
Apple Watch – What can you do with it? - zgryw
http://madebymany.com/blog/apple-watch-what-can-you-do-with-it
======
res0nat0r
Apparently you can't do a lot of things with it if you have tattoos on your
wrist:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/344b3o/anyone_with_ta...](http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/344b3o/anyone_with_tattoos_and_the_watch_please_read/)

~~~
huhhhh
_You 're tattooing it wrong._

But seriously, how could Apple not test this?

~~~
drzaiusapelord
I have a feeling that the Apple of old would have caught this instantly, when
it was largely the boutique brand for creatives. Today's Apple? Not surprising
at all.

~~~
edgyswingset
The Apple of old (and by that I mean Steve Jobs) decided to tell people they
were holding their phones wrong rather than launch a device which worked no
matter how you held it.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
No I mean a 80s and 90s hacker culture where weirdos were valued and guys with
tats would be testing things. Apple today just seems way too button down, for
good or bad.

~~~
greglindahl
Not only do you need a tat, but you need a tat covering the skin under the
watch that's done with metallic ink. What fraction of people with tats have
such a tattoo? I have a lot of friends with tats, but none that meet those
criteria.

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danso
It's pretty exciting to anticipate how developers might do innovative things
with the Watch...but until then, I'm pretty bearish of the device as something
of real utility. It's not just the particulars of Apple's execution and
implementation, but just that the physical form factor of a watch inherently
limits it...and the coolest things we've seen watches do in fiction, such as
Dick Tracy's wrist-walkie-talkie, are done just fine via smartphone. And
glancing at your watch all the time is not much less of a social interruption
than pulling out your phone.

What annoys me in reading consumer-facing reviews of the product is how much
of the perceived potential is through things that should be done by
_software_...for example, the ability to filter notifications from the
phone...there's no reason why a second (or third, fourth, etc) layer of
notification triage can't be implemented as a phone setting...in fact, I think
iPhone's Do Not Disturb mode is fantastically better done than its Android
equivalent. But to think that the Watch, or any ancillary device, is needed to
inherently solve the problem of filtering information overload...it's as if
rather than developing better spam filters, email providers just encouraged
consumers to make multiple email accounts to handle the deluge.

So hopefully Apple increasingly opens up the API for developers, to do things
far beyond what Apple has anticipated in its marketing plan.

~~~
wpietri
Your comment on social interruption really resonates with me. As somebody who
has been wearing a Pebble for a couple of years, the main utility I have
discovered is in minimizing the number of times I take out my phone. But it's
not really about reducing the onerous physical labor of putting my hand in my
pocket. It's about being more present.

Right now I get wrist notifications maybe 5-10 times a day. E.g, my next
meeting, a text message. I can sneak a glance in during a meeting and then
either carry on or smoothly bring things to an end so I can deal with
something urgent. That's about what I want; anything else can wait until I'm
free, at which point I'll pull out my phone and skim the non-urgent stuff that
has stacked up.

Despite having poked at the SDK, and despite having built a personal-use
Android app in the meantime, I haven't really had the urge to build anything
for the Pebble. I don't want more on my wrist.

~~~
rabbyte
I want a bracelet to replace my phone and pebble.

------
drzaiusapelord
>Can I build a watch face? No

Wow, really? I just built a watch face from a photo of my son on Android using
some app. It took 2 minutes. I was expecting Apple to do this better; not
block the functionality.

>Can I access the users Heart Rate? No.

This is bewildering. You'd think support for third party health apps would be
a priority. This works on AW right now.

This product seems rushed. I guess Apple didn't want AW and Pebble to continue
being the only smartwatch game in town. This seems to fall into the Apple
conventional wisdom of, "New product? Wait until Rev A." AW isn't perfect but
its kind of what I expect for a smartwatch platform. Its lightweight and
somewhat of an accessory to your smartphone (not another app/ad platform), but
still feature rich and developer friendly.

~~~
BinaryIdiot
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted; I couldn't agree more. Not being able
to build a watch face is incredible. Android Wear and Pebble both had this
ability really quickly (Android Wear was at launch, I believe Pebble added it
shortly thereafter) and much of this was done years ago.

But I can't say I'm not entirely surprised. Apple doesn't like people
customizing the look of their products much. Look at the iPhone (which I own)
it's still a grid of icons; no live information at all like every single other
platform out there unless you want to dig into a draw and slide over to today.

~~~
deong
Android Wear didn't have it at launch either. It took six months or so to
release an official watch face SDK. People did immediately hack watch faces
together by making an app whose UI was a custom drawn watch face animation,
but that was a little clunky in that you had to have an app on your phone for
the face, and some of them were pretty rough on the watch battery.

But yes, overall I agree. It's a bit surprising just how locked down it is.
Especially when it's hard to see the gain from it. The Apple Watch seems to
have a shorter (or at least not longer) battery life than most of the Android
Wear models that allow taxing the watch battery to do quite a lot more stuff.

------
brudgers
[Caveat: I am not suggesting that there won't be a market for software that
runs on the current generation of wrist located wearable computers. I just
think as an interactive interface, the form factor will wind up as an
evolutionary dead end for reasons similar to those by which touchpads have
largely displaced trackballs.]

I referee soccer. This means that some number of times a year, I regularly get
paid for an activity where a wristwatch is my only piece of tech and I rely on
it while breathing heavily and making spectators, team officials and players
express their unhappiness. I have half a dozen wristwatches in my referee bag.
When I run center, I accumulate wristwatch-wearing-hours two at a time because
I have to get things right. No amount of software sophistication can overcome
the ergonomics of wristwatches.

The wristwatch form factor has poor ergonomics for an interactive device
because it always requires two hands. Placing a small machine on the wrist
puts it out of harms way by placing it behind our primary method for
interacting with the physical world. Wristwatches work ergonomically because
they require limited manipulation and are primarily displays.

To the degree wristwatches offer interaction, quick interactions are done by
feel. Timex's Ironman series performs its intended function well because the
lap button is easy to locate without looking. However, basic wristwatch
ergonomics mean that hitting that button is two handed and slows down a
runner. Even worse, bringing an arm across the chest briefly inhibits full
expansion of the chest and thus lung capacity. Only because the information
the watch provides is so valuable is such a biomechanical cost a viable
engineering tradeoff.

Running a wristwatch off a phone turns two-handed one-device operations into
potential two-or-three-handed two-device operations. Sure, the obvious
solution is a voice interface...but when everything runs on the phone, then a
wristwatch is just a bluetooth microphone with a small display...with wrist
mounted microphone versus headset mounted.

On the other hand, The wrist is a well protected place for mounting sensitive
equipment on the body and the wristwatch is a reasonable form factor for
sensors, yet in the long run serious sensor platforms want to be open as do
the platforms for analysis of sensor data. Proprietary interfaces are not
likely to be the direct road to the quantified self.

------
rikf
Interesting that apple seems to be following the same model as they did with
their mobile devices in terms of developer functionality. Their view seems to
be to start off really tightly locked down and then gradually open up
additional features to developers. It makes sense in that its much easier to
open stuff up after its been locked down then to lock down stuff once people
have built stuff on it.

~~~
joakleaf
I think this goes well with their other line of thought:"It is so difficult to
remove a feature once we've added it, so it is best to be careful adding new
features and start with a few great features first." That's how they have
developed iOS.

I recall a high-ranking individual (Jobs, Cook, or Forstall) from Apple saying
this a couple of years ago, but I don't remember when, where, or context.
Sorry.

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pmontra
"Your Apple Watch app acts like a separate process running on a separate
device, however behind the scenes the OS runs a ‘skeleton’ like version of
your host application on the user's iPhone and the Apple Watch extension in
tandem, both on the iPhone"

I totally missed this limitation until now. So the iWatch works only if you
have an iPhone and the phone is in communication range with the watch?

What can the watch still do if the phone is offline or too far away?

~~~
BinaryIdiot
> What can the watch still do if the phone is offline or too far away?

I believe the watch face continues to work but anything that requires
interacting with non-native apps (most of apple's apps are native on the watch
fyi) or network connectivity just won't work. On the plus side it will work
with bluetooth and wifi so you can at least go some [minor] distance away from
your watch. But this same limitation exists in Android Wear and Pebble as well
(though Pebble has native applications so less of an issue there).

~~~
oxide
I'm not sure why, but I get the feeling that these watches aren't all that
smart. It sounds like the portable pocket computer we already bought does all
the heavy lifting, while the smartwatch itself functions as a secondary
display?

I never gave them much thought until just now, but learning that really saps
some of the novelty away from the whole thing for me.

I can't imagine a good reason to own a watch in 2015 and learning they're only
functional when paired with a phone reinforces that belief.

~~~
jonknee
The Apple Watch is a secondary display and sensor array. Battery limitations
have handicapped it for doing much on its own.

------
snowwrestler
To clarify--this is a plain-English rundown of the features and functions that
a developer can include when building an Apple Watch app. For example, it says
that devs do not have direct API access to force touch or the digital crown.

(As opposed to a consumers' view of what you can do with it.)

------
lighthawk
Though the Apple Watch is still cool, I'm still seriously thinking of getting
a Pebble Time:
[https://getpebble.com/pebble_time](https://getpebble.com/pebble_time)

However, development for the Time so far hasn't been as easy as I'd thought,
e.g. some of the examples provided to develop watch-faces, etc. online didn't
seem to be fully up-to-date to use with color/Time.

------
threeseed
Every restriction that Apple made makes total sense for the short/medium term.
Watch faces need to be impeccably programmed or are likely to dramatically
reduce battery life (some of the existing ones use OpenGL). Developers
shouldn't be redefining the behaviour of force touch or digital crown before
users have had a chance to properly learn them and access to heart rate surely
had FDA implications.

Tim Cook has stated that the focus for iOS development through to version 9
and likely a release or two afterwards will be performance and stability. Only
then if Apple can push the battery life a few extra hours will they likely
open the platform up a bit more.

Fully agree with the author how amazing it is seeing so many buggy apps after
having a week to play with my watch. Even from some of the established players
e.g. getting quota exceeded errors using Twitter.

~~~
baldfat
Watch further establishes people into the Walled Garden which is Apple.

I still think people just don't wear watches will cause watches to be a very
minimal form of wearables.

I seriously would wear a bracelet that had a larger usable surface and longer
battery life and faster cpu :)

~~~
clifff44
Walled Garden. I like the metaphors.

~~~
ceequof
It's an old metaphor:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walled_garden_(technology)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walled_garden_\(technology\))

------
rebootthesystem
I am having trouble finding a reason to strap a $400+ device to my wrist. I
have not had a need to wear a watch permanently for over 20 years. Heart rate
monitor? I have a Polar watch in my gym bag for that. Swimming? I have several
swim watches, however, I will typically use a finger-mounted SportCount
because it doesn't require interrupting the stroke to bring both hands
together to operated (you operate it with your thumb, single handed). Time? I
have my phone, computer, TV, microwave and, yes, el-cheapo LED nightstand
clock for that. Even while travelling if I don't feel like taking my phone out
of my pocket there are clocks everywhere. And, you might laugh, but years of
sailing, kayaking and outdoor activities have taught me to estimate time to a
useful degree of certainty by looking at the position of the sun. Silly, I
know. I am simply saying that I can't remember the las tome I thought "If I
only had a watch on my wrist permanently...". Anwering the phone? Please.

------
brosky117
One thing that I've always imagined but haven't heard much in these
discussions is the real potential behind the Apple Watch being the near-
magical NFC interactions that could be achieved with its position on the body.
For example, paying for groceries, opening locked doors, starting cars, etc. I
feel that someone would only need to see a Watch user wave their hand and
magically do something once before wanting that same "power".

~~~
jonknee
For cars that problem has been solved for several years--keyless entry /
ignition is pretty common these days (with the added advantage that your key
lasts for years without charging and you can give it to someone).

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dignick
You can do bi-directional notifications between host app and extension with
MMWormhole, which uses CFNotificationCenter:
[https://github.com/mutualmobile/MMWormhole](https://github.com/mutualmobile/MMWormhole)
I think overall Apple has done a fantastic job of v1 of this product line,
it's pretty polished. As an App developer who has been working on a watch App,
while there is a lot you can't do I understand why you can't do it, it will
come in time (native Apps later this year), and what is there right now is
pretty good. Shameless plug, the App is currently in review:
[http://napkin.io](http://napkin.io)

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ProAm
I'm going to wait for the Flavor Flav Edition, which will be a iPad on a chain
worn around your neck.

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gdubs
WWDC is right around the corner, so we're likely to see the APIs open up a
bit.

Apple's rollout strategy makes sense here. Restrict the number of ways
developers can kill the battery, because it's the Watch people will blame, not
the poorly engineered apps.

------
korvenadi
iAd support on apple watch is a stupid idea. who wants to show ads on a watch?

~~~
josefresco
_Notification_ style advertisements, that bubble up as you move about could be
a gold mine if users could get over the potential privacy concerns.

Advertising models like this (contextual notification powered offers) must
exist for smartphones already - anyone know the leader in this segment?

~~~
wpietri
It could be a gold mine for _advertisers_ , whose job is mostly to manipulate
people into buying particular things. For watch owners, though, it's being
mined.

My concern is only modestly with privacy; it's more about intimacy. Defending
against manipulation requires a bit of space, a bit of distance from the
manipulator. There is zero chance I would let ads on my watch, a surface I
paid a fair bit of money for because there's some information so useful that I
basically want it to be part of my body.

~~~
josefresco
I work for small business owners, to say their "advertising" is primarily to
"manipulate people into buying particular things" would be a very skewed
characterization.

Characterizations like that show a bias, and while they may "feel right" when
talking about large brands, when you realize your local market, or restaurant
wants to "advertise" or promote a special - suddenly _advertising_ doesn't
seem all that evil.

~~~
wpietri
And tell me again the point of promoting a special? It's to manipulate people
into becoming regular customers of restaurant A over restaurant B. Even the
notion of specials has mainly become a promotional device; the tail of
advertising has now wags the dog of cooking.

I like small business owners. And I get the _necessity_ of advertising in
today's markets. It's an arms race; if your competitors advertise, you
generally have to do so as well. People being people, I'm also provisionally
ok with some modest level of manipulation. But let's be real: advertising is
mostly calculated manipulation of other people for your own profit.

------
kenrikm
I've been working on a pretty complicated watch app that will be going live to
our users in the next few days. The simulator actually does a pretty good job
at faking a real watch. I was worried about the communication between the
phone and the watch over Bluetooth being slower then the simulator however
I've had a apple watch since Friday and there is no noticeable delay (though
I'm not sending images)

------
epaga
"I’m also not sure if you can submit an app to the store that is only an Apple
Watch app, like say a timer or small utility of some sort."

Yes, you can: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/toolbox-for-apple-
watch/id98...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/toolbox-for-apple-
watch/id986664742?mt=8) or [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/flip-coin-coin-
flip-decision...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/flip-coin-coin-flip-
decision/id982838378?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D4) for example. Pretty amazing that
apps like those two got the green light from the App Store Review Team.

~~~
smackfu
It seems like standards can be a bit relaxed when you are submitting an app
that aligns with Apple's strategy.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
I don't think it's that. Perhaps they put the Apple watch release date as the
app's release date and they rushed it through at the last minute.

Though I really don't see how the first one, with an iPhone app that is just a
blank screen, got through.

~~~
smackfu
My thinking is that if you want to say you have thousands of apps on launch
day, but barely any developers have run their apps on real hardware, you have
to relax your standards a bit, and figure it will work its way out in a month
or two.

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sylvinus
Interesting that they are using a separate process on the iPhone. Is that to
prepare for a future where the whole extension will actually run on the watch
itself?

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puppetmaster3
You can return it.

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hfourm
its screen looks nice atleast

------
gesman
I totally cool with apple watch to be the toy for kids.

Kudos to Apple's marketing abilities for pimping it as a luxury thing (I
wouldn't even call it a watch. Wearable perhaps?) and making people to
salivate over it.

Apple's marketing is something worth paying for to learn from.

