can initiate calls on my Mac by clicking a phone number in Contacts, or even on a webpage. My phone—wherever it is—does the heavy lifting, and I never have to leave my computer. As long as my Mac and iPhone are on the same network and configured with the same iCloud account, phone handoffs just work. (Unlike Instant Hotspots and SMS relay, phone handoffs require only iOS 8 and Yosemite.)

Requirements Here’s a quick summary of the hardware and communication requirements for these features:

AirDrop, Instant Hotspot, and app Handoff require Bluetooth LE; Instant Hotspot requires iOS 8.1.

SMS relay requires that your phone and other devices be on the same local network; it also requires iOS 8.1.

Phone handoff to/from other devices requires that both devices be on the same local network.

Settings: Battery usage, notification disabling, visual options

iOS updates always include some neat little changes to settings and options, and iOS 8’s Settings app is no exception.

Per-app battery usage Perhaps my favorite new feature in Settings is a way to see which apps are sucking up your battery’s juice. Go to Settings > General > Usage > Battery Usage, and after a short wait, you see a screen listing recently used apps (with “recent” being your choice of the past 24 hours or the past seven days) along with the percentage of battery usage taken up by each, sorted by that usage.

Note that just because an app appears high on this list doesn’t mean it’s a degenerate battery hog. In most cases, it’s simply that you’ve been using the app frequently. For example, I use Reeder and Tweetbot a lot, so they appear at the top for me. Where you’d want to be concerned is if an app appears here that you don’t use frequently.

Also, keep in mind that these percentages refer to each app’s proportion of your actual battery use, not of your battery’s maximum charge. In other words, in the screenshot here, Reeder is responsible for 19 percent of all my battery use over the past seven days. It does not mean that Reeder has used 19 percent of a fully charged battery.

Easier notification disabling I’ve long complained about iOS’s notification settings. Earlier this year, I described one of the small but regularly annoying issues:

Turning off all notifications for a particular app requires multiple taps to deactivate banners/alerts, turn off app badges, deactivate sounds, and remove from Notification Center and the lock screen. A single option to deactivate all notifications for an app would be much appreciated.

In iOS 8, we finally (yes, I think this one actually deserves a “finally”) have a way to quickly disable notifications for an app. Just go to Settings > Notifications> [App Name] and disable Allow Notifications, and all of that app’s notification options will be turned off. Hallelujah.

More visual-accessibility options that help everyone In Settings > General > Accessibility, there are now more options for tweaking iOS’s appearance. Ostensibly for those with vision issues, many of these settings can also improve the experience for those with good vision. The new Increase Contrast screen offers three options: Reduce Transparency makes many translucent elements—such as Notification Center and Control Center—much less so, making them easier to use (if, to some people, less attractive). Darken Colors helps to increase overall contrast. And Reduce White Point essentially dims the screen a bit—this one is useful if you find your device’s lowest brightness level to still be too bright at night or in dark environments. (Another one that’s interesting, and that could come in handy in particular situations is Grayscale, which, as you’d expect, converts the screen’s color gamut to grayscale.)

Even dimmer screen dimming This one, also hidden in the Accessibility settings, seems minor, but I love it. I regularly read on my iOS devices at night before going to sleep. If I’m doing that reading in bed, the lights are out (because my better half is trying to sleep), so I turn the screen brightness all the way down. But iOS’s dimmest screen-brightness level has never been dim enough—it’s still uncomfortably bright when there’s no ambient light. (Some reading-focused apps have nice night-reading modes, but not all.)

My solution has long been to go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Accessibility Shortcut and select Invert Colors. Whenever I was in a dark environment, I would triple-press the Home button to invert the device’s screen colors so that white backgrounds are black, and black text is white. The result isn’t ideal—especially if there’s anything but text on the screen—but it works.

Under iOS 8.1, you can use this same triple-press shortcut to quickly change the brightness of the screen. Even better, you can reduce brightness much more than with the standard brightness-level slider (the one accessed via Control Center and the Settings app). Here’s how:

Go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Zoom. Enable Zoom. Tap the screen three times with three fingers. This brings up a zoom-options popover. Tap Choose Filter, and then tap Low Light. The screen will dim considerably. Tap outside the popover to dismiss it. Make sure Zoom Region, a bit lower on that screen, is set to Full Screen Zoom. (It was for me, but some readers report that it wasn’t for them.) Disable Zoom to restore the screen to its normal brightness. Go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Accessibility Shortcut and choose Zoom.

Now, whenever you triple-press the Home button, you’ll toggle this “extra dimming” mode on or off. (If you selected multiple Accessibility Shortcut options, you’ll instead see a popover listing those options; tap one to toggle it.) Note that the brightness level of your “extra dimmed” screen is relative to your screen’s current brightness setting, which means that if you want it really dim, you should use Control Center to reduce brightness to the lowest level, and then triple-press the Home button. The result is a screen that’s much dimmer than you’ve probably seen before, and thus much better for use in the dark.

(Interestingly, this dimmed mode really is a screen filter, rather than a further dimming of the screen. You can see this if you rotate your device 90 degrees—as the screen switches orientations, the filter rotates more slowly than the rest of the screen, revealing the screen’s actual brightness level for a fraction of a second.)

(Thanks to Cult of Mac for figuring out the triple-tap trick.)

The Home and Lock screens: Tweaks for geeks

The Home and Lock screens may not seem much different than they were under iOS 7, but even they’ve received some useful tweaks in iOS 8. And don’t forget Notification Center and Control Center.

Accurate Control Center brightness previews Whenever Control Center is visible, the rest of the screen is dimmed to give Control Center focus. This makes a lot of sense, but under iOS 7, the behavior made it difficult to choose the correct brightness level: Because the “real” screen, behind Control Center, was dimmed, you’d end up opening Control Center, adjusting brightness, closing Control Center to see the result…and repeating until you got the brightness level you wanted.

One of my favorite minor details of iOS 8 is that whenever you touch the brightness slider in Control Center, the “real” screen behind it is temporarily restored to normal brightness, so you see an accurate preview while you’re adjusting the level.

Keyboard input ignored when accessing Control Center Another little Control Center touch—no pun intended—I like is that if you swipe up from the bottom of the screen to access Control Center while an onscreen keyboard is visible, any keyboard input is ignored. In iOS 7, I’d frequently “type” characters while trying to show Control Center; this happens far less frequently now.

Landscape-orientation folders If you’ve got an iPhone 6 Plus, you’ve likely noticed that some apps give you an iPad-like layout—a sidebar of some sort on the left, with content on the right—in landscape orientation. In most apps, I find this new layout to be largely useless, as the aspect ratio of the 6 Plus’s screen means you don’t get much height when in landscape orientation—it’s usually more useful to just use the full width of the screen for content.

But a landscape-orientation feature I do like on the Plus is that, in addition to the Home screen rotating, as it does on the iPad, you get a view of folders that’s currently available only on the 6 Plus. Specifically, when a folder has more than nine items in it, you can see multiple “screens” within that folder simultaneously.

On the other hand, this feature reminds me of one of my least favorite landscape-orientation-Home-screen behaviors: When you rotate your iPad or iPhone 6 Plus into landscape orientation, the Home screen rotates, but every icon moves. And because iOS-device screens are rectangular, every icon except for a few in the top row changes its relative position, as well. For example, in portrait orientation on my 6 Plus, the music icon is the first icon in the third row; in landscape, it’s the third icon on the second row. I’ve disliked this behavior since the original iPad. (Interestingly, on the 6 Plus—but not on any iPad—the dock always stays along the short edge of the screen, with each icon in the same relative location.)

Medical ID For years, I’ve created a custom lock screen, complete with emergency-contact info, for each of my iOS devices. I’ve included phone numbers, email addresses, my blood type, and medication allergies, along with a note offering a reward for returning the phone.

In iOS 8, if you open the Health app and tap the Medical ID button at the bottom of the screen, you can create an official “Medical ID” screen with important info: name, date of birth, allergies, medications, blood type, organ-donor status, height, weight, multiple emergency contacts, and medical notes. (I use this last field to include a “Reward if returned” note that includes my email address.) Once created, this screen is accessible from the lock screen, so someone who finds your phone or—worst-case scenario—you can quickly see all this info, whether it’s to return your device to you or to provide emergency care.

(FYI, I still create a custom lock screen, but now it includes a note that reads, “Swipe right & tap Emergency > Medical ID for reward/contact info.” I’m assuming that, until this feature has been around for a while, most people who find my phone aren’t going to realize that the Medical ID screen even exists.)

Interactive notifications In iOS 7 and prior, whenever you received a notification, you’d have to open the source app—unlocking your device first, if necessary—to act. I love the fact that in iOS 8, I can reply to many message-based notifications (Mail, Messages, Tweetbot, and more) right from the notification itself. Just swipe to the left and tap Reply, and you can immediately type a message. This even works on the lock screen, though for some apps, you’ll still need to unlock your phone to type the reply.

Speaking of notifications, I also like that you can remove individual notifications by left-swiping, leaving other notifications from the same app in place. And you can delete email messages, or mark them as read, right from Notification Center. (You can even process Notification banners as they appear. For example, pull down on the bottom of a Mail banner, and you get options to Mark As Read or Trash.) On the other hand, you still can’t easily clear out Notification Center completely. You must remove one app’s notifications, then another’s, and so on, tapping a tiny X button, then a tiny Clear button for each.

Safari: Force desktop view, new tab view, and more

Safari hasn’t gotten a massive overhaul in iOS 8, but it’s gained a few neat features.

Show desktop version of site One of my biggest frustrations with mobile browsers is that many websites insist on serving phones (and sometimes tablets) oversimplified mobile versions of webpages. This is especially frustrating when the mobile sites are missing features or options available on the desktop versions.

In iOS 8 Safari, when you get stuck with the mobile version of a website, tap the URL field and then swipe down on the webpage, and a couple new hidden options are revealed: Add To Favorites and Request Desktop Site. Tap the latter to reload the desktop version of the current page. (Unfortunately, these options sit on a translucent background that makes them nearly invisible on some sites.)

New tab view on iPad If you tap the little tab-view button in iPad Safari’s toolbar (it looks like two squares stacked on top of each other), you get a nice overview of all open webpages, with pages from the same website stacked together, Tap any page to view it. I find this new view to be much more usable than the one in iOS 7—enough so that I’ve disable the tab bar to gain some additional vertical space for webpage content.

Per-site searching Go to Settings > Safari > Quick Website Search and enable Quick Website Search, and you can add quick-search shortcuts for most sites by simply visiting the site once. For example, after browsing Amazon.com, you’ll notice that the Quick Website Search list now includes amazon.com as a Website Shortcut. Going forward, you can search Amazon by simply typing amazon [search term] in Safari’s URL/search bar.

Per-tab Private Browsing This is a simple, but welcome, change: You can now enable Private Browsing for a particular tab, leaving all other tabs “public.” (Under iOS 7, Private Browsing was an all-or-nothing feature: Enabling it closed all tabs and started you with a blank, private slate.)

Scan your card for online purchases iCloud Keychain makes it easy to quickly enter previously used credit cards when making online purchases, but what if you’re using a new card for the first time? In iOS 8 Safari, when you tap in a credit-card-number field, you see a new Scan Credit Card option. Tap it, and you can then use your iOS device’s camera to “scan” your credit card’s number. It can even scan the card’s expiration date. (This scanning feature is also available when adding credit cards to Apple Pay.)

Messages: Soundbites, per-conversation Do Not Disturb

Unlike on OS X, Messages on iOS has always been pretty reliable for me. But it’s also had far fewer features. In iOS 8, Apple has brought iOS messages a bit closer to the desktop version.

Soundbites If you’ve followed Apple’s iOS and Yosemite PR at all, you’ve likely seen the company’s demonstrations of Soundbites, a new Messages feature that lets you quickly send an audio message to someone—and lets the recipient listen to that message even more easily. When viewing a conversation screen, just tap and hold the little recording icon, and then talk. When you’re done, slide your finger to the up-arrow button and release, and the message is sent. The recipient can listen to the message by simply raising their iPhone to their ear; they can even reply the same way. Soundbites works really well, and while I often text because I don’t want to talk, sometimes quickly speaking a message is a whole lot more convenient than tapping it out.

Conversation options My favorite new Messages feature is the capability to set Do Not Disturb mode for individual conversations (message threads): Just tap the Details button within a conversation, and then enable Do Not Disturb. It really comes in handy when I need to leave notifications enabled, but a particular texting session between family members or friends gets out of hand. (On that same screen are a few other useful new options: One lets you leave a group conversation entirely—think of it as a passive-aggressive way to say, “Folks, it’s been fun, but you’re driving me nuts.” Another lets you quickly send your current location to other people in the conversation, and a third lets you rename group conversations for easier future reference.)

Camera & Photos: Manual exposure, 60 fps, Camera Roll

Each year, the biggest camera improvements usually come in the form of hardware upgrades on the latest iPhone and iPad models. But the Camera and Photos apps usually get a few tweaks, as well.

Manual exposure control When taking a photo with an iPhone or iPad, you can tap anywhere on the screen to force the camera to focus on that point. But under iOS 8, the resulting focus-indicator square sports a brightness icon—drag it up or down to manually adjust the shot’s exposure level. You even see a live preview of how adjusting the level will affect the resulting image.

60 fps iOS 7 introduced the capability—as long as you had an iPhone 5s—to record video at 120 frames per second (fps). The main reason to do so is that you can later slow down parts of that video to 30fps and get great slow-motion video. The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus up that capture rate to a whopping 240 fps, making slo-mo videos even better. The downside to taking slo-mo video is that, because it’s capturing four to eight times as many frames per second, it eats up a lot more of your phone’s precious flash storage.

What many people don’t realize is that if you go to Settings > Photos & Camera, and scroll down near the bottom of that screen, you can enable Record Video At 60 FPS to record standard video (in other words, using the Camera app’s Video mode, rather than Slo-Mo mode) at 60fps. You can’t use these clips with iOS’s slow-motion feature, but you get standard videos that have twice the frame rate as normal, but require half to a quarter of the storage space of slo-mo videos.

Welcome back, Camera Roll A minor, but welcome, improvement in iOS 8.1 is the return of iOS 7’s Camera Roll, replacing the (apparently unpopular) Recently Added album of 8.0 through 8.0.2.

Find My iPhone: Send Last Location

I’ve long been a fan of Apple’s Find My iPhone service, which lets you find a lost—or stolen—iOS device. But if your device’s battery dies before you can locate it—or before you even realize it’s gone—you’re out of luck. Under iOS 8, go to Settings > iCloud > Find My iPhone (or iPad or iPod touch), and enable Send Last Location. Now, whenever your device’s battery gets “critically low,” the device will—assuming it has an Internet connection—automatically send its location to the Find My iPhone servers. When that battery dies, you’ll no longer be able to track the device location in real time, but you’ll at least know its last location.

Peer-to-Peer AirPlay

One of the best reasons to get an Apple TV is AirPlay, which (among other things) lets you easily mirror your iOS device’s screen on a TV or video projector. But before iOS 8, your Apple TV and iOS device needed to be on the same local network to make an AirPlay connection. This made it difficult to, for example, use an Apple TV and AirPlay in a hotel room or at a conference. And if the Wi-Fi network is crowded, AirPlay mirroring’s performance can suffer.

With iOS 8 (and Apple TV software 7.0 or later), your devices no longer need to be on the same network—or on any network at all. Each simply needs to have Bluetooth and Wi-Fi enabled. Assuming they do, your Apple TV should show up in your iOS device’s list of AirPlay destinations (in Control Center). When you choose it, the Apple TV will automatically set up an ad-hoc Wi-Fi network, and your iOS device will join that network, allowing you to use AirPlay directly. In addition to being easy to set up, peer-to-peer AirPlay will often provide better performance, because no other devices will be sharing the network.

The big “but” here is that this new feature works only on the third-generation Apple TV.

Easy video screen capture

Taking a screenshot of your iOS device’s screen is simple: Just press the Home and Sleep/Wake buttons simultaneously. But if, like me, you need to capture video of your iOS device’s screen, the procedure is a bit more involved. Under iOS 7 and earlier, it required you to install a third-party app, such as Reflector, on your Mac, and then mirror your iPhone or iPad screen to your Mac using AirPlay.

With iOS 8 and Yosemite, it gets a little easier:

Connect your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to your Mac using Apple’s standard Lighting-to-USB cable. Launch QuickTime Player on the Mac. In QuickTime Player, choose New > New Movie Recording (not New Screen Recording). In the resulting movie-recording window, click the tiny downward-pointing arrow next to the red record button. Choose your iOS device under Camera. Open that menu again to choose your audio source. (To record your iOS device’s audio, choose it; to record a voiceover, choose your Mac’s microphone.) Choose High or Maximum recording quality. Click the red record button to begin recording; click the button again to end recording.

The result is a QuickTime movie of whatever you did on your iOS device’s screen. A nice touch is that QuickTime Player automatically tweaks the status bar in your recording to show a full battery and a solid Wi-Fi signal, to remove your cellular carrier’s logo, and more.

Maps: 3D Flyover Tours

Want to take a tour of London, or Paris, or San Francisco? Launch the Maps app and search for the city; at the top of the screen, you’ll see the text “3D Flyover Tour of City.” Tap Start, and you’ll see an impressive flyover tour, with prominent landmarks labeled as you “fly over” them.

Alas, the list of cities for which Apple offers these tours is currently short, but for those cities, it’s a fun diversion.

Third-party apps: Auto-fill passwords

I’m a huge fan of 1Password for iOS for storing and retrieving my myriad logins and passwords, but Apple’s iCloud Keychain has been dutifully, automatically saving my online passwords, as well. In fact, under iOS 7 I ended up using iCloud Keychain more than I expected, because it worked directly in Safari, while 1Password required me to perform a few extra steps to retrieve website passwords.

Thanks to iOS 8’s extensions feature, 1Password can finally work directly in my browser, so I’m using it constantly. But iOS 8 also brings another advantage to iCloud Keychain: It can now work within apps. If I download an iOS app that’s associated with a website where I already have an account, the developer of that app can enable iCloud Keychain support, so I can quickly log in to the app using my website credentials. +1 for convenience.