As the testing went on, it became evident that the key to making the Watch work was speed. An interaction could last only five seconds, 10 at most. They simplified some features and took others out entirely because they just couldn’t be done quickly enough. Lynch and team had to reengineer the Watch’s software twice before it was sufficiently fast. An early version of the software served you information in a timeline, flowing chronologically from top to bottom.
WIRED’s interview is decent with some interesting background, like the experimentation with a timeline interface a la Pebble Time. The real gem in this story is that Apple gave WIRED a gallery of Apple Watch UI assets. I’m fascinated by the intricacies of the Watch’s software design. It is cool to see Apple publicise this aspect of the device in similar regard to how they present their custom alloys of aluminium, steel and gold in marketing. It shows they care about it.
@eli_schiff Also the Activity app design is identical to 8-yr-old PolarClock screensaver, equally hideous colors
I don’t care that a cool calendar visualisation from 2007 bears a resemblance to Apple’s fitness tracking visualisation from 2014. Design is as much about how it works as how it looks. These two pieces of software behave very differently.
Unlike Polar Clock, the rings in the Watch’s Activity app can go round the circle more than once, to indicate more than 100% percent completion. It’s not clear from static screenshots but the Activity app is actually three-dimensional. The more intense shadow denotes that a particular ring is ‘stacked up’ on itself, like a coil.
The Polar Clock is a very different metaphor. The rings fill to 100 and then reset to 0 on a two dimensional plane. The labels are inscribed into the rings. In contrast, the Apple Watch labels statically float at the top centre of the screen and animate outwards, leaving small symbols that are also fixed in place.
My aim is not to ‘defend’ Apple or vilipend Dane Baker’s criticism, whether you believe Apple ripped off Polar Clock or not is immaterial. On pure aesthetics, I think the Activity app colour choices are poor and very generic. That’s beside the point, though.
I’m just trying to convey a sense of the things that makeup application design which are not represented by motionless screenshots. It’s not a simple matter of aesthetics and functionality. I call it ‘behaviour’ but that’s not an encompassing term. A better word eludes me.
Apps can look good, have many features but behave poorly. iOS 7 is an example of the opposite; something that behaves well but looks ugly in many places.
If a customer wants to try out the Apple Watch without going through the try-on and sales process, they will be able to use a new demo unit connected to an iPad mini. Additionally, customers who already know which Apple Watch they would like to purchase can buy one via a dedicated purchase station.
Gurman’s story has a lot of new details about the store sales process, but this stands out. The ‘watches-under-glass’ approach Apple has spoken about before felt lacking to me. The appeal of the Apple Store is that you can walk in off the street and immediately touch iPhones and iPads.
Interacting with Apple’s products is a huge part of clinching the sale. Regardless of how pretty Apple’s jewellery tables are, they do not offer the same customer experience opportunities as Apple’s other products which are not locked behind glass.
I would be concerned if Apple’s only answer to this problem was to make an appointment. I’m really happy to see that Apple will also put these ‘placards’ on show for anyone to try out the Watch impromptu. The text on the iPad mini in the photo confirms that the Watch unit is responsive to user input, rather than just looping a demo video.
Tim Cook, now Apple’s CEO, says that he worried about Tevanian leaving, and urged Steve in 2004 to figure out another challenge to keep the brilliant software engineer at Apple. “Steve looked at me,” Cook remembers, “and goes, ‘I agree he’s really smart. But he’s decided he doesn’t want to work. I’ve never found in my whole life that you could convince someone who doesn’t want to work hard to work hard.’”
I highlighted very few things in my reading of Becoming Steve Jobs, but I highlighted this. Tim Cook pushed Jobs to find Tevanian a new ‘challenge’ to keep him at Apple. This has direct parallels to recent stories about Jony Ive who has apparently considered leaving his role at Apple in the last decade. True or false, some see the Apple Watch as a way to keep Ive interested in staying at Apple. This anecdote shows that the executive team would at least consider projects of this nature.
I’ve always felt that the flattening of Apple’s user interface that began in iOS 7 was as much a strategic move as an aesthetic one. Our first reaction was to realize that an unadorned interface makes it easier to focus on content.
But with this new display technology, it’s clear that interfaces with fewer pixels have another advantage. A richly detailed button from iOS 6 would need more of that precious juice strapped to our wrists. Never underestimate the long-term benefits of simplification.
I really don’t believe that the aesthetics introduced in iOS 7 was a tactical manoeuvre. Ive’s flat design was not ‘strategic’. I think you can say iOS 7 was triggered by company politics because I think the actual reason iOS changed appearance so radically is easily traced in time.
Between iOS 6 and iOS 7 Forstall left and Ive took charge. Ive liked the flatter aesthetic which meant that iOS became flatter. The cause and effect isn’t hidden here. Forstall may have wanted to move away from skeuomorphism eventually but he wasn’t planning on it for 2013: new features like iTunes Radio had already been built out with iOS 6 aesthetics by the time Forstall left in November 2012.
If Forstall was still in power, do I think the Watch would feature Corinthian leather and glossy textures? There’s a chance. The square iPod nano shipped with exactly that. The more likely outcome is that it would be toned down to suit a 1.5 inch display because the design of iOS and Watch OS are on different tracks.
I think this approaches my bigger point. Watch OS and iOS are not mirror images of each other. They are different. A skeuomorphic iOS and a flat Watch OS could definitely coexist. A ‘strategic’ master plan to have both devices on the same design path is unnecessary. There are bits of Watch OS that will never come back to iOS and there are bits of Watch OS that should come back to iOS. But, if there really was a long play to synthesise both OS’s then they should already be the same. Arguably, iOS should already feature dark black UI’s. It doesn’t though — proof by contradiction that they are independent products with independent user interfaces.
I hear the same revisionist perspective on iOS 8 extensions. ‘Extensions would have never worked without a redesign like iOS 7 due to the clash of design elements’. This is not true either. With iOS 7, Apple overlays extension UI with little adornment. However, in a iOS 6 design world, Apple would have just shoved massive drop-shadows between the pieces of UI to make them distinct units. It seems like the obvious progression today but I think people forget what tricks were used before.
It is thoroughly documented, almost more than anything of recent Apple journalism, how iOS design became dictated by Ive and Apple rushed to engineer the new direction under his leadership. I don’t see why people find it necessary to conjure up other reasoning for the change.
Several months ago, we began reviewing apps before they are published on Google Play to better protect the community and improve the app catalog. This new process involves a team of experts who are responsible for identifying violations of our developer policies earlier in the app lifecycle. We value the rapid innovation and iteration that is unique to Google Play, and will continue to help developers get their products to market within a matter of hours after submission, rather than days or weeks. In fact, there has been no noticeable change for developers during the rollout.
It’s worth noting that Google’s human-based review process is measured in hours, not days. You could argue that Google’s review process is not as extensive as Apple’s, but even taking that as given, Apple’s turnaround times look ridiculous. Doubling the amount of time it took Google to investigate each submission would still represent a much shorter period that the rate at which the iTunes team processes submissions. Apple could definitely improve turnaround times.
Apple Watch won’t save us from shitty behavior but it will limit our distractions. Think of the Watch as a seive through which only the most relevant information lands on your wrist. Your interaction with that information is also whittled to nearly a few contact points: read, respond, or reachout.
The overwhelming attitude I’ve seen in the past few days is that the tech community treat notifications as a social bad, that people hate consistent alerts and buzzes. As Clayton describes it, for this group of people, the Watch can act as a ‘sieve’ to help prioritise and sort what’s important.
That’s fine. In addition, however, I think there’s another group of people who have been overlooked in commentary about smartwatches. These people love notifications and lap up new ways of staying ‘tuned in’ to their friends and the world. From secondary school through to university, I have never seen someone get annoyed at the number of times their phone is buzzing for attention. These people want to be able to respond even faster than they already can. For these people — I would guess people of this class are typically of the younger generations — getting notifications isn’t a frustration but an addiction.
What’s genius about the Watch is that it can serve both groups of people well. For people like Clayton Morris, it can be an intermediary filter to let only significant things through. For others, it can be used as a second screen, a medium that can keep them even more connected.
I’ve decided I am buying an Apple Watch Sport in Space Grey. I don’t want to splash out an steel casing with a product I still have many questions and reservations about. By the second-generation, I’ll be able to make a better assessment about how much I want to spend on a smartwatch. I can’t really dilly-dally in deciding this value proposition either: I’m concerned that the Sport will sell out through preorders.
Regarding colour, I like black things. They fit in best for me. If I was going to buy a steel, I’d probably end up with a space black one of those too. Moreover, the only way to get a black band (without buying a band separately) is to get a Space Grey Sport. If Apple offered silver aluminium with black band in their preset collections, maybe I would have bought that instead.
On size, as much as I want to have the larger display to have the higher resolution display, my wrists are so small that the 42 mm will look ridiculous. Using the ‘Actual size’ comparison in the Apple Store app confirmed this. From my perspective as a developer, I think using a 38 mm as a daily driver is beneficial because I believe that’s the screen size that most normal people will buy as well. Having the same hardware as my app’s users is definitely a factor for me. Therefore, albeit mostly driven by the constraints of my physical anatomy, I’m buying the 38 mm Watch for $349.
The user interface of Watch OS is a distilled form of the iOS platform, in many ways refined more so than iOS has been since Forstall’s departure. On a technical level, Watch OS is iOS but that is irrelevant. The UI layer is independent.
Whilst the visual style is a large distinction (I would argue superior interpretation of a flat UI than achieved on iOS), Watch OS exhibits the same behaviour as the phone. Apps have push-pop navigation, table views, top-left back buttons, pages with a row of dot indicators and scrolling content. The Digital Crown augments the experience … the fundamental ways to structure your app remain the same as UIKit.
However, one thing I noticed is that the layering of navigation controllers is the opposite as to what you would expect coming from iOS. On iOS, views are presented as stacking top-to-bottom. This means when you use the swipe gesture to go back, the finger pulls back the top view to reveal the second one underneath.
Weirdly, this metaphor is not carried over to the Apple Watch. On Watch OS, views stack in reverse. When you pull back, you pull the previous view over the top over the current view. The ‘cards’ get laid on top of each other when navigating backwards. You can see this in the video demo above; compare how view A replaces view B when gesturing on the watch and the phone.
This difference will go unnoticed by the general public. After all, it doesn’t affect how navigation controllers function, sliding back still goes back. changed the metaphorical hierarchy on this new platform. I don’t know why they did it — there’s a chance its simply an oversight — but I have a theory.
At small sizes, which the Watch screen certainly is, it’s easier to see something new coming onto the screen than something old getting removed. Being able to tell early is important because — when using the swipe gesture — your finger will obscure much of the display. The Watch OS even makes the disappearing view recede to further emphasis which context is ‘going away’. Making it easier to see what is happening makes it easier to see if you started the back gesture by accident, which might be a common error with edge-swipe gestures on a tiny touchscreen canvas. It all adds up. I may also be drastically over thinking this. I’d love to hear about any alternative explanations though.
It is also entirely at odds with the position adopted by David Cameron and most governments around the world, who believe that they need ever-increasing monitoring powers to combat crime and terror, dismissing the concerns of civil libertarians.
Cook disagrees fundamentally. “None of us should accept that the government or a company or anybody should have access to all of our private information. This is a basic human right. We all have a right to privacy. We shouldn’t give it up. We shouldn’t give in to scare-mongering or to people who fundamentally don’t understand the details.”
The debate here is about a new policy of some tech companies, Apple included, that encrypt data in such a way that the decryptions key are only stored locally on user’s devices. Entities like the NSA cannot simply subpoena Apple’s servers to get at data stored in this way, because the unlock codes are in the possession of the user, not on Apple’s servers.
Obviously, governments hate this. This means collecting evidence for things like terrorist plots is now much, much harder and politicians are starting to push back against this type of security.
Personally, I tend to agree with Cook. Apple should not be prevented from offering this level of privacy, simply to enable institutions to detect criminal activity made by a minority of the user base. Threats of terrorism cannot hold back technological development that has far-reaching benefits to society.
That being said, I think Cook will relax this stance, to some degree, in the future. There will come a time when Apple wants to release new products and features that rely on personal data analysis. When this happens, I expect Apple to make everything explicitly opt-in to remain consistent PR-wise.
We’re announcing a new watch called Pebble Time with a new timeline interface. Pebble Time features a new color e-paper display and microphone for responding to notifications. No compromises on what you love about Pebble: up to 7 days of battery life, water resistance and customizability. Pebble Time is fully compatible with all 6,500+ existing Pebble apps and watch faces. Three colors available exclusively on Kickstarter. Pebble Time starts shipping in May.
It’s going to retail for $199. When compared against the $349 Apple Watch Sport, I can’t comprehend how this product is compelling for iPhone users. This smartwatch doesn’t ship until May — even if you are unsure about the Apple Watch, you might as well wait until April to compare.
At a software level, the Apple Watch will outclass the Pebble Time in every way. Third-parties cannot integrate with peripherals as closely as Apple can. The Watch has special privileges: it can have a permanent connection with the host iPhone, sending data far beyond the current list of notifications. I foresee features like Handoff are crucial to the smartwatch-phone experience and you will miss them on non-Apple accessories.
On hardware, Pebble has gone in a different direction to Apple. (Small devices require tradeoffs). Rather than OLED, the Time uses a colour eInk display, which can show 64 colours. This means you could play a NES Super Mario platformer on your wrist, but things like photos are not going to work. This is an interesting decision. Although I question whether users will want to look at their ‘universe of photos’ a la Apple Watch, almost any app notification nowadays benefits from a full colour image. Facebook profile pictures being the obvious example.
In addition, e-paper display refresh rates are lacklustre. The Pebble Time UI has some interesting context transitions, reminiscent of hand-drawn animations. The Clock irregularly transforms into a smaller representation, for instance. It’s a cool effect on the concept videos. However, on the watch itself the frame-rate of this transition is severely impaired by the screen technology. It looks bad.
The e-paper display does mean that the Time has a week of battery life. This sounds awesome, but I really don’t think battery longevity is enough to ‘outperform’ Apple’s efforts. Smartwatches have natural charge cycles. Use in day, charge at night. As a long as a smartwatch can last the waking hours, I don’t think anything beyond that threshold matters.
Bringing utility to the table is much more important than battery life. The Apple Watch simply does a lot more stuff than the Pebble does. Plus, ostensibly, it looks a lot nicer on your wrist and is available in far superior material finishes.
Well, one million of those users were people who downloaded iOS 8 and either never reopened Twitter, or forgot their password and couldn’t log back in. The other three million were lost due to Safari’s Reader section, which no longer pings Twitter automatically for content like it did in iOS 7. Users who were counted as active because of this automatic pinging on iOS 7 were then lost when they updated to iOS 8.
Basically, Safari’s Shared Links section made you count as an active Twitter user, even if you never opened the view on iOS 7, as long as you had a Twitter account logged in in Settings. iOS 8 stops Twitter from counting you as an active user because it only fetches when Shared Links is opened. Twitter blames this change for 3 million users ‘leaving’.
However, I don’t think you can say that users have left Twitter because of iOS 8. These users should never have been counted as active, because they really weren’t. The way the Safari app worked before just made them classify as active in Twitter’s analytics. It was over-counting.
The new behaviour is a more accurate representation of how many people actually use the service. The three million weren’t “lost” — they should never have been included in the statistics at all.
The upcoming laptop is so thin that Apple employees are said to refer to the device as the “MacBook Stealth” internally. In order to reach that new level of portability, Apple not only slimmed down the trackpad and tweaked the speakers but the ports as well.
The upcoming 12-inch Air has the fewest amount of ports ever on an Apple computer, as can be seen in the rendition above. On the right side is a standard headphone jack and dual-microphones for input and noise-canceling. On the left side is solely the new USB Type-C port. Yes, Apple is currently planning to ditch standard USB ports, the SD Card slot, and even its Thunderbolt and MagSafe charging standards on this new notebook.
This laptop is going to be controversial. ‘Only Apple’ would have the bravado to reduce connectivity to one (new sized) USB port and a headphone jack. This isn’t just a boycott of industry standard inputs, which is the naive response from critics, Apple is openly forgoing inclusion of its own patented connectors, like Thunderbolt and MagSafe.
If this laptop ships as described, this is one of the ballsiest things Apple has done for years. Because you will power this thing through the USB port, you literally won’t be able to use an accessory whilst it charges. The rest of the redesign is pretty standard although I was disappointed by the appearance of the base. The speaker holes look ugly in the mockup and the trackpad is too close to the keyboard for my liking.
I may like the look more when I see it for real, so we can wait a bit before getting too angry. There’s no getting away from it. Stripping away all connectivity is a massive statement, especially if Apple kills off the old 11 inch Air when this is released.
Workflow is your personal automation tool, enabling you to drag and drop any combination of actions to create powerful workflows.
Workflow includes over 100 actions, including those for Contacts, Calendar, Maps, Music, Photos, Camera, Reminders, Safari, AirDrop, Twitter, Facebook, Dropbox, Evernote, and iCloud Documents, to name a few.
I’m not sure what to say about Workflow. iOS places too many constraints on third-party apps for Workflow to ever fully satisfy what I want from an app like this. A forgiving mentality would say that this is the best implementation they could make within the system-imposed limits. I can’t think at that kind of level, though. Personally, I’m left frustrated that the app can only do so much. I don’t care that the reason for the shortcomings is outside of the developer’s control.
The only way an automation app will ever meet my standards is if Apple made it and created a plethora of integration points to enable complex interactions between apps. Given Apple’s lack of attention for Automator on OS X, I doubt that will ever happen.
Workflow caters for a slim slice of the user base that has no ambition of doing more. Frankly, Apple shouldn’t have featured this app in the way that they did. Novices will be lost — the app is too complicated for most people. For those who do understand it, once the novelty wears off, the app will fall into disuse once the walls are hit. A Mac (and/or a set of dedicated iOS apps) is better at all of the tasks Workflow can offer, simple as that. If you don’t have a Mac, then you’ll get lasting value out of Workflow.
Samsung has closed its high-profile Samsung Experience store in one of Europe’s biggest shopping centres.
“We regret to announce that we will be closing the Samsung Experience Store at Westfield Stratford City at the end of this year”, Samsung told CNET today. Photographs posted on Twitter by visitors to the mall in London show the shop already being dismantled.
reddit recently raised a round of $50 million where the new investors agreed to give back 10% of the shares they bought to the community in the form of a “cryptocurrency” that was to be “backed” by reddit shares. For legal reasons, it is unlikely we will make the cryptocurrency exchangeable for actual shares, since we are not a public company, and therefore it would be illegal to give shares to millions of people. Howevever, we are working on a legal strategy and I’m sure the cryptocurrency will be exchangeable for something of value.
Also, we used the word “cryptocurrency” originally, but a better term is “digital asset”, since in many ways notes will not be like a currency at all. For instance, we are not planning on letting users buy gold with the cryptocurrency (although we haven’t eliminated that possibility).
The asset will be based on blockchain technology. As I have said in many previous reddit comments, we are not committing to any particular protocol at this time, but our preference is either for colored coins or sidechains depending on the winds of the bitcoin world in the coming months (the bitcoin world changes very, very fast, and we want to be certain we pick the best technology).
So, 1/6th of Reddit users will randomly be gifted a ‘digital asset’ that will probably be exchangeable for something of value at some point in the future. Maybe. Reddit tries out some weird stuff.
