Tag: apple

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Apple Rules*, Flat vs. Threaded Discussions

Issue 11 of my newsletter – subscribe here

I spotted this ad on the tube recently, and it made me think about Apple’s unappreciated dominance over the lives of hundreds of millions of people:

600 free prints a year – what a deal! Clearly there must be a catch, and sure enough, there is a tiny asterisk next to “App!” I wasn’t able to see it from my side of the carriage, but there’s an even-tinier line of text right at the bottom of the ad that doubtless discloses just how much you’ll have to pay to get those 600 “free” prints.

This kind of chicanery is prohibited by Apple on its App Store. There are very strict rules about disclosure of payments, and in particular, of the auto-renewing subscriptions that so many developers (including my company) are so fond of, since it’s kind of the only way we can people to actually, you know, pay for a service these days.

How strict? Well, there is a very specific set of wording you must use to describe how subscriptions auto-renew. The text labels on the subscription buttons must be over a certain size. Prices must be the biggest element of text, so you can’t just say “FREE!*” as the tube ad does:

In the purchase flow, the amount that will be billed must be the most prominent pricing element in the layout. For example, an annual subscription should clearly display the total amount that will be billed upon purchase. While you may also present a breakdown price that the annual amount is equivalent to or a savings when compared to weekly or monthly subscriptions, these additional elements should be displayed in a subordinate position and size to the annual price. This ensures that users are not misled.

It’s all very consumer-friendly, so I honestly don’t have a big problem with the intent of Apple’s rules. But just consider what’s happening here – Apple dictates the precise way in which you design key parts of your app. That’s unusual, to say the least. It’d be like the London Underground dictating that you couldn’t design adverts with asterisks and tiny disclaimer text. Maybe they should? But maybe not.

If you don’t agree with Apple’s rules, well, you don’t need to be on their platform, right? It’s not like you have to make iOS apps, after all. Why, you can just… completely ignore the majority of the smartphone app revenue in the US and UK!

So that’s a big problem. Apple may not command the lion’s share of smartphone users as Google does, but in many markets, iOS users spend far more money on apps than Android users.

A bigger problem is that Apple breaks its own rules by not disclosing pricing and subscription terms; by using push notifications for marketing (third parties apps are prohibited from doing so); by immediately cutting off trial subscriptions rather than letting them run for their whole term; and so on. It matters because Apple is now competing directly against many of the companies whose apps it hosts and rules over, from Apple Music to Apple Arcade to Apple TV+ and Apple News.

Apple would claim it tries to be reasonable when reviewing third party apps, and I don’t doubt the motives of their review team. However, the mere chance that your app update could be rejected, or worse yet, removed, whether for good reasons or just out of a misunderstanding? It’s literally terrifying for people whose livelihoods depend on Apple’s whims – like me.

All of this has introduced a chilling effect on third party app developers. I’ve seen many otherwise outspoken developers genuinely scared of voicing even mild criticism of Apple on private forums and chat rooms, let alone on Twitter or podcasts. They really think they could be blacklisted for criticising Apple, and while I am 100% certain that isn’t the case – because I and others have been far more critical in public and have never experienced any blowback – I understand their fear.

Now, as far as benevolent dictators go, you could do much worse than Apple. I’ve always had pleasant dealings with them in person. But no company should have that kind of complete and terrible power over tens of thousands of companies and hundreds of millions of users. We don’t allow it in the “real” world and so we shouldn’t allow it in the digital world.

—

I’ve been thinking a lot about the merits of flat versus threaded discussions online. Flat discussions are like those on Metafilter and other old-school forums where each reply follows directly from the one above it, while threaded discussions are like what you see on Reddit where replies can be in response to other specific replies, creating multiple “threads” branches off from one another.

For a long time, I believed flat discussions were generally superior to threaded ones. They helped promote coherent debate rather than encouraging groups of users to spin off on wild tangents, never to be seen again. In other words, Metafilter good, Reddit bad.

But I’ll confess – I’m spending a lot more time on Reddit than Metafilter these days (although I’m making a concerted effort to change!) That imbalance is partly because Reddit, having far more users than Metafilter, can cater towards more specific interests. There’s just no way I can get all the latest news about Edinburgh or Apple on Metafilter, that’s not what the site was designed for.

There’s another reason, though: I don’t think that flat discussions, as typically implemented by forums like Discourse or Metafilter, are working well for communities where there is serious disagreement about how discussions should unfold.

I’m being really unspecific here because I don’t just mean “communities with political disagreements”, I mean “communities where some people like making jokey comments and others dislike them” and also “…where some like tangents and others hate them.”

Flat discussions makes problems stick out more because everyone is forced to read them. In flat discussions, it’s possible for one or two people to completely dominate a discussion, or for irrelevant, misinformed, or extreme opinions to derail a conversation because it’s just impossible to ignore them; you’re literally posting right underneath them. In threaded forums, these sidetracks would end up downvoted and quarantined in their own threads.

Metafilter and other “flat” forums are trying to preserve a unitary community where we hope that just by talking enough, people can come to an agreement about how to run a conversation. Reddit assumes that’s impossible.

Watching

🎞️ Dr. Strangeglove. Fantastically funny and tightly-written masterpiece.

Reading

📖 Ways of Seeing by John Berger. A classic, which means you’ve probably heard most of its arguments in other books by now, but still very much worth reading. It doesn’t waste your time.

📖 The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal. Don’t be put off by the misleading “Lady Astronaut” tagline – it’s impeccably researched but packed with smart, interesting characters. A bit like Stephen Baxter crossed with someone who understand human emotions.

Visiting

🏛️ Michael Rakowitz at the Whitechapel Gallery. Funny and political and smart, an artist for millennials.

🏛️ Manga at The British Museum. A workmanlike exhibition that’s nonetheless essential if you have any interest in Manga whatsoever.

🏛️ AI: More than Human at the Barbican. Very much for the layperson who doesn’t mind watching a bunch of Google and Deepmind marketing materials that are wholly unquestioned. There was one video, made and filmed by Deepmind, about the work they’re doing with Moorfield Eye Hospital – but nothing about the many controversies about their use of patient data.

It is an occupational hazard of curating an exhibition about AI that you quickly run out of good stuff to display. Sure enough, two thirds of the way through, the exhibition devolved into a grab bag of “future stuff” that had nothing to do with AI. Must try harder!

Actually, one more thing – there was a machine-generated poem installation at the Barbican. It wasn’t any good. I’m pretty tired of this AI fetishism and star-struck curators who pretend machine-generated stuff is worth exhibition.

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Money Illiteracy, Apple Arcade

Issue 6 of my newsletter – subscribe here

Since buying a house a couple of years ago, I’ve noticed more and more people talking about overpaying their mortgages, and I find the whole idea mystifying.

The mechanics of mortgages were alien to me until recently, and they may well be to you as well. In the UK, most people opt for 25 year mortgages with a reasonably substantial deposit, usually around 5-10% of the value. For the first few years, the interest rate on the mortgage will be higher because your loan-to-value ratio will also be higher – that is, the amount you’ve borrowed vs. the value of your house. That means your monthly mortgage payments will also be relatively high.

But as time goes on and your mortgage payments add up, the amount you’ve borrowed will decrease. More importantly, the value of your house has probably gone up. In some areas, it might have gone up a lot. That means your loan-to-value ratio will be lower, so banks will trust you more and offer you a significantly lower rate of interest if you remortgage. Right now, you could get as low as 2% interest on your mortgage, vs. the 4+% at the start of your mortgage.

It doesn’t sound like a big difference, but when you’ve borrowed hundreds of thousands of pounds, it adds up to hundreds of pounds per month in increased mortgage payments. I was genuinely shocked by how much our mortgage payments decreased after just two years when we remortgaged for a lower rate, and I thought I was financially savvy.

Anyway – that’s all prologue to the fact that for many homeowners, when their mortgage payments decrease, they decide to overpay their mortgage, sometimes by a significant amount. If you overpay each month, you could clear your mortgage years earlier than its default 25 year term.

The act of overpaying a mortgage, I believe, confers such a strong feeling of security and responsibility and satisfaction that many very smart people will prioritise mortgage overpayments over every other form of investment. At least, that’s the only way I can explain such a mystifying decision.

Now, it is true that Money Saving Expert, the middle-class bible, tells you to overpay your mortgage, assuming you have no other higher-interest debts. Why? Their answer is that while the interest rate on mortgages can be very low, most savings rates are even lower. It’s possible to beat 2% on a few savings products like Cash ISAs and fixed-rate accounts where you lock your money away for a year or more, but I suspect most people are not using those.

So far, so sensible. It’s only until you get to the end of the long article that it explores alternatives to saving, like investing, with the stark warning:

But to generate the amount of investment returns equivalent to paying off your mortgage, you’d usually need relatively high-risk investments – overpaying the mortgage gives a surety of return.

This is a brilliant summation of British distrust in the stock market, and specifically index funds, which are the one of the more accessible alternatives to traditional savings and bonds. Index funds are the opposite of traditional wheeler-dealer stock traders – they’re composed of shares that mirror the biggest companies in a particular market, and those shares only get bought and sold as those companies gradually get bigger or smaller.

Still, index funds are volatile: their price can jump up and down in just a few days. In bad years, an index fund might lose as much as 40% of its value, as happened in 2008. On the face of it, it’s no surprise people distrust the stock market. And because it’s plainly risky to put your money in index funds in the short term, many people think it’s even riskier to do that for the long term.

The truth is completely different. Index funds are much less risky if you hold them for the long term. The average rate of return from the S&P 500 index (a bundle of major US companies) over last 60 years is 7%, after you’ve taken inflation into account.

In some years, the index has dropped a huge amount, but most years it’s increased. And the longer you hold an index fund for, the more those dips and spikes are evened out, such that you don’t need to worry about timing. Here’s an extreme example:

Imagine you were spectacularly unlucky and you invested in the S&P 500 on August 9th 2007, the day before it began its massive year-long crash. Two years later, you would have lost 47% of your money: a dire result. But if you held on to your money until 2017, you’d have realised a gain of 6% per year, after inflation – far higher than any interest rate you’d get from savings or bonds.

Most financial advisors agree that index funds are one of the best choices for investment, and they would undoubtedly favour them over overpaying a mortgage with a 2% interest rate. So why do people distrust them so much?

  1. Index funds don’t make investment firms a lot of money, so they prefer to advertise and promote actively-managed investment funds whose managers buy and sell shares much more faster. As famously demonstrated by a $1 million bet by Warren Buffet, these funds tend to underperform index funds over the long term, but due to survivorship bias you often just hear about the funds that succeeded rather than the ones that failed.
  2. At school, the only thing I learned about the stock market was the Great Depression. You just can’t underestimate the importance of education in all of this.
  3. Likewise, popular culture associates the stock market with risk-taking wheeler dealers. It’s basically gambling.

All of this is a great shame, because it makes people poorer. You might say, boo hoo, what a shame that people fortunate enough to own a house aren’t making more money. OK, fine, but until we get rid of capitalism, I think it’d be a good thing for more normal people to own part of large companies and benefit from their profits. Right now, those gains are disproportionately going to the wealthy.

I personally wouldn’t put all my savings into index funds due to their volatility. But while home prices aren’t as volatile, they are highly illiquid in that you can’t quickly turn a bit of your house into cash if you need it. And of course, the volatility of the stock market is lessened if you view it over the term of a 25 year mortgage.

It suits the financial industry that homeowners remain so risk-averse and financially ignorant that they harm themselves. I wish more people would consider index funds over mortgage overpayments. But it’s hard to change the stubborn British belief that housing is the best, and only, investment normal people can make.

—

Today, Microsoft launched the Xbox Games Pass (basically, Netflix for games) at $5/month on PCs, joining the existing console-only Games Pass for $10/month, and the “Ultimate” Games Pass that combines both and adds a few extras on top for $15/month.

This makes me think the Apple Arcade subscription price is going to be lower than most people expect. Apple has a reputation for being expensive, but their subscription products are comparable with competitors:

  • Music: Apple Music, Spotify, and Google Play Music are all $10/month
  • Storage: iCloud Drive and Google One both offer 200GB for $3/month
  • Apple News+ is the same $10/month as Texture was before Apple acquired it

Apple Arcade is interesting because it extends across iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and Macs – but it probably has fewer AAA titles and blockbuster IPs than Xbox Games Pass. So if I had to guess, I’d say it’ll land at $7/month – far less than the $15/month some commentators have floated.

Maybe an “Apple Prime” that includes games, news, music, storage, and AppleCare for $30-40/mo?

Playing

🎮 Kids on iPad. 30 minutes of weird, mesmerising, disturbing interactive animation about crowds, groupthink, and kids.

Watching

📺 When They See Us on Netflix about the Central Park Five. One of the best things I’ve seen this year; excellent acting and beautiful direction. I couldn’t get through the final episode without crying.

Reading

📖 The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. My book of the year so far; full thoughts next week.

📖 Saga, Volume 1 by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples. Entertaining epic sci-fi/fantasy comic. Didn’t quite live up to the “better than Star Wars” hype, but hey, it was on Libby from my library so why not? ¯_(ツ)_/¯

📖 9 Lessons in Brexit by Ivan Rogers, the former UK ambassador to the EU. A very short book, more like an extended essay really, about misconceptions the British have about the EU and Brexit process. A tad overwritten, but that’s civil servants for you.

My main takeaway is that the government’s prioritisation of immigration and goods trade over services (which are worth far more to the UK economy) is going to majorly bite us on the arse.

📰 The Wild West Meets the Southern Border by Valeria Luiselli in the New Yorker, about the parallels between Wild West re-enactors in Tombstone and US attitudes towards the border with Mexico. Very enjoyable and insightful. Here’s a bit that, perhaps deliberately, reminded me of the modern Westworld:

The town, it seemed, existed not only in a loop of embodied repetitions of odd historical moments but also in a kind of cut-and-paste of the same people. It is entirely possible that, at any given moment in Tombstone, Wyatt Earp is having a beer with Wyatt Earp.

and on re-enactors’ fetish for details over the big picture:

An interesting paradox of the reënactment scene’s obsession with authenticity and historical accuracy, this “getting it right,” is that accuracy is measured in terms of the minute details of a particular event, which does not necessarily amount to historical accuracy in the broader sense. Old West history buffs may endlessly dispute whether Wyatt Earp was wearing a specific kind of bow tie during the O.K. Corral shoot-out in 1881, but may be oblivious of much of what was happening in the region during those years.

Visiting

🎤 Cymera, “Scotland’s Festival of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Writing”.

Some choice (paraphrased) quotes from Ken MacLeod:

“Hard science fiction” is anything you can honestly sell with a spaceship on the cover. “Space opera” is anything you can honestly sell with an exploding spaceship on the cover.

… Space opera is justified because it’s the most optimistic form of science fiction. It shows we still have a future. And it gives us a vast arena for recreating mythological adventures.

Charlie Stross:

“Horror” is about loss of control. About the loss of bodily autonomy.

🏛️ I saw the Edinburgh (University) College of Art graduate show and the Edinburgh College HND show yesterday.

Lots of interesting art but my eyes were left bleeding from the blizzard of spelling mistakes and typos. Spelling errors in titles. Flagrant abuse of apostrophes. Grammatical errors every page. Barely any project was immune. It was painful to read.

I understand students might think they’re here to be artists, not writers – but unless you’re the best of the best, it’s really important to have a rounded set of skills.

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Through an iPhone, Squinting

If you want a vision of the future, imagine your arm holding up your iPhone — forever

It has been truly delightful to see all the imaginative augmented reality prototypes made by developers playing around with Apple’s new ARKit framework. It’s only been available for a couple of months, but developers have already gone to town with all sorts of fun ideas:

Amid the excitement, it’s easy to forget that we’ve been here before, many, many times. Back in 2015, Apple acquired Metaio, a German company that provided an SDK (software development kit) that allowed other developers to easily make augmented reality experiences. Two years on, ARKit is no doubt far more powerful and far easier to use than Metaio’s SDK, but the principle is the same.

And so are many of the applications. We’ve seen 3D objects superimposed on the real world on iOS device before, powered by Metaio:

And we’ve seen people plopping down inexpensive furniture into their homes before:

I don’t mean to rain on ARKit’s parade. The ease of use, lack of licensing fees, and sheer power means that we’ll be seeing a greater variety of ideas than we ever did in Metaio’s time, and so it’s entirely possible that someone will figure out an idea that makes phone-based augmented reality really take off. This ARKit-powered measuring tape prototype is actually very neat and useful:

But I don’t think this time is different.

All of these videos you see are incredibly misleading — not because they’re faked (they aren’t), but because they make it seem as if your field of view will be filled with the digital reality.

We usually don’t have to worry about this for videos taken by smartphones because in those cases, it’s actually true: when you watch a video on Snapchat or Instagram, you’re seeing what you’d really see if you were there. But when you watch an augmented reality video, you’re definitely not: instead, you have to imagine you’re holding up a phone at arm’s length, and seeing the video on that phone.

Looking at the world through a 5″ window is never going to be comfortable for longer than a minute. I’m sure there will be specific, short experiences like the measuring tape app that do well, along with some tourism and instructional apps, but I very much doubt we’ll see experiences even as long as 5 minutes, let alone 15 minutes.

As for games, so many of the prototypes are basically placing 3D objects on top of real world 2D planes, like your coffee table:

Forget about accessibility or comfort. I fail to see how this is more fun than a non-AR game that isn’t tied to a flat plane. It would be more innovative for AR games to involve manipulating of objects in the real world to influence the digital world, but that’s decidedly tricky when you’re holding up a phone or tablet.

Before you say “Pokémon Go”, let’s be clear — literally the first thing any decent player does in that game is turn off the augmented reality layer (where the monsters are superimposed on top of the real world camera view) because it eats up your battery and makes the game harder to play.

I don’t buy it. And I don’t think Apple does, either. Unlike Google’s shameful boosting of the dreadful Google Glass, Apple has thus far been comparatively quiet about ARKit. I’m sure they realise that most people don’t want to develop their shoulder muscles by using AR all the time.

No, this is all preparation for their future heads-up display — one that really will fill up your field of vision, be perfectly comfortable to use, utterly desirable, and only barely affordable.

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Ingrateful Expectations

This week, I bought a new iPad Pro 9.7″ to replace my iPad Mini 2. I use my iPad at home for at least two hours every day, mostly for web browsing and reading magazines, so it didn’t feel like a stretch to spend the not-inconsiderable £619 to get an upgrade. I was particularly interested in the iPad Pro’s new screen (40% lower reflectance than the Air 2, maybe 70+% over the Mini 2; laminated display; etc.), the Apple Pencil support, and most importantly, a 3x speed increase compared to what I have now.

Has my Mini 2 gotten slower since I bought it two and a half years ago? It feels like it, but according to benchmarks, iOS 9 actually increased the speed of the Mini 2 for my most common activity, web browsing. Perhaps the benchmarks are wrong, but it’s also likely that I just expect much more from my devices every year – not just because web pages and apps are becoming more complex, but due to the ratcheting-up of performance on my other devices. When I first got my iPad Mini 2, I’m sure it made my iPhone 5 feel slow in comparison, but my iPhone 6 now makes the Mini 2 feel slow.

And now the iPad Pro makes my iPhone 6 feel slow(ish). That’s to be expected, but more surprisingly, in my tests it loads webpages just as fast as my 27″ iMac from late 2012, which has 24GB of RAM; the iPad Pro has ‘only’ 2GB. Last night I used FaceTime while browsing the web and scrolling in Twitter, and there was nary a hiccup. I’m sure I could make it slow down with, say, a dozen Safari tabs and Grand Theft Auto, but that’s not a common use-case for me.

The display is just as good. Yes, it has lower reflectance, which makes for a more pleasant reading experience (no getting distracted by subtle reflections in front of the text); yes, it can go brighter. But the real MVP is the True Tone feature, which basically white-balances the display by sensing the colour temperature of your surroundings. It’s not headline-grabbing but as soon as you turn it off, you realise just how blue the display would be without it. The ultimate effect is less eye strain because it makes the iPad feel more like a piece of paper rather than some artificial glowing rectangle. I wouldn’t be surprised if True Tone was introduced to all new Apple displays in the next couple of years.

Naturally, the world wouldn’t complete without Apple fanatics who are deeply, personally offended by the iPad Pro not having, say, USB 3 support or 4GB of RAM or a faster Touch ID sensor. Without them, it’s apparently not a sufficiently impressive upgrade over the iPad Air 2 from 18 months ago. I think that’s arguable, but what’s more interesting to me is that there are people who really want to upgrade a 1.5 year old tablet.

Now, we all know people who upgrade their phones every year, and while I don’t care enough to do that, I can understand the impulse because it still feels like there’s a rapid pace of improvements in smartphones. But I don’t know anyone who upgrades their computer every year. In fact, it wouldn’t even be possible to do such a thing on many Macs, because they don’t get updated that often – and in any case, the upgrades would get you a scant 10-20% speed increase.

Tablets occupy a middle ground. Since they share the same core processors as phones, they share the tremendous speed improvements. But their other features are changing less rapidly; people just don’t care as much about the camera or touch sensor on tablets as they do on their phones, because they use their tablets less frequently and for a narrower range of tasks. So I find it baffling that anyone would even want to upgrade their iPad every release.

I suppose people are upset because it’s called the iPad Pro and that Apple are marketing it as a replacement for your computer. If so, that’s unfortunate. ‘Pro’ is a marketing term; the iPad Pro is no more meant for ‘professionals’ than the Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro laptop is meant for professionals. The iPad will never be a true replacement for a traditional computer until it’s much more flexible and runs a windowed operating system… but… who cares? Many people don’t need a traditional computer any more, and most people are using traditional computers far less – I know I am. For the rest of the time, I’m happy using my tablet.

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How Useful is the Apple Watch, Anyway?

Back when I worked out at gyms, I’d often be found on the exercise bikes. Unlike the other cardio equipment, it was easy to grip the heart-rate monitors, and it was intriguing to see the numbers skip up and down as I went through my routine. But after a few sessions, I stopped bothering. The numbers always followed the same predictable pattern and I wasn’t learning anything new or useful from them.

I feel the same way with fitness devices and the notion of the ‘quantified self’ as a whole. Regularly recording your weight, steps, calories, heart rate, and so on, is useful when you are looking for changes, whether that’s because you’re trying to lose weight, run faster, or detect an illness. It’s good for professionals who are pinpointing exactly how to improve their performance. It’s good for long-term reviews of your weight or heart rate over many months or years. And it’s good for beginners who don’t know much about how their bodies will respond to change. But unless you fall into one of those categories, it’s not really that useful to know that your heart rate was, on average, 70 bpm this week and 68 bpm last week.

When I started running, I found it motivating to track my distance and pace with various gadgets. I stopped routinely recording my runs a few years ago when my habits settled down. These days, I run three or four times a week along two or three different trails, and I know exactly how long and difficult they are. It’s not that interesting for me to know exactly how fast I run because I can’t do anything with that data, and in any case, I can already tell.

There is a huge novelty factor for fitness trackers these days, precisely because everyone is now a beginner – even those people who were already running and walking. It really is interesting, for the first few months, to know how many steps you’re walking. But eventually it gets predictable and at least half the people stop using them altogether.

It’s refreshing that the Apple Watch dispenses with step counts as a primary measure, and to highlight three different numbers related to exercise, movement, and standing; and, by and large, to dispense with numbers as well. But I suspect even this simplified measure will get boring as well.

So if that’s the case for one of the Watch’s best features – fitness – what about the others? One week in, and I have a better idea of what the Watch is useful for.

Communication is, unsurprisingly, the killer app – just as it is for the iPhone. It really is much more convenient to receive texts on your wrist – and much less distracting. Often, when I receive a text or email on my phone, I’ll read it, and then I’ll mindlessly open up a whole bunch of other apps and end up wasting five minutes. With the Watch, I look at the text, and then that’s it. There is no temptation to fiddle with other apps because the screen is too small and frankly, it’s tiring to mess with it for more than 30 seconds.

Dictating texts with Siri is very good. But there’s one thing that’s even better – sending drawings to other Watch owners. In the two days that my partner and I have both owned Watches, we’ve sent a whole bunch of little drawings to each other. I am not a huge texting or emoji person but it’s a lot of fun to send drawings, and I’m surprised there’s been so little discussion about this. Perhaps it’s because so few people actually own Watches. Anyway – don’t let anyone tell you that these drawings are dumb or juvenile. They have hearts of stone.

The battery life continues to be perfectly fine. The more I think about it, the more irrelevant the complaints seem. The Watch can’t really function with the iPhone, which you have to charge daily. Now that we’re all accustomed to that ritual, adding another device on is not a huge burden. I usually end the day with 30-40% charge, which suggests that there is room for Apple to give users the option to keep the display on for longer, especially if they can improve power consumption in other areas.

Other quick observations:

  • The Uber app is no good for summoning cars since it’ll only use your precise location, rather than letting you change it to, say, the corner at the end of the street. But it is useful to keep track of a trip in process.
  • It’s fun to play around with the different watchfaces. I favour the ‘Color’ face, which I change to match my clothes.
  • I’ve uninstalled practically every third-party app. I think this is a major failure for Apple, and it’s going to take some persuading for me to reinstall them. What’s the point of having 3000 apps on launch day when they’re poorly designed and no-one wants to use them? Everyone loses out.
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Apple Watch First Reactions

Speed

It’s annoyingly slow. Apps that display information from the internet (social apps, news apps, transport apps, maps; i.e. most of them) can take a few seconds to open, and then a few more seconds to display your desired data. I’ve already installed and deleted entire swathes of apps that suffer from this issue; the NY Times app, BBC News, Twitter, Twitterific, Foursquare, etc.

Compared against the very first iPhone, the Watch is very impressive in its capabilities and speed. Compared against the iPhone 6, it’s hard to justify using the watch at all for these apps. The good news is that any performance improvements Apple engineers can eke out of the hardware will have a knock-on positive effect on the entire watch experience – and I trust that they will have every motivation to succeed.

In contrast, apps that communicate solely with the phone (e.g. Music, Overcast, Calendar) or on the watch (Stopwatch, Timer) are reasonably responsive and useful.

Display

The screen is gorgeous, but small. It’s baffling and laughable that there are so many news apps on the watch. I suppose news junkies may find it entertaining to look at headlines, but the experience is so slow and poor compared to reading a screen of text on the iPhone that I expect few people will bother.

The screen size also makes it difficult to understand and use complex apps, like Maps, Citymapper or Transit. Apple and third-party developers are clearly trying to address this through tricks like Force Touch and by simplifying interfaces and use cases, but they need to do much more work to make the apps useful.

Fitness

The fitness tracking, on the other hand, is excellent. It counts my steps and distance accurately enough that my Fitbit is not long for this world. The built-in Activity app is also really quite well-designed and motivating, to the point that I fear for the future of third-party fitness tracker app developers. Consider the advantages that Apple has over them:

  1. Apple’s fitness tracking app is pre-installed, both on the watch and on the iPhone.
  2. It has access to private APIs and sensors; third-party apps can’t yet track heart rate, operate independently of the phone, or function in the background quite as well.
  3. It can be added to watchfaces as a ‘complication’. That alone is enough to elevate it over any third-party app, and I doubt we will see that capability opened up within the next 2-3 years.

Day 1

I received the watch yesterday morning and proceeded to fiddle with it throughout the day. I initially blamed its slowness on our poor office internet, but it became clear later in the day that it was just slow, period. Tried a lot of third party apps, and deleted almost all of them.

Day 2

Went to the British Library to see the Magna Carta exhibition. Didn’t fiddle with the watch much at all, except to:

  • Play music and podcasts
  • Occasionally look at my step count
  • Let a kid play around with it (he’d been staring at it for ages, his mum was amused)

Battery was still at ~80% by 4pm – very respectable. Then went for a 1 hour run, tracking it as an ‘Outdoor Run’, which took the battery down to ~60%. The watch was initially very distracting and reminded me why I stopped wearing GPS watches – frankly, I don’t need to know my distance or calories in real time. Plus I only realised afterwards how to change the distance units to km (it’s by a force touch on the ‘start run’ screen, obviously).

When I run, I wear my iPhone on an armband so it’s really inconvenient to switch between music and podcasts, or to select specific tracks. The watch – despite its slowness and small screen – made doing those things perfectly easy, which was delightful. For me, that alone is practically worth the purchase price, given how frequently I run and how much I enjoy listening to podcasts and music.

I expect that other people won’t care about that stuff at all (maybe they only listen to a set music playlist, or they keep their phone in their pocket while running, or they don’t run at all) but perhaps there will be other things that they really appreciate. The ability to see the weather or read tweets on my watch isn’t a big deal to me if I have my phone in my pocket; but if you don’t have pockets, it’s a much bigger deal.

So, we’ll see.

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Watching the Future of Wearable Gaming

If you’ve been paying attention to the big tech headlines recently, you’ll have noticed the same trend as I have. Apple Watch. Microsoft HoloLens. Magic Leap. Wearable computing is on everyone’s minds (and arms, and faces). But all these people getting excited about their glasses and digital crowns are late to the party. We’ve all been part of an invisible wearable tech revolution without even knowing it.

Does this sound familiar? You strap your phone to your arm, pop your earbuds in and head out for your run. GPS tracks your location, the phone’s accelerometer and gyro sensors give you detailed stats about your elevation and split times, you hear mile markers and pace updates and maybe even zombies behind you, your phone vibrates when it needs your attention — and a dozen other functions besides. I’d bet a decent number of you have this experience multiple times a week. And you know what? That sounds a hell of a lot like wearable computing to me.

So, ignore all those people waving their shiny plastics in your face on stage and telling you its the future of wearable tech. That future’s already here, and fitness gaming is a huge part of it. Let’s have a look.

Belkin

Back in 2008, users of Nike+ and Runkeeper treated the iPhone as a wearable computer. The value of having audio updates of your run, plus a GPS trace and other stats afterwards, far outweighed the inconvenience of strapping on a phone or buying a separate GPS device.

When we designed Zombies, Run! in 2011, it was this added value that we were thinking about: the capability to provide a richly interactive, location-aware running experience. We knew that runners already wore headphones for music, so we made audio our primary mode of output (fitting nicely with our expertise in audio production and storytelling) rather than making people look at the screen.

We also knew that GPS and accelerometer data was just about good enough to serve as an input method. That meant we could see whether users were outrunning our virtual zombies or not. Again, this worked better than making people touch the screen.

That said, without screen-based interaction, we felt we couldn’t make Zombies, Run! truly location-sensitive. We couldn’t reliably direct people to run to precise locations (GPS was and still isn’t fast/accurate enough, particularly for the level of safety we need), or give them frequent gameplay or story choices, or let them see the position of zombies relative to themselves.

Other apps, in fact, have tried these things, and I think the reason they failed is for the simple reason that no-one wants to run while looking at a handheld screen. The truth is, there have been precious few successful games for wearable computers.

Smartwatches

Will the Apple Watch change things? Probably not — at least, not yet. Continue reading “Watching the Future of Wearable Gaming”

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Apple Health vs. Fitbit

A new feature of iOS 8 is Apple’s Health App. It’s a way for users to view any health data that has been collected by in-built sensors in the device itself (such as step counts from the phone’s specialised accelerometers), along with data that can been added by third party apps (such as your weight, as recorded by a set of smart scales).

healthapp

The dashboard that Apple supplies is deliberately basic. Everything that can be graphed is graphed, albeit in a very stripped-down way; no scrolling, no trendlines, no regular axis labels, and so on. They’re so spartan that I’m not really sure why Apple included them at all. But the true purpose of Apple Health is not as a pretty dashboard, but rather as a way for apps to share health data with one another.

In Apple’s world, users of a running app wouldn’t have to manually enter their weight in order to calculate an accurate ‘calories burned’ figure; instead, they would authorise the running app to access their Health data so it always has the most up-to-date weight information. Likewise, the running app would synchronise its calorie burn information back to Health so that (for example) a dieting app can have a better view of calories out vs. in.

None of this happens automatically. Developers must specifically build in ‘Healthkit’ functionality, and while Apple may have hoped that everyone would eagerly jump onto their bandwagon, many of the most popular apps have been dragging their heels. The reason is that while adding Healthkit functionality isn’t particularly difficult from a technical perspective, it poses troubling business issues for some companies. Take Fitbit, for example. Why would they contribute the data their pedometer collects – step count, distance count, floors climbed, and soon, heart rate information – to Apple Health when it could result in their customers using a non-Fitbit app to view that data?

Not only do they lose control of the customer experience; not only do they lose the ability to sell their Fitbit Premium subscription; but worst of all, they become commoditised. They’re just the same as any other cheap pedometer, because as far as the customer is concerned, all they are is a bit of plastic that sends bits to a phone.

Fitbit has even more cause to worry with the iPhone 5s and iPhone 6, since both phones include specialised accelerometers that allow them to record steps with effectively zero battery consumption. Indeed, the iPhone 6 includes a barometer that allows it to record floor counts. Theoretically, this means that anyone who owns those phones has absolutely no need of any dedicated pedometer device, Fitbit or not.

In practice, Fitbit is still doing fine. People still buy their devices, and I still use my own Fitbit. Firstly, the data appears to be more accurate:

fitbit

All the screenshots in this post were taken at the same time; you can see that on Saturday 25th October, I walked a lot of steps and climbed a lot of flight-equivalents

Now, while most health professionals will tell you that consistency is more important than precision when it comes to step counts (i.e. it’s more important to know that you’re doing 20% more steps than yesterday, rather than knowing you did precisely 1000 more steps), it’s still nice to see your steps tick up reliably. As for floor climbing, Apple’s sensors woefully underestimate the true count, which is disappointing. But two things are even more important than precision.

One: The Fitbit is almost always with me, clipped to my belt, while (amazingly) I don’t always carry my phone with me; hence more complete records.

Two: Viewing my step count on my Fitbit takes about three seconds. On Apple Health, it takes more like ten seconds (although I could probably get an app that might accelerate that). So I look at my Fitbit more frequently.

Having said all of that, the Apple Watch will eliminate all of Fitbit’s advantages in terms of accuracy and accessibility (due to its fixed position on my wrist) and I suspect that will be the end of my Fitbit-using days.

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10 apps the BBC should make

Over the years, the BBC — which started as a radio service — has chosen to move into new, risky platforms including television, home computing, and the internet. It’s safe to say that we’re all quite happy with how those ventures turned out, so my question is, why stop there? The BBC should raise its digital ambitions to create original interactive experiences for computers, smartphones, and tablets; experiences that inform, educate, and entertain.

I am specifically not talking about apps that distribute or repurpose existing content. While the iPlayer apps for TV and radio are very successful, they don’t involve the creation of new interactive content.

iPlayer

Nor am I talking about websites such as the new educational iWonder brand. iWonder is a very well-written and very nicely designed website and it has some excellent articles, but it is not fundamentally interactive.

iWonder

So what am I talking about? I can best explain with ten examples of genuinely interactive apps that would complement existing BBC TV shows and properties (because, you know, it’s all about brand synergy), and are provably feasible and popular.

1. BBC News = BBC News

BBC News app

Credit where credit is due: the BBC News app is a simple yet decent extension of the BBC News Online website, itself an exceptional BBC property due to its world-leading, online-only nature. It’s arguable that it’s not a particularly interactive app, but then again, I don’t think that making it more interactive would add much.

2. The Sky at Night/Stargazing Live = Star Walk

starwalk

Thanks to presenters like Brian Cox and shows like Stargazing Live, there are plenty of people interested in stargazing and astronomy, but do we really expect them to go outside and fumble around with a compass when they could use something much better – like Star Walk? Want to find Jupiter or identify a constellation? Just point your smartphone in the right direction. It’s augmented reality of the finest kind, providing a supremely accessible and highly educational experience. If you combined Star Walk with audio or video commentary, you could provide viewers with a new stargazing tour every week. Perhaps you could even crowdsource counts of Leonids and Perseids meteor showers. Continue reading “10 apps the BBC should make”