These torture tests are interesting but painful to watch. Consumer Reports also has an article “The science behind smartwatch scratch resistance” about how they did the scratch test and what it means.
Bottom line? “The face of the Apple Watch is definitely harder than that of the Apple Watch Sport. But the performance of the hardened glass of the Sport model is pretty impressive as well.” It sounds like, as long as you take the usual amount of care with your expensive electronics, the Apple Watch screens are pretty durable.
Apple’s market capitalization — the value of all of the shares of its stock — is more than $758 billion, greater than any other company’s. Yet the Wall Street consensus is that Apple is still having a growth spurt. In fact, if Apple’s watches, phones, laptops and other gadgets and services keep generating favorable publicity — and if its quarterly earnings report on Monday is as strong as the market expects it to be — there’s a reasonable chance that Apple’s value will keep swelling. Not far down the road, it might even reach the $1 trillion level that some hedge funds predict.
But even if Apple still has some room to run, there are some early warning signs. After all, the company has already crossed a significant threshold. In February, it grew to twice the size of the next biggest company in the S.&P. 500, a rare feat of financial dominance, and one that hasn’t happened since Ronald Reagan was president.
And the last company to achieve that?
I checked the numbers with Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S.&P. Dow Jones Indices. He found that the last market colossus to tower over its competitors by a two-to-one ratio was IBM, which did it in three successive years: 1983, 1984 and 1985. “That was when PCs were new,” he said, “and just about everyone thought IBM would rule the world.”
Good read. Cue the “Apple is doomed” theme song. Hasn’t anyone written that yet?
Looking for a Mac app? Use to the App Store application on your Mac.
Looking for an iPhone or iPad app? Jump into iTunes, click the iTunes Store button at the top of the window, then select App Store from the popup menu on the top of the right-hand nav bar. You can click the iPad or iPhone tab at the top of the window to further filter results. You can also bypass the clicking by just entering a search term in the search field, though your results can include music, apps, movies, etc.
To find an Apple Watch-specific app, things get a little more complex. If you know the name of your app, use the search field and, if there’s an Apple Watch app that matches that query, it’ll appear in the search results.
If you want to explore, you can type Watch in the search field, then click the “Apps for Apple Watch” link that appears in the right-hand nav bar. This will produce a long list, made up strictly of Apple Watch apps, but it’s a list that is painfully slow to scroll through. Clearly, this is a work in progress.
Another option is to search using your iPhone’s Apple Watch app. A solid search experience, but exploring is limited to the “Featured” tab.
As I’ve mentioned before, The Watch Aware Apple Watch app tracker purports to show all currently approved Apple Watch apps. The interface is nicely done, responsive, and there’s a nav bar at the top that lets you explore the database in a variety of ways.
There’s also that number at the top of the page that tells you how many Apple Watch apps have been approved. Unless Apple is providing this info, which I have a hard time believing, I expect this is more of an iTunes data scrape than an official list. No matter, they did a great job and this is my current go-to Apple Watch app searching option.
Anything I’ve missed (certainly the case)? Please weigh in in the comments.
Frederic Filloux, writing for Monday Note, tells the story of Parisian developer Stupeflix and what they went through to get from a mysterious phone call from Apple to being featured a month later in Tim Cook’s October 2014 iPad Air keynote. Terrific read.
Casey Neistat takes an Apple Watch and does his best to turn it into a poor person’s gold Apple Watch Edition.
At first blush, this sounds kind of dopey, but there’s some craft here. While I can’t imagine that anyone would be fooled by this for even a nanosecond, and I also suspect this would instantly void your warranty, I kind of like the idea of custom inking your Apple Watch.
The lines for the Apple Watch were similar to the lines for every other Apple product, with one main difference:
While the atmosphere outside the store was generally similar to previous launches, a glaring difference was the fact that I wasn’t waiting outside of an Apple Store. I was sitting on the sidewalk outside of the upscale fashion boutique Maxfield, on trendy Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles.
And:
Some things, though, were still off. Gone was the infamous clapping and cheering that comes with an Apple launch, replaced by the Maxfield employees monkishly ushering customers in one at a time. It almost seemed like Apple and Maxfield had somehow divided up responsibilities, and each applied their signature “culture” to the process.
There’s an irony in all of this. Apple’s previous Retail Chief, Ron Johnson, spent the better part of a decade building out Apple’s presence to almost 500 stores, so customers could line up around the world to be the first to get new Apple products.
Now, in the first big launch under the Ahrendts regime, the company decided to forgo the entire Apple retail system, forcing Apple fans make a pilgrimage to a store they most likely will never visit again. Unless Apple decides that the Apple Watch 2 is also too fashionable to be launched in an Apple store near you.
I find the logic of this outside the Apple Store rollout fascinating. The sense I get is that Apple is trying to extend the tendrils of the iPhone ecosystem. The iPhone itself is sold in a number of different retail outlets, but there was never a time you couldn’t buy one in the Apple Store.
One thought is that these luxury retailers are familiar (Angela Ahrendts was a longtime CEO of Burberry and knows luxury retail like the back of her hand) as well as properly equipped to handle this sort of luxury item.
Apple clearly intends to sell the Apple Watch in the Apple Store. Were the stores just not equipped to sell the Apple Watch on launch day? Or was this more a chance to give these other luxury retailers a head start to build a market? Or maybe a bit of both?
This post was written for developers, but if you are interested in the design side of Apple Watch, you might find this interesting. No programming required.
The goal of the article is to lay out the different icons used on Apple Watch and to give you a sense of which icons are used in each unique part of the Apple Watch interface.
If you are a developer with an app in progress or already in the App Store, the iTunes Affiliate Program is an absolute no-brainer. But this logic also applies for any other iTunes content, even free content.
The commissions are 7% on sales that result from your affliate traffic. In the case where a customer clicks on your link, to your app, from your website, and buys your app, that effectively means you have reduced Apple’s cut from 30% to 23%.
But it gets even better:
The affliate links carry over to other purchases made by the user that followed your link as well. If they browse more and decide to buy a competing product, you also win.
If your app is free, and they follow your link, then buy something totally different within 24 hours, you win.
This is not new, but this article just came out and I thought it was worth sharing for folks who might not be aware of the math. This program is a huge win for app developers and anyone with content they place in the App Store, even free content.
And, as pointed out by Anthony Waller, there’s no better way to manage affiliate links than with the excellent Blink app, written by John Voorhees.
In April 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope — which was launched into orbit exactly 25 years ago — took its most iconic image: the Pillars of Creation. These gigantic towers of dust and gas, 7,000 light years away, are named because the immense force of gravity causes them to condense into clumps of matter that will become new star systems.
In fact, billions of years ago our own solar system may have been born through the same process — so when you look at this upgraded 2014 version of the image, you’re also looking back at the very distant history of Earth.
We’ve all seen this image a hundred times but the details in this story are really fascinating.
My thanks to Bushel for sponsoring The Loop this week. For some people, IT is a task and not a career. Bushel is a simple-to-use cloud-based tool that anyone can leverage to manage the Apple devices in their workplace. Bushel allows you to easily set-up and protect all of the Apple devices that you distribute to your team, or those that your team already has. Provide access to company email accounts, automatically install work apps to every device all at once, and separate and protect your team’s personal data from company data. And if a device is ever lost or stolen, you can even remotely lock it or wipe company data completely. Do all of this and much more, without any help from IT. All wrapped into one seamless interface so you can manage those Apple devices when you want, wherever you are. Bushel makes the complex simple, so you can focus on what matters most, all while taking back your nights and weekends. Your first three devices are free forever, and each additional device is just $2 per month with no contracts or commitments. Learn more at Bushel.com.
So last night, I was at a hockey game. I got an odd text from Jim. It was an animated image of a 3D smiley face, with hearts for eyes, wagging its tongue at me.
Like this:
But animated.
Turns out, Jim had just picked up his personal Apple Watch and was putting it through it’s paces. The animation appeared on my iPhone in Messages, animating in gorgeous color, larger than the image on Jim’s watch. When I got home, I switched over to my Mac and, sure enough, the animation appeared there as well.
On my Mac, I selected the animation in my Messages window, then hit the space bar to bring up the quick look window. In quick look, I was given the option to open the animation in Preview, which I did. In Preview, you get the animation, broken down into individual frames. In this case, the yellow smiley was made up of 48 individual images.
If you know someone with an Apple Watch (many are arriving for delivery today), give this a try. Note that in the Messages app, you can tap once to select the image, then double-tap to make it larger. The Apple Watch animated emoticons are gorgeous.
First, take a look at this location on Google maps. You’ll be zoomed in in the northeast part of Pakistan. At the middle of that part of the map, you’ll see something like this image:
Was this done by someone on the Google Maps team? Is it possible it was done by someone outside of Google?
As it turns out, this is indeed a prank, done with Google Mapmaker. The result is an image hosted on google.com (check the URL in the above link). Thanks to Doney den Ouden for the insight.
Interested in making your own version? Here’s the edit page for this one. [HT @varunorcv]
Three new Apple Watch ads were posted this morning, Us, Up, and Rise. These ads are full of detail, little vignettes that give a sense of life with Apple Watch. Not the interface as much as how well it integrates into your busy lifestyle.
Most noticeable to me, instead of the vivid colors, electronic drums, and throbbing bass of the original Apple Watch ad, these three were painted with a very soft brushstroke and a delicate palette.
Here’s Us, with a very loose theme tying together romance and friendship:
For all the ways you connect, the Watch is here.
Next up is Up, as in up and at ’em. This focus is on fitness:
For all the ways you move, the Watch is here.
And finally, there’s Rise, as in rise and shine:
For all the ways you spend your time, the Watch is here.
You can now see what apps are available for the Apple Watch, even if you don’t have one of the devices. Just open the Apple Watch app on your iPhone, which comes with the latest iOS update, and you can browse the available apps. Currently there are over 3,000 apps for Apple Watch. I expect that to increase very quickly.
Canadians are a relatively happy bunch — the fifth happiest in the world, according to new data from the 2015 World Happiness Report released Thursday.
The report issues a score on a scale of zero to 10 based on Gallup World Poll data collected from people in more than 150 countries between 2012 and 2014.
Researchers then analyze the “life evaluation” data to rank countries, ostensibly providing a comparative overview of people’s “subjective well-being” in each.
For all of our myriad problems and issues, Canada is still a great country. Read the story for the list of the top five and where the US placed in the report – both very interesting.
Greg Koenig, writing for iMore, digs into the durability of the various Apple Watch finishes.
One bit in particular I found fascinating was this discussion of the space black finish, something very difficult to pull off well in traditional watch case finishes:
Enter two technologies: The Physical Vapor Deposition (PVD) plating process and Diamond Like Carbon (DLC) materials.
In the basic PVD process, a part is cleaned thoroughly and placed in a vacuum chamber, along with a consumable sample of plating material. Once the air is evacuated from the chamber, the material sample is vaporized by a heater and eventually condenses on the target part. PVD is a highly competitive, advancing technology with applications across many fields — anti-reflective, UV blocking, scratch resistant sunglass coatings? PVD — and the process is often heavily modified. The gist remains the same.
The PVD process is used to create a vast array of coatings, but the current gold standard for hardness and wear resistance is DLC. Essentially, a DLC coating is a 1-3 micron layer of carbon that self arranges into a structure similar to that found in a diamond, thus imparting some of a diamond’s surface hardness properties. In fact, many of the attempts to create synthetic diamonds revolve around modifying the basic PVD DLC process in order to “grow” a stone. The term “DLC” itself isn’t just one kind of coating, there are 7-8 different basic chemistries, and each manufacturer of equipment and service provider often creates their own proprietary recipe and processes. (Tungsten DLC, for example, deposits a layer of tungsten on the part before the DLC layer is applied, promoting better adhesion).
So just how tough is DLC? The best way to put it is that the watch industry is a second or third tier user of DLC coatings. The vast majority of research and application of DLCs goes into highly engineered components that depend on DLC’s hardness, friction reduction, corrosion resistance, and tribology advantages. (That’s the study of how one material interacts with another during contact and sliding.) You’ll find DLC coatings on shock absorbers and engine pistons in F1 cars, across the leading edges of fan blades in jet engines, coating critical medical implants, and the cutting tools inside the CNC mills and lathes that made the Apple Watch itself. (DLC extends cutter tool life, improves cut quality and allows for dramatic feed/speed increases.)
I find this fascinating. Apple has gotten really good at creating durable finishes for their products. I’ve noticed that every generation of iPhone I’ve owned has shown less and less wear on the case and screen. I suspect the Apple Watch is a beneficiary of all that durability R&D.
Another Apple Watch app tracker. This one is from WatchAware.
I like the fact that they keep track of the number of shipping apps. Not sure where that number comes from or how accurate it is, but as of this post, there are 2,145 approved Apple Watch apps.
As I said in this post, I think that number will rise to over 100,000 by the end of the year. Might have to revise that number upwards if there are already 2,145. After all, the big wave of Apple Watches hasn’t even hit yet. Think we might hit a million Apple Watch apps by the end of the year?
There are a boatload of Twitter clients for OS X. Apple Watch? So far, according to the linked article, there are three: The official Twitter client, Twitterrific 5, and Tweetings 2.
One notable absentee from this list is Tweetbot. As of the writing of this post, there is no information available on whether or not Tapbot’s flagship will be coming to Apple Watch. When and if it (or any other app) does, we’ll update this list to reflect the new Twitter app order. But even then, the Twitter client you use on your Apple Watch will most likely be the same one you use on your iPhone, just in a much more personal fashion.
I asked Paul Haddad (lead developer for Tapbots) about his plans for Tweetbot for Apple Watch. His reply was twofold. First, he’s waiting to get his hands on an Apple Watch (looks to me like his order will arrive tomorrow).
But Paul also made this point. The most critical element of a Twitter app are the notifications you receive. As it turns out, Tweetbot has long been part of the Apple Watch demo experience, as evidenced by the video in this post. That’s a Tweetbot notification, about 30 seconds in.
Certainly a custom Twitter client will give you more control over your tweets, but it is worth knowing that as long as your existing Twitter client makes use of the Notification Manager, you’ll get those notifications on your wrist, too.
Allyson Kazmucha, writing for iMore, has put together a solid list of shipping Apple Watch apps. Click the View All link towards the top of the page to see all of the apps in a single list.
I suspect that this list will grow exponentially over the coming weeks. My money’s on a hundred thousand Apple Watch apps by the end of the year. Think that’s too ambitious?
Security researchers at SkyCure stumbled onto an iOS vulnerability that, at its extreme, may cause all phones (and, presumably iPads) on an attacking network to go into an infinite restart mode. The solution is to either disable WiFi or leave the range of the offending network. As far as I can tell, the harm of this vulnerability is that it disables your phone. There does not appear to be any permanent damage or loss of data.
This is not quite “the sky is falling”, but it is an issue that needs to be addressed. I can only imagine that Apple is busy working on a fix as we speak.
If you are interested in details, the SkyCure researcher who discovered this issue wrote up a pretty interesting blog post that tells the story of his discovery and lays out some (but not all) of the details.
Natalie Kerris, who spent the last 14 years at Apple in corporate communications, announced her retirement from the company on Wednesday in a Twitter post.
“After 14 amazing years at Apple, it’s time to move on and see what adventures life holds for me next!” Kerris said.
She accompanied the announcement with this photo of a Steve Jobs quote:
Kerris was responsible for launching the iPhone, iPod, iPad, iTunes, the Mac, Apple Pay, and Apple Watch.
I contacted Kerris this afternoon to see what her plans were and if she had any other comment on her departure.
“I’m retiring to enjoy life,” Kerris confirmed. “Two weeks in Italy with my family gave me a new perspective on life.”
Congrats on your retirement Nat, you will be missed!
“I just had it,” Lucas Hinch, 38, told The Smoking Gun (via Ars Technica). Apparently the PC had thrown up one too many blue screens of death in recent months, so Hinch took it into an alley, loaded up a 9mm Hi-Point pistol that he’d purchased on Craiglist, and let the bullets fly.
From checking flight status to being in the cockpit, Apple is changing the air travel industry. It’s amazing when you think about how many industries Apple has transformed over the years—music, movies, phone, tablet, etc. The list goes on and on.
