Watch Faces and Complications

With the Apple Watch now in the hands of customers, some smart people have started commenting on the device and sharing their first impressions.

A recurring theme in my RSS feeds today has been the wish for third-party additions to complications and watch faces.

Jason Snell writes:

The third-party story is going to be huge as time goes on. Current third-party apps are okay, but they’re incredibly limited. With some of Apple’s built-in apps, you can get a better sense of what might be possible on this device. But I have to admit, I’m most excited by the idea of third-party watch faces or, at the very least, third-party complications for existing watch faces. I’m not convinced that developers will make pretty watch faces—I’ve seen all the awful third-party Pebble faces—but I do want more variety in my watch faces. I’d be fine if Apple took a strong hand with faces and only approved a very small number that passed a very high bar. But I’d be okay if Apple kept tight control of the faces… if developers could provide data from their apps as complications on existing faces. I’d love to plug in my Weather Underground temperature, for instance—today Apple’s standard temperature widget was a full ten degrees off of the actual temperature in my town.

Casey Liss shared similar thoughts:

Like third-party watch faces, I think third-party complications could take a turn toward awful. However, with a light hand and an eye toward brevity, allowing third parties to create their own complications could make an already impressive information appliance even more useful.

And here’s Abdel Ibrahim:

I still believe that apps on Apple Watch are mostly meant to be repositories. The idea of pressing in the Digital Crown and tapping a tiny icon to get to the home screen and launch an app still makes little sense to me. As of right now, the future of the Watch seems to me to be in meaningful Glances, Notifiations, Faces, and Complications (provided Apple allows the latter two). In some cases, like with Uber for example, I can see the need for launching an app. But in most cases, I still don’t see why I should bother.

Between WatchKit and the lack of personalization in some areas of the software, initial limitations of the Watch are creating a whole crop of low-hanging fruit for the next few years.

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Featured on Tim Cook’s Keynote

Frederic Filloux on the story of Replay and how it got featured at Apple’s iPad Air 2 keynote last year:

In September 2014, while at the Stupeflix Paris office, Nicolas Steegmann got a call from Apple in Cupertino. Once the caller identified herself, Nicolas knew something up. The contact came after Stupeflix presentations to Apple’s team in Paris. In rather elliptic terms, Steegman’s interlocutor said it would be great if two members of the company, a developer and a designer, could be in Cupertino the next day. ‘They will have to stay at least two weeks’, she said. 48 hours later, the team was on Apple’s campus. They quickly found themselves in a windowless room and given a straightforward brief: Devise the coolest possible demo for your app. No more details, no promises whatsoever.

You can watch the original demo from October 2014 below.

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Unread 1.5 Adds iOS 8 Share Sheet, 1Password Support

Originally created by Jared Sinclair and later acquired by Supertop, Unread is one of the few reading apps that’s been unmistakably built for the age of multitouch. By abstracting traditional UI complexities from an RSS reader to achieve a purity of text and images, Unread features an excellent reading experience on the iPhone and iPad with comfortable gestures that make the app feel natural, fresh, and useful.

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Mac Power Users Joins Relay FM

Mac Power Users, one of my favorite podcasts hosted by Katie Floyd and David Sparks, is joining the Relay FM family. Stephen Hackett, writing on the Relay FM blog:

I’ve listened to Apple podcasts for a long time, and with over 250 episodes published, Mac Power Users has been a constant listen of mine for years.

Mac Power Users isn’t just a podcast; it’s an institution. The guest list is impressive, with greats like Rod Roddenberry, Merlin Mann, Aisha Tyler and David Allen making appearances.

That’s why today’s announcement is so exciting: MPU is joining Relay FM.

And from the MPU blog:

Mac Power Users has had a great run on 5by5 and we are grateful to Dan, Haddie and the rest of the 5by5 team for everything they’ve done for our show through the years. But we’ve decided for the show to continue to grow we need to make a few changes.

I have a personal attachment to Mac Power Users. Three years ago, when I was hospitalized for three weeks and couldn’t work (or move), I started catching up on the MPU backlog. Mac Power Users episodes were informative, funny, and always useful. In those three weeks, Katie and David kickstarted my interested in plain text, Markdown, and automation, which eventually led me to use Pythonista, Editorial, and deeply reimagine how I work on a daily basis and the apps I use.

I’m thrilled to see Mac Power Users joining Relay. To make sure you won’t miss new episodes, you can subscribe to an updated feed here.

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Virtual: Podcasters, Please

This week Federico and Myke talk about how VR could effect game design, take a look at more upcoming Apple Watch games and workshop an idea for a video game of their own.

Last week’s episode of Virtual featured more discussions on Apple Watch games – and I’m sure we’re not done yet. You can listen here.

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Apple Watch and Durability

Luma Labs’ Greg Koenig, writing for iMore:

It’s no surprise that questions are being raised about just how durable each variant of the Apple Watch will be, given that people are now considering putting down real money for them. The best way to answer such questions is to wait and see how the first wave of watches do in the hands of real people. Yet it’s not unreasonable for potential early adopters to want at least some idea before they buy. Lucky for us, Apple is using materials and techniques that have been standard for wristwatches going back a few decades, so we can make some educated, experience-driven assumptions about how the watch variants will fair on our wrists soon.

Fascinating read on the materials and processes used by Apple. See also: Koenig’s analysis of Apple’s promo videos from March.

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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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