Gruber has pretty much hated on the watch and openly admitted he's clueless about how it would be useful from the very beginning. With that kind of negative outlook, all it's going to do is foster further complaints about issues that are not really a problem. My wife, daughter, and myself all tried out the watch at the store and nobody had any issues activating apps from the home screen. It didn't even occur to me it would be a problem. The complication touch targets, the small circles, are no better touch targets than the apps in the home screen.
At any rate, it's pretty clear the intended general use of the device has you launching apps out of notifications or glances anyway, as part of a contextual workflow. So I predict over the coming year, this will all be a total non-issue. It's really hard to take these sit-at-home-99% of the time bloggers very seriously on devices like these anymore. The more personal, and lifestyle related Apples products become, the less and less relevant the views of ultranerds are to the rest of us.
It's the same thing with the new MacBook. Nearly every single blogger/news dork said the keyboard was bad. Ok whatever. I tried it at the Apple Store. I am in love with that keyboard. I've never liked a keyboard so much. I've also never understood the obsession with key travel. I want the least amount of travel I can get while still having detectable feedback. Why wouldn't it? The less effort required to type, the faster I can go. They whine about the arrow keys... you get used to new keyboard layouts in time. It's like 90 year old men griping about "kids these days" and Gruber complains about these sort of things right in that class. I mean, keyboard-wise, the guy desperately clings to outdated typewriter-emulating clicky keyboards. Which, fine, more power to him, but, if you're going to take an opinion from a stranger, I'd hope you make sure that stranger's lifestyle and use of the product class is a close lock on your own. Otherwise, it's just noise.
