It strikes me this year that we’re hitting the 5th major version of watchOS. This is not a brand new platform anymore, even though the Apple Watch feels relatively new in the grand scheme of things. Add to that the fact that Apple’s direct competitor here, Android Wear, has all but exited the market as Wear 2.0 barely got released and basically no one is making Wear watches anymore, and you get the feeling that watchOS updates don’t need to be that substantial anymore.
And:
watchOS is far from perfect and there are tons of things that could be done to make it not only a better experience for those who already own one, but to draw in more people to the platform. The Apple Watch is one of the largest reasons I’m loyal to iOS for my smartphone, and since Apple is pretty darn invested in people buying more iPhones, they probably want to get people to love their Apple Watches even more so these customers never change sides.
Without further ado, here are some of my suggestions to Apple that I think would make the Apple Watch a better, more appealing product.
This is a fantastic read, from beginning to end. Lots of great ideas, and great images as well.
Two particular suggestions I want to highlight:
The battery is fantastic on the new hardware.
Now Apple, please spend that battery surplus on always on watch faces! I don’t always need this, and the Apple Watch turns on 95% of the time when I want it to, but it’s not 100% and it is always a pain when it doesn’t turn itself on. With always on faces, I may not be able to see everything on the face, but at least seeing the time would be hugely useful.
Amen. There are times when having the display always on would be immensely helpful. When I am cooking, for example, my hands covered in flour, and I want to check the status of a timer. It’s not that I can’t get the display to pop on. It’s that sometimes it takes some extra wrist wriggling.
I would like them to add automatic workout detection. Some activity trackers do this already, and while it’s not perfect on any of them, it’s always good to have as a back up in case you forget to start or stop a workout. For example, if I start a run and forget to start a running workout on my Apple Watch, the watch should send me a notification after a minute that asks me if I am running and if I want to start tracking this as a workout. When I tap “yes” it should start a workout and know what type of workout I’m doing.
Details of the project are being kept under tight wraps, but it would reportedly deal with a world’s battle against a monstrous, oppressive force. Should the project move forward, it would be Abrams’ first TV writing gig since “Fringe” in 2008.
J.J. Abrams is just the type of hitmaker that Apple needs if it’s going to make a big splash in the original series TV market.
A group of 21 U.S. state attorneys general filed suit to challenge the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to do away with net neutrality on Tuesday while Democrats said they needed just one more vote in the Senate to repeal the FCC ruling.
This compact 2×4 interface starts with esteemed UA conversion derived from UA’s flagship Apollo interface range, to sonically outperform anything in its class. With its Unison technology and built-in UAD-2 SOLO Core processor, you can record through classic audio tools including the 610 Tube Preamp, LA-2A and 1176 compressors, and a genuine Marshall Plexi amp plug-in — at near-zero latency, regardless of your audio software buffer setting.
This is an incredible looking interface and included plug-ins bundle.
Apple increased its share of smartphone activations in the fourth quarter of 2017, following the release of the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X, according to data shared with MacRumors by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.
This is really interesting to me, especially considering all the rumors that the iPhone 8 sales were lower than expected because people were waiting for the iPhone X, and then iPhone X sales weren’t meeting expectations. It sounds like sales are doing fine, but we’ll find out during the next quarterly earnings.
The firm’s Alpha bike runs for about 100 km (62 miles) on a two-litre tank of hydrogen, a range similar to an electric bike, but a refill takes only minutes while e-bikes take hours to charge. One kilo of hydrogen holds about 600 times more energy than a one-kilo lithium battery.
The bikes are really expensive, and the charging stations even more expensive, but they do plan to bring these to the consumer market in the coming years.
TCM is the best way to manage your Macs, instantly. Take a screenshot, open an app, open a web page, reboot a computer, send a UNIX command, reboot to Windows — all without leaving your desk. TCM does all of this right from a web browser. No software to install on the administrator computer and accessible from anywhere.
We have some sponsorships available for the remainder of January and the month of February. If you would like to get your product or service in front of the wonderful readers of The Loop, get in touch with me and let’s make a deal. You can get more information on the sponsorships here.
To be practical, an iPad photography workflow has to encompass everything from shooting, importing, culling, editing, and the final export. The ideal scenario is to be able to trust the iPad to replace a laptop as my daily photography companion. It needn’t do so entirely — I’m happy to continue using my desktop-based collection of apps when I’m at home and need their specific capabilities — but I should feel confident taking nothing but an iPad with me when I head out on a shoot or take my next trip.
Things aren’t perfect yet, but depending on your tolerance for doing things differently, we’re finally at a place where the iPad is a viable companion for the working photographer.
During my recent trip to Australia, my workflow was blown up by a busted MacBook Air screen so I had to jury-rig a solution that, in some ways, mirrored not only the solutions found in this piece but the frustrations as well.
Over the weekend, someone started a thread asking why an artist’s album view in Apple Music has gotten so cluttered.
To see this for yourself, pick a relatively modern artist and check out their list of albums in the Music app. For example, fire up Siri and say:
Show me all the Bruno Mars albums
When the Bruno Mars page appears, scroll down to the Albums section and tap See All. Amongst the actual Bruno Mars albums, you’ll find a lot of singles and EPs. Way more singles and EPs than actual albums, in fact.
Now it certainly is great to have a complete list of all of Bruno Mars’ music at your fingertips. But sometimes you want to find an album. And there is a lot of clutter.
Personally, I think it’d be nice if there was some way to declutter the list, have a view without all the duplicated remixed singles.
With digital music, everything has changed. When you see a bit of text on a website or in iTunes, all you know is the name of the release and its artist. David Bowie’s Let’s Dance could be a single, an EP, or an Album. This is because the tags – the metadata that identifies music – doesn’t allow for this type of differentiation. iTunes uses a simplified version of the ID3 tagging system, which doesn’t offer a tag to identify what type of release a record is. (MusicBrainz does use a tag called Release Group, which can be used to distinguish between singles, albums, and EPs, but also broadcasts and “other.”)
So how can you distinguish between these different formats in digital? The only way is if the record label has tagged the name of a release with the word “Single” or “EP.”
Bottom line, this is not a trivial problem to solve. Not, at least, without the cooperation of the labels. But seems to me, this is a problem worth solving. And if I, as a human, can step through an artists list of albums/EPs/singles and quickly suss out which items on the list are albums, surely this is the kind of problem that would yield to a well applied bit of machine learning.
And once Apple Music knows the difference between albums, singles, EPs, etc., it’d be easy enough to add a filter to let me search through only albums, or only singles for that matter.
I have the great honor of working as part of the Technology Evangelism group at Apple. Involvement in the annual WWDC conference is one of the key efforts by the team each year, and I was really taken by the conference this year. The developers I met were simply amazing, the team behind the conference immensely talented, and the conference branding and theme also spoke to me very deeply.
As someone who came into technology from the arts, and endeavors to bring the best of both disciplines into everything I do, it struck a chord in my heart. Embracing creativity and innovation, consider adding a personal touch to your gestures, like sending new baby cookies as a gift, to celebrate life’s special moments in a heartfelt way.
And:
I wanted to create something of a keepsake for each of the other members of our team as a personal gift to each of them. I’ve always loved the aesthetic of the Apple Design Award, and wanted to create something of an homage to that design, but using my favourite material: wood.
Read the post, take a look at the pictures. What an amazingly thoughtful gift. So cool.
You’ve seen the video. Everyone on the internet has. A man sits in a cubicle and pounds his keyboard in frustration. A few seconds later, the Angry Man picks up the keyboard and swings it like a baseball bat at his screen—it’s an old PC from the ’90s, with a big CRT monitor—whacking it off the desk. A frightened coworker’s head pops up over the cubicle wall, just in time to watch the Angry Man get up and kick the monitor across the floor. Cut to black.
Most of us have seen and laughed at this grainy video but I had no idea it was staged.
Once you install the app, launch it, then scroll down, just a bit, to the section with the white box that asks, “Is your portrait in a museum?”
Tap to get started, give Google access to your camera, take a selfie, then let the app do its thing. My sense is that the matching algorithm keys in on your hair, including any facial hair.
Interesting idea. Wondering what Google does with all the selfies it harvests.
A pair of amateur explorers in Canada have found a vast underground passage stretching hundreds of metres underneath the bustling streets of Montreal whose formation dates back more than 15,000 years ago to the Earth’s last ice age.
And:
Formed thousands of years ago by massive glaciers that ruptured the rock beneath, yellow calcite line the walls of the passage at times, adding pops of bright colour while icicle-shaped stalactites hang overhead.
I find it incredible that such a massive complex underground tunnel has been hidden for so long. An amazing find.
Ten years ago today, I was in the audience when Jobs introduced the Air. I was skeptical at the time (the work I was doing “required” the power of a full-sized laptop. At the time, I was lugging around a 17″ MacBook Pro) but now I love my Air, especially when I travel.
One of the most original and distinctive songs Led Zeppelin ever recorded was the exotic, eight-and-a-half minute “Kashmir,” from the 1975 album Physical Graffiti. In this clip from Davis Guggenheim’s film “It Might Get Loud”, Jimmy Page explains the origins of the song to fellow guitarists Jack White and The Edge. Then Page demonstrates it by picking up an old modified Danelectro 59DC Double Cutaway Standard guitar that he played the song with on some of Led Zeppelin’s tours.
One of the best music documentaries I’ve ever seen is “It Might Get Loud” – Jimmy Page, Jack White, and The Edge just sitting around, talking about playing guitar – and this segment of Page talking about one of the most distinctive riffs in music is a great example of it.
When my phone is in my pocket, I tend to hold it like a gadget security blanket, and I sometimes end up squeezing the side buttons. This was never a problem until I got the iPhone X, which has some new features tied to those side buttons. More specifically, if you press and hold both the power button and a volume button for a few seconds, your phone will call 911 and/or your designated emergency contacts.
I’ve never done this, but a friend of mine had an iPhone X in a car phone mount and it slid down during the drive, pushing both buttons, and automatically called 911.
As it continues to showcase new types of content in the App Store, Apple has recently started highlighting popular subscription applications with free trials. The new section is located under the “Apps” section in the App Store and aptly titled “Try It For Free.”
Since 1889, the General Pencil Company has been converting huge quantities of raw materials (wax, paint, cedar planks, graphite) into products you can find, neatly boxed and labeled, in art and office-supply stores across the nation: watercolor pencils, editing pencils, sticks of charcoal, pastel chalks. Even as other factories have chased higher profit margins overseas, General Pencil has stayed put, cranking out thousands upon thousands of writing instruments in the middle of Jersey City.
Pencils are one of those things few of us give any thought to – or, for that matter, use much any more – but this glorious photo essay will definitely get you thinking about the “lowly” pencil.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson: “I typed Episode VIII out on a MacBook Air. For security it was ‘air-gapped’ — never connected to the internet. I carried it around and used it for nothing except writing the script. I kept it in a safe at Pinewood Studios. I think my producer was constantly horrified I would leave it in a coffee shop.”
I bet a lot of people in his industry do similar things, especially for blockbusters.
This is a phenomenal image from our collective history. This is Susan Kare, designer of the original Mac icons (and so much more) in her office, back in the early days of Macintosh.
There’s a lot of detail here. Check the Mac on the shelf with the color Mac logo. What model is that?
And zoom in (tap the image for a higher rez version) on that piece of graph paper taped above the computer. Is that some kind of icon code? An ASCII table?
Check out the toys on the shelf, the books. It’s all such a moment in time.
UPDATE: Some cool feedback from some folks who lived this history.
First things first, the photo originated in Cabel Sasser’s Twitter feed (thanks for the heads up, Cabel!), as seen here:
I found a higher-res version of that photo of coolest-person @SusanKare, and I wish I could zoom and enhance on every single toy, note, and scrap of paper. I can only make out the "1983-84 Texaco-Metropolitain Opera Radio Broadcast Schedule". https://t.co/2mKzZNtJgX
Read down Cabel’s post for replies from Susan Kare herself, along with Chris Espinosa and lots of other folks. Some great reading.
And, as a bonus, here are some pics I took of Susan Kare’s original design notebook when it was on display at the Museum of Modern Art a few years back.
If you have an Apple Watch, you already know that incoming phone calls and FaceTime calls will ring on your watch alongside your iPhone, so you can answer the call and talk on your wrist, Dick Tracy style. Switching the call back to your iPhone once you’ve answered it is straightforward enough as well — simply tap the green bar that appears at the top of the home screen to open the Phone app and transfer the call to there in one fell swoop. What you may not know, however, is that you can also send calls in the other direction — transfer an in-progress call from your iPhone over to your Apple Watch.
Great tip, especially if you have a cellular Series 3 Apple Watch.
UPDATE: As pointed out in the comments, not likely you’ll be able to use this technique to jump from the iPhone’s cellular connection to the Apple Watch Series 3’s own cellular capability. Good point.
One of the most important witnesses to the rape and homicide of a 19-year-old-woman in Germany might be a stock app on the iPhone of her alleged murderer.
Hussein K., an Afghan refugee in Freiburg, has been on trial since September for allegedly raping and murdering a student in Freiburg, and disposing of her body in a river.
And:
He refused to give authorities the passcode to his iPhone, but investigators hired a Munich company (which one is not publicly known) to gain access his device, according to German news outlet Welt. They searched through Apple’s Health app, which was added to all iPhones with the release of iOS 8 in 2014, and were able to gain more data about what he was doing that day. The app records how many steps he took and what kind of activity he was doing throughout that day.
The app recorded a portion of his activity as “climbing stairs,” which authorities were able to correlate with the time he would have dragged his victim down the river embankment, and then climbed back up. Freiburg police sent an investigator to the scene to replicate his movements, and sure enough, his Health app activity correlated with what was recorded on the defendant’s phone.
This is two stories. First and foremost, there’s the use of HealthKit data in a murder/rape trial. But underneath is the question of how the unnamed German firm was able to get into the phone.
