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Apple Details How It Rebuilt Siri→

Derrick Harris:

Apple announced during a Wednesday night meetup at its Cupertino, California, headquarters that the company’s popular Siri application is powered by Apache Mesos.

We at Mesosphere are obviously thrilled about Apple’s public validation of the technology on which our Datacenter Operating System is based. If Apple trusts Mesos to underpin Siri — a complex application that handles Apple-only-knows-how-many voice queries per day from hundreds of millions of iPhone and iPad users — that says a lot about how mature Mesos is and how ready it is to make a big impact in companies of all stripes.

According to Apple’s slides, today’s Siri is the third generation of the company’s voice-based assistant.

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Instapaper on Apple Watch→

The team at betaworks has released Instapaper for Apple Watch today. With the Watch, Instapaper eschews text (you don’t want to read long articles on your wrist) in favor of text-to-speech – introduced back in September.

Today we’re introducing a whole new way to get through your articles with Instapaper for the Apple Watch. The Watch app allows you to navigate to any saved article and trigger text-to-speech playback from your iPhone […]

Once an article is selected, the Watch app provides you with a text-to-speech controller that includes options to play, pause, fast forward, rewind, change the rate, and view the article’s current progress […]

As Marco Arment writes, Instapaper is now also an audio app, which makes it suitable for the Watch. Nice idea, especially because it still syncs reading/listening position between devices.

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‘Hours, the Apple Watch, and Turning an App Into a Business’→

Jeremy Olson on making Hours free and shifting their focus on turning a “simple app” into a business:

How do you break into business and the enterprise? We like Slack’s bottom-up approach. Start by making the best solution for individuals, who in turn advocate adoption for their team, who in turn evangelize to other teams…and up the chain it goes. If startups can make this strategy work in the Enterprise, as Slack has, then they can focus on creating a great experience for the end-user instead of a bloated feature list to pass a corporate approval checklist.

Hours is an excellent time tracker. I’m curious to see if this strategy will work out for them, and if other developers are tweaking their plans to follow a similar route.

See also: Dan Counsell’s advice from last year.

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NightStand for Apple Watch→

Cool-looking upcoming Apple Watch dock by ElevationLab:

NightStand makes daily charging a breeze. Just set your watch on, from out of the corner of your eye, no careful alignment required. Locks to your bedside table so you never have to hunt for the cord. Undocking is one-handed. Solid, soft, seamless construction. Low-profile, minimal design.

It would have been nice if Apple included a charging dock with every Apple Watch. I’m intrigued by the NightStand because of how it can be placed vertically anywhere:

Optionally mounts vertically. NightStand ships with an ultra-strong, optional to use, custom 3M adhesive back (the same adhesive GoPro and our highly-rated Anchor headphone mount uses). Mount NightStand safely to the side of your bed frame, stealthily behind your headboard, on your wall anywhere. If you ever have trouble removing it, just heat it with a hair dryer to soften the adhesive.

$29, ships May 29th.

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Apple Watch App Store Going Live Today

Apple has begun opening the doors to the Apple Watch App Store, featuring iPhone apps that have been updated with Watch compatibility. According to BuzzFeed, more than 3000 Watch apps have been approved by Apple, and all of them will be available in the App Store section of the Apple Watch app for iPhone today.

In a screenshot shared by Buzzfeed, it appears that the App Store for Apple Watch will feature curated sections for categories such as Healthy Living, Games, and more. However, at the moment the Apple Watch app is only displaying a list of recommended apps by Apple, which include Twitter, Things, Wunderlist, Uber, Evernote, and Instagram. Apple is also promoting two games – Rules and Trivia Crack, both updated with Apple Watch support. A full refresh of the App Store for Apple Watch with more sections and lists is expected to go live later today.

In the meantime, Apple has also updated the App Store for iPhone with new badges to indicate whether an app offers Apple Watch compatibility. In search results and app descriptions, you’ll now see a badge with the app’s Apple Watch icon, as well as screenshots of the Apple Watch version underneath regular iPhone screenshots.

The new badge is also available on the App Store for iPad, with a label that says “Offers Apple Watch App for iPhone”. Currently, screenshots of Apple Watch apps are not available on the iPad App Store.

djay Comes to Apple Watch, Mac App Gains Video Mixing

Popular DJ app djay (which I covered numerous times on MacStories in the past) has announced today an Apple Watch counterpart that will bring a slimmed down interface with controls and music selection to the wrist.

On Apple Watch, djay will allow users to import tracks stored in the iPhone’s Music app, automix songs from a connected Spotify account, and even apply effects and loops with a simplified UI and a subset of the controls available in the iPhone app.

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