Go download Hours for iPhone and Apple Watch for free! I’ve always been bad at tracking time, something few people enjoy. Hours has, within a matter of a few days of use, worked it’s way into my flow and allowed me to keep track of my time on my new job at HLK.
McCrossen’s not convinced that Apple and others will be able to restore the Age of the Wrist—in part because of the privacy and security that the pocket offers for treasured phones, and in part because “time is embedded everywhere” these days, from car dashboards to coffeemakers to iPhone screens.
“Maybe we’re so deeply saturated with the imperatives of clock time that we want to put it away,” she said. “Maybe we don’t want it on our wrist anymore. Maybe we don’t need it.”
Interesting point. To me, the reason I wear an analog watch (and will use analog watch faces when I get an Apple Watch) is because I like “fuzzy time”. The down-to-the-second digital time display on our electronic devices isn’t always necessary and we can lose the relative time. Seeing time on a round face, the relation of the minute hand to the face, changes how time is perceived to me.
Life here is slower, but the interruptions offered by technology have impacted suburbanites and urbanites just the same. PTA moms and barbecue-grilling dads may see initially see the Apple Watch as yet another tool forcing us to stay connected, but really, the opposite is true.
Like our city-dwelling counterparts, we also spend too much time tapping on small screens, while ignoring the vistas in front of us. We, too, carry around the guilt of having missed moments, while having forgotten the people in front of us. We stress over phones at dinner tables. Over eyes fixated on digital conversations, instead of spoken ones.
The Apple Watch’s promise is the ability to break that cycle. How ironic that is. We once paid Apple time and again for the privilege of using its many devices. And now – oh how clever, Apple! – we must pay again for the privilege of being able to stop.
Growing up in a small town in Southern Illinois, I miss the slowness of life at times. Except at midnight when I’m in the mood for a burger and no McDonald’s within 15 minutes is open late, far less 24/7. Great to hear another perspective on the Apple Watch. Will this gadget move us towards not using our gadgets as much in public?
I originally designed the Apple Watch app for my podcast player, Overcast, with a scaled-down version of the iPhone app’s structure.
This seemed like a sensible adaptation of my iOS app to the Apple Watch. In practice, it sucked.
One of the reasons that I haven’t started building Apple Watch apps yet is because of my lack of an Apple Watch to feel them on. Marco writes on how once he had the device, he understood how he went about things wrongly. This isn’t about technical limitations of the platform, but how people use it. What the expections are. Designing in a simulator is never designing on the device.
The Watch is the first device that’s encouraged me to spend as little time as possible with it, or with any of the other electronic sinkholes around my office, my home, and in my pockets. It’s the first product that lives in this world, offering a small, brief window into the digital one - instead of being a portal that envelopes us, pulling us into another place to be held hostage by our own need for novelty and trivial diversion.
I love that line “first product that lives in this world.” From what we’ve heard, Apple’s intent was just this. Allow you to step away from your phone more. Be more present.
Last year this was published by Doghouse Diaries:
And today, this patent by Samsung was released:
Not the first to try a full, wrap-around wrist device, but hilarious that Doghouse called it last year.
Yet what Dye seems most fascinated by is one of the Apple Watch’s faces, called Motion, which you can set to show a flower blooming. Each time you raise your wrist, you’ll see a different color, a different flower. This is not CGI. It’s photography.
“We shot all this stuff,” Dye says, “the butterflies and the jellyfish and the flowers for the motion face, it’s all in-camera. And so the flowers were shot blooming over time. I think the longest one took us 285 hours, and over 24,000 shots.”
Such a great article from Wired on the watch faces from the upcoming Apple Watch. I know for my wife, the butterfly face will be her go to. Or maybe the Mickey Mouse. She wants a Tinkerbell one, but I’d be willing to bet that developers will be able to design watch faces and complications soon.
Quite a few good articles on the Apple Watch published today as the presale starts tomorrow at midnight (PST).
Apple Watch reservations for in-store pickup will be limited to one per customer through Apple’s Reserve and Pickup service, MacRumors has learned. Customers in the United States and other launch countries will be required to present a valid government-issued photo ID upon pickup at the Apple Store where they placed their Apple Watch reservation, and only the person named on the reservation will be allowed to pick up the product.
Wait. Did you think I was talking about voting? No! A photo ID shouldn’t be required for something silly like that. Don’t want to discriminate. But one will be required to buy your Apple Watch. Make sure you have one!
Our phones have become invasive. But what if you could engineer a reverse state of being? What if you could make a device that you wouldn’t—couldn’t—use for hours at a time? What if you could create a device that could filter out all the bullshit and instead only serve you truly important information? You could change modern life. And so after three-plus decades of building devices that grab and hold our attention—the longer the better—Apple has decided that the way forward is to fight back.
Great article, start to finish, about the upcoming Apple Watch. If you want a look behind the curtain of Apple and how much they push every detail of a product, read this article.
You can’t explain magic.1
Explaining time saved is next to impossible, as people perceive time very differently. I think this will be the killer feature of the Apple Watch: time saved. All those times you take your phone out of your pocket for a notification, quick directions, or because you are waiting for a message and don’t want to miss it, the Apple Watch will be right on your wrist. Keep you phone in your pocket.