Yes, tangent, but please support the movements in several states to abolish daylight savings time. Having time move out from under us has long been a pain for programming robust systems. Perhaps the 5th or 6th generation of Apple watch will not need to do such an archaic adjustment.
Daylight Savings Time has some ill effects, true, but if you think that making life easier for programmers is a point that should convince the general public, you're sorely out of touch. For one, it's not all that difficult in the scheme of things. For another, programmers dealing with dates in the past will always have to consider it. Lastly, the general perception is that programmers get paid quite well enough and can suck it up and deal with this minor annoyance.
I have worked on a fairly large scale distributed system where we had to deal with DST. The week before the switch was always the craziest. Until... we switched the boxes and the database to UTC. Even if DST is abolished, leap second will be something to deal with.
I have so many things I hate about DST - like switching all our cross timezone meetings but programming is not one of them - always set your machines and DB to UTC and do the conversion in your app.
You could even set your servers to TAI and adjust for leap seconds in your app, so that you don't have to worry about timestamps going backwards during leap seconds.
//We have enough digits to print 1424978922 on a watch face - that is standard Unix time. Why humans can't just learn to read that simple number is beyond me
You really think people should be using 1424978922 instead of 5:30 or 9:30? That kind of thinking is what's beyond me..
"Considered separately, the active use app, clock, and fitness numbers sound very low, but the reality is that people will passively wear the Apple Watch for most of the day, actively interacting with it only for short periods of time."
Essentially they're saying, "People will buy an expensive watch that does all this extra fancy stuff, but really they won't bother much with the extra fancy stuff - because who actually wants to fiddle around with something on their wrist for any protracted length of time?"
I think Apple has enough die-hard fans, who will buy almost anything they make, for it to be hard for them to do something that will register as a genuine complete flop... but I think the Apple Watch really could struggle to get much traction amongst the masses, and I don't just mean the expensive gold model.
Sounds like a typical first generation new device from Apple.
Generally, 1st generation new devices have low benefit to cost ratios, are trying to enter a market with the absolute minimum requirements, and the successive generations will include some kind of hardware bit that makes the device much more useful.
If you used your iPhone at full power all day, it would be dead in three hours. If you left it in standby, it would last for days. Most people do a combination of these things, leading to the battery life averaging out to be around one day of normal use.
Is that essentially saying people bought an expensive phone that does all this fancy stuff but don't bother with it because they don't want to fiddle with something in their hand for any length of time?
Try flooring the accelerator on your car and see how long the tank of gas lasts. Compare it to idling away a full tank. Do people shy away from hot-rodding their engines just because they don't want to fiddle with the throttle, or because doing the speed limit and accelerating slowly tends to suit their needs just fine?
The aforementioned article about the Apple Watch talks of "heavy application use" and suggests it might only last 2.5 hours. If you read, for example, http://www.trustedreviews.com/iphone-6-review-battery-life-a..., it suggests "heavy use" of the iPhone 6 (at 50% screen brightness) yields about 14 hours of battery life. That's a pretty significant difference.
While it's easy to say "it's more compelling to do stuff on a phone than it is to do it on a watch, so you'll naturally use the phone more", that rather makes me wonder why I would bother buying the watch, especially when you actually need the phone as well.
Time will tell how people use these devices and whether the battery really holds up to a reasonable person's usage. And, of course, it seems likely (though not certain) that later generations will have improved battery life.
Because of the big screen, it's easier to browse the web on a tablet than on a phone. Easier than that is a laptop. A PC has an even bigger screen than that! But people still use phones, mostly for the minor convenience of having it in your pocket instead of in a bag, but also for the unique interactions it provides.
I use my PC for eight hours a day straight. I use my phone for maybe 10 minutes here, 10 minutes there, maybe an hour long call once or twice a day. Is there anything wrong with that? Should I be using my phone more? I mean, why would I spend all the money on having a powerful phone when I'm only using it occasionally?
That's the logic you seem to be putting towards this watch. I'm not going to defend the battery life, it's totally crap. I'm just arguing against the logic. You seem to be saying if you're not using the device constantly, it's not worth having. I don't use my car constantly. I don't use my phone constantly. I don't use my Pebble constantly. But they're nice to have for their own reasons. The point of the watch is not to use it 100%, all the time. It's to use it when it makes sense to use it. Heavy application use isn't what it's designed for.
Still, I agree the battery makes it useless even for the intended functionality.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying. It just seems to me that it's a lot of money to spend on something that you aren't intending to use all that much (regardless of the battery life problem). You have a phone in your pocket that works quite well for many tasks; do you really need to spend a bunch more money on a fancy watch that does some of the same things as your phone, via your phone, in possibly a less useful way?
I really don't know, perhaps Joe Public will see it very differently to me; certainly those of my friends who don't work in tech, but overwhelmingly do own iPhones, I have spoken to about the Apple Watch seem fairly uncertain as to its general usefulness.
>While it's easy to say "it's more compelling to do stuff on a phone than it is to do it on a watch, so you'll naturally use the phone more", that rather makes me wonder why I would bother buying the watch, especially when you actually need the phone as well.
While this is true, no body is browsing the web or watching a video on their watch. People are doing quick checks of stocks, the weather, firing off a text message on their watches. The use cases overlap significantly but smart watches fill the niche of "I don't want to pull my phone out to check the time/if I have texts."
It does fancy stuff, but the fancy stuff it does consists of things that either alert you to something (and thus are over after a second), or that let you do some simple (and quickly done-with) interaction without having to pull out your phone.
Despite "smartwatch" sounding like "smartphone", there's really nothing you'd want to do with its UX that could last an hour.
Remember Windows SideShow[1]? It was a technology to allow OEMs to do things like putting an extra display on the lid of a laptop, that would indicate things when the laptop was closed and mostly asleep. That's what the watch is for: indicating things when your phone is closed and mostly asleep. If it indicates something interesting, you don't continue interacting with it; you take out your phone.
I'm not saying this to defend Apple's product in particular; it's probably far too expensive to get the right adoption in its market, and is more like an initial market-testing experiment in the same way Google Glass was.
But passive/reactive UX is a great idea, generally. The constant complaints about being stuck in a cubicle staring at a screen, or teenagers staring at their phones all day, are precisely because that's where our alerts are, and we don't want to miss them... but it's also where a bunch of engaging+distracting stuff is, so in the process of trying to stay on top of our alerts, we get constantly pulled back into engaging with the engaging stuff.
Imagine if, to check your email, you had to log into World of Warcraft or Second Life and wander over to your virtual mailbox on your virtual driveway. Lots of potential for distraction during that, right? But waking up your phone or your laptop, with its manifold social apps and games and media to consume, is nearly as bad.
Technologies with passive or reactive UXes allow us to treat technology as something poking its head into your door and asking a question, rather than something you need to "submerge into" like some sort of virtual reality.
I look forward to the day when every $5 Swatch watch gives you your phone's alerts. At that point, the glowing rectangle will become only a productivity device: something for creation, live collaboration, or media consumption; something you intentionally engage with for defined periods. But not something you need to context-switch back to every three minutes to see if you got an email, and end up reading HN while you've got it open.
Watches are things you use in brief bursts. They are no less valuable for that. Like fire extinguishers, the value lies in being available and responsive whenever. I don't rate my bottle opener by how much time I spend using it. Just the opposite in fact.
I'm not sure what point you're making there. But in an attempt to end the thread in a fun way, here's a watch that opens bottles. If it's good at both those things, it will take but a few seconds a day to get good use out of it.
That's "19 hours of combined active/passive use" (that is, mostly idle) e.g. I will have to remember to charge it at the end of every single day, and goodness forbid that my day will last 24+ hours, as it just might once in a while. I find this inexcusable for a $300-class watch, but to charge four figures for a watch before bringing battery life firmly into "several days" territory, at the very least? I find it completely ridiculous.
And how stupid will these 'luxury' watches look in a few years, when Apple (or their competitors, anyway) will eventually bring battery life into more sane range? That's what I was trying to say: I find the abysmal battery life kinda-accepted in this class of products, so far, to be inadequate, but even more so - I think it's completely preposterous there to be 'luxury' editions of the product. Later, when technology will mature and provide it with more usability and when incremental changes each year will diminish - sure, but right now - aren't Apple seeing that they are going to just make fools of themselves?
If I'm wrong - well, then I'm seriously not understanding something in life.
Yes. To put it simply, there is a non-empty set of people that will pay a large sum of money for something, simply because it requires a large sum of money. To this market, the lack of features or battery life, etc is not a concern. The price of the good itself, and therefore it's perceived exclusivity, is the paramount feature of the product.
This non-empty set of people have no qualms about upgrading every few years to a new, more exclusive model. Nothing is worst than having something "old" or out of fashion.
This non-empty set of people, will pay $10k, $15k, $20k+ for something just because they can.
Fashion, watches, etc is even more extravagant because the element of "freshness" and being "in style" plays into a constant need to invest in the latest.
Yeah, I read that after the fact. I'd still give it an outside chance that they announce Broadwell MBP's but if Apple Watch is the star of the show, then that's somewhat unlikely.
Battery is shot and the whole system has been slowing way down. It finally refused to boot this past weekend for a few hours. It's non-retina, non-SSD so I'm not sad about getting a new one. The new one is screamingly fast and wonderful. I just don't want to buy it a month before Broadwell MBPs roll off the production lines and then already have obsolete hardware.
Well, considering we change the clocks to "spring forward" 2 a.m on March 8, all signs point to some kind of watch being released. The Swiss must be shaking in their boots while frantically clicking through the Android SDK. ;)
I get that a retina macbook air would be great, but the big selling point of the macbook air is its battery life, and I don't anticipate them sacrificing that.
I was wondering why they were painting the Yerba Buena center yesterday. The railing and awning were yellow and I saw a bunch of painters out there painting everything gray. When I walked by today, almost everything was gray. I'm hoping for some retina macbook air, new macbook pro and of course the watch.
I've purchased a Pebble and, more recently, a Moto 360. I love the idea of smart watches but I feel like they need to be as passive as possible for the best user experience. So far the Apple Watch looks like it needs a lot of interaction to do different things. I'm excited to see a real demo of the interface to see if that's really the case.
I'm a programmer, and know very little about art (sadly).
The picture in the background here is very beautiful. Someone who makes that kind of thing, how do they do it? How do they chose colours, and how would they go about making the shapes actually appear on a screen?
It looks like a small handful of semi-transparent shapes (they look like leaves to me) with different colors that are overlayed on each other. Since they're different semi-transparent colors, the colors blend to form a new shade where they have overlapped. Repeat this a few times with logic that rotates the leaf around the axis a little below the bottom center of the screen, and there you have it.
Yep. It's just a more gradated version of the iOS Photos app icon. It's pretty easy to see what makes the simpler version look the way it does, when you blow it up[1]: there are just eight translucent roundrects with gradients, and everything else emerges from how they overlap.
(And from the fact that the gradients form a complete hue continuum. Look at the small triangles in the middle to see the destination colors, and see how they match the source colors of their neighbours.)
While I can't speak on how the designer of this particular piece created the shapes you see, in Sketch I would create a shape (the flower petal) and then do "rotate copies". Do that a couple of times with the different size shapes and give each layer a different opacity (ability to see through the shape). Making it a black background with high opacity and layering them on top of each other provides for the cool effects.
Then place a rectangle background with a gradient on it that transitions from purple to green like in the graphic.
If they're going to sell a watch, does this mean our iPhone alarms will forevermore work correctly during DST switchovers and calendar year increments?
63 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadYou really think people should be using 1424978922 instead of 5:30 or 9:30? That kind of thinking is what's beyond me..
Hint: If your system depends on local time, it isn't going to be robust.
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/02/24/caldwell-edition
Really, if they will get away with that, the world has surely gone crazy.
"Considered separately, the active use app, clock, and fitness numbers sound very low, but the reality is that people will passively wear the Apple Watch for most of the day, actively interacting with it only for short periods of time."
Essentially they're saying, "People will buy an expensive watch that does all this extra fancy stuff, but really they won't bother much with the extra fancy stuff - because who actually wants to fiddle around with something on their wrist for any protracted length of time?"
I think Apple has enough die-hard fans, who will buy almost anything they make, for it to be hard for them to do something that will register as a genuine complete flop... but I think the Apple Watch really could struggle to get much traction amongst the masses, and I don't just mean the expensive gold model.
Generally, 1st generation new devices have low benefit to cost ratios, are trying to enter a market with the absolute minimum requirements, and the successive generations will include some kind of hardware bit that makes the device much more useful.
Is that essentially saying people bought an expensive phone that does all this fancy stuff but don't bother with it because they don't want to fiddle with something in their hand for any length of time?
Try flooring the accelerator on your car and see how long the tank of gas lasts. Compare it to idling away a full tank. Do people shy away from hot-rodding their engines just because they don't want to fiddle with the throttle, or because doing the speed limit and accelerating slowly tends to suit their needs just fine?
While it's easy to say "it's more compelling to do stuff on a phone than it is to do it on a watch, so you'll naturally use the phone more", that rather makes me wonder why I would bother buying the watch, especially when you actually need the phone as well.
Time will tell how people use these devices and whether the battery really holds up to a reasonable person's usage. And, of course, it seems likely (though not certain) that later generations will have improved battery life.
I use my PC for eight hours a day straight. I use my phone for maybe 10 minutes here, 10 minutes there, maybe an hour long call once or twice a day. Is there anything wrong with that? Should I be using my phone more? I mean, why would I spend all the money on having a powerful phone when I'm only using it occasionally?
That's the logic you seem to be putting towards this watch. I'm not going to defend the battery life, it's totally crap. I'm just arguing against the logic. You seem to be saying if you're not using the device constantly, it's not worth having. I don't use my car constantly. I don't use my phone constantly. I don't use my Pebble constantly. But they're nice to have for their own reasons. The point of the watch is not to use it 100%, all the time. It's to use it when it makes sense to use it. Heavy application use isn't what it's designed for.
Still, I agree the battery makes it useless even for the intended functionality.
I really don't know, perhaps Joe Public will see it very differently to me; certainly those of my friends who don't work in tech, but overwhelmingly do own iPhones, I have spoken to about the Apple Watch seem fairly uncertain as to its general usefulness.
While this is true, no body is browsing the web or watching a video on their watch. People are doing quick checks of stocks, the weather, firing off a text message on their watches. The use cases overlap significantly but smart watches fill the niche of "I don't want to pull my phone out to check the time/if I have texts."
Despite "smartwatch" sounding like "smartphone", there's really nothing you'd want to do with its UX that could last an hour.
Remember Windows SideShow[1]? It was a technology to allow OEMs to do things like putting an extra display on the lid of a laptop, that would indicate things when the laptop was closed and mostly asleep. That's what the watch is for: indicating things when your phone is closed and mostly asleep. If it indicates something interesting, you don't continue interacting with it; you take out your phone.
I'm not saying this to defend Apple's product in particular; it's probably far too expensive to get the right adoption in its market, and is more like an initial market-testing experiment in the same way Google Glass was.
But passive/reactive UX is a great idea, generally. The constant complaints about being stuck in a cubicle staring at a screen, or teenagers staring at their phones all day, are precisely because that's where our alerts are, and we don't want to miss them... but it's also where a bunch of engaging+distracting stuff is, so in the process of trying to stay on top of our alerts, we get constantly pulled back into engaging with the engaging stuff.
Imagine if, to check your email, you had to log into World of Warcraft or Second Life and wander over to your virtual mailbox on your virtual driveway. Lots of potential for distraction during that, right? But waking up your phone or your laptop, with its manifold social apps and games and media to consume, is nearly as bad.
Technologies with passive or reactive UXes allow us to treat technology as something poking its head into your door and asking a question, rather than something you need to "submerge into" like some sort of virtual reality.
I look forward to the day when every $5 Swatch watch gives you your phone's alerts. At that point, the glowing rectangle will become only a productivity device: something for creation, live collaboration, or media consumption; something you intentionally engage with for defined periods. But not something you need to context-switch back to every three minutes to see if you got an email, and end up reading HN while you've got it open.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_SideShow
http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/happy-hour-watch
And how stupid will these 'luxury' watches look in a few years, when Apple (or their competitors, anyway) will eventually bring battery life into more sane range? That's what I was trying to say: I find the abysmal battery life kinda-accepted in this class of products, so far, to be inadequate, but even more so - I think it's completely preposterous there to be 'luxury' editions of the product. Later, when technology will mature and provide it with more usability and when incremental changes each year will diminish - sure, but right now - aren't Apple seeing that they are going to just make fools of themselves?
If I'm wrong - well, then I'm seriously not understanding something in life.
This non-empty set of people have no qualms about upgrading every few years to a new, more exclusive model. Nothing is worst than having something "old" or out of fashion.
This non-empty set of people, will pay $10k, $15k, $20k+ for something just because they can.
Example: http://financesonline.com/top-10-most-expensive-champagne-bo...
Fashion, watches, etc is even more extravagant because the element of "freshness" and being "in style" plays into a constant need to invest in the latest.
https://www.apple.com/support/macbookpro-videoissues/
Usually the 15-18% refurb discount jumps to around 25-30% if those models are going to get discontinued. Not seeing that on the store (yet).
The picture in the background here is very beautiful. Someone who makes that kind of thing, how do they do it? How do they chose colours, and how would they go about making the shapes actually appear on a screen?
Or Photoshop.
(And from the fact that the gradients form a complete hue continuum. Look at the small triangles in the middle to see the destination colors, and see how they match the source colors of their neighbours.)
[1] http://www.icreatemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Pr...
Then place a rectangle background with a gradient on it that transitions from purple to green like in the graphic.