Apple
For the watch, it was a year before Ive settled on straps that clicked into slots. Ive later tested watchbands by wearing them outside the studio with other watches. The shape of the body, meanwhile, barely changed: a rectangle with rounded corners. “When a huge part of the function is lists”—of names, or appointments—“a circle doesn’t make any sense,” Ive said. Its final form resembles one of Newson’s watches, and the Cartier Santos, from 1904.
The New Yorker
Love the simple logic of it. So many competitors to the Apple Watch let function follow form. A round watch has an interface designed to be round, but the moment you have an interface that scrolls, that round screen becomes the bane of your existence. A rectange just makes sense.
And this great piece on Steve Jobs:
Jobs’s taste for merciless criticism was notorious; Ive recalled that, years ago, after seeing colleagues crushed, he protested. Jobs replied, “Why would you be vague?,” arguing that ambiguity was a form of selfishness: “You don’t care about how they feel! You’re being vain, you want them to like you.” Ive was furious, but came to agree. “It’s really demeaning to think that, in this deep desire to be liked, you’ve compromised giving clear, unambiguous feedback,” he said. He lamented that there were “so many anecdotes” about Jobs’s acerbity: “His intention, and motivation, wasn’t to be hurtful.”
Those close to me know that I share a personality type with Steve Jobs. INTJ. I too see the value in being unambiguous in feedback. Be clear. Vanity has no place in this line of work. If all members of the team care to produce the best product, being clear about what is wrong about it is most important. If people care more about themselves, feeling get hurt too easily over something that has nothing to do with feelings. I just try to be a bit less of an ass than Steve Jobs could be. Sometimes I success. Sometimes I don’t.
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This spontaneous anti-green-bubble brigade is an interesting example of how sometimes very subtle product decisions in technology influence the way culture works.
Vítor Lourenço
I love the intersection of culture and technology. It’s facinating to me. Strike up a conversation with me about the Apple Watch and the cultural impact of wearables is all I’ll talk about for a couple hours. Well, apparently Apple has done a great job ostracizing those that don’t have an iPhone, or at least in the view of many iPhone users. Green is mean.
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For 2015, iOS 9, which is codenamed Stowe (after the ski resort in Vermont), is going to include a collection of under-the-hood improvements. Sources tell us that iOS 9 engineers are putting a “huge” focus on fixing bugs, maintaining stability, and boosting performance for the new operating system, rather than solely focusing on delivering major new feature additions. Apple will also continue to make efforts to keep the size of the OS and updates manageable, especially for the many millions of iOS device owners with 16GB devices.
9to5Mac
If this turns out to be true, it will make a lot of people happy. Stability is one of the biggest complaints in the last year and I have personally heard it from a lot of friends that are Apple fans and developers.
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Welcome to Apple World Today. While this is a new website, the roots of it go back ten years to the founding of a site called The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW). That site grew out of Weblogs, Inc., which had a large stable of websites including Engadget, Joystiq, and Autoblog. Weblogs, Inc. was acquired in 2005 by Aol, which regrettably decided to discontinue some of the "smaller" websites in the last week. TUAW was down, but not out.
Welcome to Apple World Today
When I worked at Apple back between 2005 and 2007 I cannot tell you how frequently TUAW was open in the back of the store. Apple didn’t provide us with more information than we needed to sell their products, so sites like TUAW allowed us to do more research, read reviews of accessories, and learn more about the Apple world. Last week, Aol shut down TUAW, which was a major punch to the gut of many in the tech world, but today the team that was let go from TUAW is now launching Apple World Today (AWT).
What makes me happy is this:
Our biggest desire is to avoid the banner ad hell that most websites, especially those owned by our former employer, have become. That's why we're looking at doing two things: relying on a few sponsors who are depending on you to go out and buy their product to keep them afloat and supporting AWT, and working that Patreon crowdfunding. Let's throw the advertisers back into the trash heap and take back our internet; make Apple World Today your "public radio" of Apple news and reviews!
RIP Tech Blogging; Welcome to the Future
Ads on the web are becoming simply rediculous. Sites like MacStories and Beautiful Pixels avoid annoying ads by leveraging sponsorships and their readership. It’s great to see another blog launching with the same intent.
For anyone that has followed TUAW over the years, Apple World Today is definitely one to follow.
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Introducing Photos for OS X. Featuring an easy-to-use and streamlined design, Photos has been engineered from the ground up to help you keep your growing library organized and accessible. Powerful and intuitive editing tools help you perfect your images as well as create beautiful gifts for sharing. And with iCloud Photo Library, a lifetime’s worth of photos and videos can be stored in the cloud — so you can access your entire collection from your Mac or iOS devices anytime.
I’ve been using iPhoto for a decade. I have a lot of photos. With a 6 month old (as of Sunday), I take a lot of photos these days. Having easy access to those photos across my devices seems like a dream. And Apple seems to be trying to make that dream come true.
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[T]he earliest watches lacked a minute hand because of the need to pack so much technology in to power them and also to drive the “display.” This wasn’t a problem since the accuracy was so poor they drifted off accurate timekeeping by up to hours every day! Their tiny springs and inefficient clockwork also meant they didn’t store much power. Thus they needed winding very regularly—at first with a key, just like traditional grandfather clocks and whatnot, which is self-evidently inconvenient.
Don’t Stress About Smartwatch Battery Life—It’s A 500 Year Old Problem, Kit Eaton
Great article about the history of watches and battery life, going back 500 years. It’s interesting to me that Apple is very much positioning their Apple Watch as a watch and not just a wearable.
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My time for a phone upgrade came last fall and I went with the iPhone 6 Plus. As Android phones got bigger and bigger screens, I sat by and mocked with much of the Apple crowd. But I got an iPhone 6 Plus within months of it coming out.
Let’s get this straight, had I thought them a good idea, I still wouldn’t have purchased one. I’m an iPhone user through and through. But I mocked because I didn’t get the shift of view yet. Any time I saw one, I thought of them held up to someone’s ear, engulfing their whole face, and I laughed hard. I didn’t see it.
But once Apple had one, a huge phone, I took the time to think. The Phone is just an app on my mobile device. An app I seldom used, especially when compared to the other apps I used. What once was a cell phone that had apps now had largely become a mobile device that had a Phone app. Could that larger screen help my other apps become more useful? Very much so. Easier reading of my feeds, easier typing of notes and posts, easier surfing the web. A bigger screen is better for all of that.
I had seen my iPhone as a phone all this time and now I had shifted. Did I look ridiculous with my large phone up to my ear? Probably. Once every couple of days when I’d take a phone call. But all the rest of the time, I had a screen the size of my face that fit in my pocket. And after a few months, I still love it.
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