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Quick Takes: Apple Watch Apps Called 'Frustrating' to Develop, iOS 11 Jailbreak With Cydia, and More
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I've also found most 3rd party Watch apps to be suboptimal, with the exception of Deliveries (https://junecloud.com/)
Also, Apple Pay on the watch is terrific, far superior to using it on the phone, imho. Give it a try!
You’re right that it doesn’t have native sleep tracking yet but there are plenty of good apps that will track it. Put it in theater mode (so the screen doesn’t turn on as you toss around) and charge it while taking your shower and you’ll be back to where you were before sleeping. The series 3’s battery life is that much better than the series 2 and before.
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I disagree. I’ve got several that I use a lot and are great on the watch.
- 1Password
- AAA (surpringly much quicker for gas prices than GasBuddy)
- AnyList (highly recommended for list syncing with a partner/family)
- Authy
- Cardiogram
- Dark Sky
- Delivered!
- HarmonyWatch
- Pillow
- Pocket Casts
- Spark
- Things
I don’t get the battery complaints for newish models, even my launch day S2 is always over 50% end of the day. That usually includes a 90 minute workout, controlling podcasts a lot and tonnes of notifications. Could manage 2 days easily if I didn’t workout second day.
I don't even use any third-party apps (nor did I install them) whatsoever on my Apple Watch -- heck, I barely use the built-in ones.
For me, it's a very handy notification viewer / quick responder, a fitness tracker, a quick way to glance at the weather, date and time, and a super convenient way to unlock my Mac. I just don't find the notion of "apps" on my watch to otherwise be a very compelling idea to even consider bothering to research what might be useful.
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Can't comment on newish models, but my 1st gen Apple Watch sometimes is at 20% by 7 PM and sometimes can't make it through to my bedtime at around 10:30 PM (and I take it from the charger at about 5:30 AM every morning).
And I have zero third-party apps (never installed them). I do get plenty of notifications, and I've only noted this "can't make it through the day" happening very recently, and it is a first-generation Apple Watch, so I'm not upset about it, by any means.. I will be upgrading in the next few months, more than likely...
For me, it's a very handy notification viewer / quick responder, a fitness tracker, a quick way to glance at the weather, date and time, and a super convenient way to unlock my Mac. I just don't find the notion of "apps" on my watch to otherwise be a very compelling idea to even consider bothering to research what might be useful.[doublepost=1519934266][/doublepost]
Can't comment on newish models, but my 1st gen Apple Watch sometimes is at 20% by 7 PM and sometimes can't make it through to my bedtime at around 10:30 PM (and I take it from the charger at about 5:30 AM every morning).
And I have zero third-party apps (never installed them). I do get plenty of notifications, and I've only noted this "can't make it through the day" happening very recently, and it is a first-generation Apple Watch, so I'm not upset about it, by any means.
. I will be upgrading in the next few months, more than likely...
Well I think the hope is that Fuchsia changes that and becomes the "one true OS." But it is still typical Google to put out 3 different products serving the same purpose and see which ones users gravitate towards.
Volume control is one thing I’d love 3rd party audio apps to have access to. It’s annoying to queue up a podcast to play (I use Pocket Casts) and then switch to Now Playing to change the volume if needed.
Just to let you know if you upgrade to a Series 3 I haven’t had any app/complication loading issues. Seems the newer hardware has fixed that.
I have used it at my work on vending machines and It was neat, just not so much in public. I like it because you are able to put your card on the watch and not have it on your phone. Unfortunately when you use apple pay on your phone, it requires setting up a passcode and I have never been able to adjust to a passcode or touch ID on the phone. Having it on the watch is nice. I keep the card on there for emergencies when I forget my wallet.
Oddly enough, I listen to ATP because they complain. They're three developers with a keen eye towards the Apple ecosystem, they have interesting points of view, so I like hearing them critique the latest Apple news. Marco can be a bit too, hmm, smug/self-assured, but John Siracusa is awesome - I don't always agree with him, but he has well-reasoned backing for his points of view and a serious level of attention to detail (he did, after all, do the book-length OS X reviews each year). His old podcast, Hypercritical, was one of my favorites, for precisely the same reason.
Also, the best ever podcast ad campaign was when "Cards Against Humanity" latched onto John's Hypercritical episode(s) where he critiqued toaster design, and, instead of ad copy, they simply sent John a series of toasters to review on ATP.
I like how users claimed the devs who implemented f.lux "didn't do anything" since all they did was use someone else's research. They conveniently leave out they still had to implement that feature into the phone. And the fact that Apple did use that for a later version of iOS sure doesn't indicate that they "did nothing".
It was easier back then. Now iOS is way more complicated, there are more updates, there are more devices, and more things require tight security. It's harder for both hackers and users now to deal with jailbreaking. That and the long periods with no jailbreak (or one only available from sketchy sources) have killed the community. I never had a non-jailbroken phone until recently, when after going through a painful jailbreaking process, I saw far too few tweaks available.
Meanwhile, Android is not quite a total piece of garbage anymore, so the alternative isn't so bad. Back then, it was unthinkable to use things like the Motorola Droid and whatever HTC had.
Didn't say Apple did nothing, but it's really easy to pick out one of those examples and say "but no look, they still had to do work, right!?"
The point is they act like jailbreaking is so awful, yet many iOS "features" happened much sooner than Apple made them.
I know - the thread is almost 2 years old now. Has the “closed-ness” of the Watch changed much in the past 2 years? I just picked up Wei-Meng Lee's 2015 "Learning Watchkit Programming" (Pearon, Addison-Wesley). On the first page he says that with the Apple Watch, Apple (paraphrase) "learned from the iPhone - that people actually want to develop for it".
My impression is that they haven't - but the book is from 2015 and I don't know how much has been opened up since. I just know that you still can't make custom Watch faces. There is the argument that for Android where you can, 99% of them are crap, and the better argument that if Apple opened a “face store”, it would be a legal nightmare concerning how f-d up our (US at least) patent system is - given that they already got sued for “an arrangement of dots and lines” (more or less). Still, allowing people the ability to make their OWN watch face for their OWN watch that is on their OWN wrist (watch out, Apple will want to claim ownership of that next!) is rather hard to argue.
Has anyone managed to jailbreak the Watch and started reverse engineering the various private libraries? Apple method names tend to be overly verbose - which might be nice for reversing, though I'd read that Swift static links everything it can, so method names don't get encoded as much. (Maybe the Watch interally is programmed mostly in Obj-C, I’ve no idea.)
<semi-political rant> That is an example of what pisses me off about our (U.S.) “compromise" patent system - the "limited time" thing is supposed to "promote the arts and sciences”. But that fails if a company comes up with stuff, never uses it, never releases it, patents it - but patents never describe specific implementations themselves, at least not for software and hardware, and then keeps stuff as near-trade secrets they have no intention of EVER doing anything with. It becomes potentially “neat stuff lost to humanity”. (To be a bit over-dramatically.)
“Do nothing with” except maybe propping up an absurd valuation for the company as “valuable IP" - which will never be used unless the company (Apple) fails again and gets bought out. And then only if the buyer decides to use it, which they probably won't.
Apple example I can think of right now: 1) The Newton offshoot Ink which they've abandoned. Will they *ever* port it to 64-bit? Otherwise it's abandon-ware - can they be sued - maybe in the EU?.
The only other one I can think of right now is opening up the Face ID sensor ("FaceKit"?) for the possibility of someone making a nifty "above-screen-gesture" interface, or something like an “iPhone Kinnect” (depending on the strength and range of the IR projector.)
With respect to jailbreaking iPhones/Watches, I’d say it’s one of those things that “is rather useless unless it isn’t”. When you consider that Apple has an unspoken symbiotic relationship of sorts with the jailbreak community, it becomes important. As Eorlas stated (#54), things that started as JB tweaks have been taken/stolen/borrowed by Apple later on (in Hemsworth's Thor voice). Having a Swype-type keyboard is an idea - can you write your own keyboard-class extensions and replace the standard implementation for non-JB iOS? But if Apple doesn’t somehow "more openly" recognize this symbiosis, they will come up with things that *they* don't see a use for (in their Steve-Jobsey-And-Some-Modern-Liberals-We-Know-Best way) - and then they just die on the vine. The Touch Bar may-be-soon a prime example.
(I don't know what they "haven't opened up" about programming TB - the bigger problem is they kept it as a "gimmick", so developers couldn't be assured it would be there - and so were hesitant to/couldn't use it to the fullest extent they might have.)
For that matter (with the Watch), simply allowing the Watch app to be installed and used on an iPod rather than a phone. Yeah, the price difference between an iPod and low-end phone is “small”, but it’s still significant. I’m guessing the price difference between “iPhone+Apple-Watch” versus “Android-phone+Android-Watch” might be significant, when compared an “iPod+Apple-Watch combination”.
Say for a teenager for their 13-16th birthday. (I have no idea what the “appropriate/whining-about-having-to-have tech ages” for kids are these days. Who then gets “pulled into” the Apple ecosystem versus The-Big-Evil-Google one. Case in point - me - who uses an iPod with the Loop closed-insulin-pump app, which also has a Watch extension. I have no real use for a Phone.
<hint if any Apple person reads this, or someone who *knows* an Apple person.. Do the damn iPod thing - make a bit - or a lot - extra money.>
My impression is that they haven't - but the book is from 2015 and I don't know how much has been opened up since. I just know that you still can't make custom Watch faces. There is the argument that for Android where you can, 99% of them are crap, and the better argument that if Apple opened a “face store”, it would be a legal nightmare concerning how f-d up our (US at least) patent system is - given that they already got sued for “an arrangement of dots and lines” (more or less). Still, allowing people the ability to make their OWN watch face for their OWN watch that is on their OWN wrist (watch out, Apple will want to claim ownership of that next!) is rather hard to argue.
Has anyone managed to jailbreak the Watch and started reverse engineering the various private libraries? Apple method names tend to be overly verbose - which might be nice for reversing, though I'd read that Swift static links everything it can, so method names don't get encoded as much. (Maybe the Watch interally is programmed mostly in Obj-C, I’ve no idea.)
<semi-political rant> That is an example of what pisses me off about our (U.S.) “compromise" patent system - the "limited time" thing is supposed to "promote the arts and sciences”. But that fails if a company comes up with stuff, never uses it, never releases it, patents it - but patents never describe specific implementations themselves, at least not for software and hardware, and then keeps stuff as near-trade secrets they have no intention of EVER doing anything with. It becomes potentially “neat stuff lost to humanity”. (To be a bit over-dramatically.)
“Do nothing with” except maybe propping up an absurd valuation for the company as “valuable IP" - which will never be used unless the company (Apple) fails again and gets bought out. And then only if the buyer decides to use it, which they probably won't.
Apple example I can think of right now: 1) The Newton offshoot Ink which they've abandoned. Will they *ever* port it to 64-bit? Otherwise it's abandon-ware - can they be sued - maybe in the EU?.
The only other one I can think of right now is opening up the Face ID sensor ("FaceKit"?) for the possibility of someone making a nifty "above-screen-gesture" interface, or something like an “iPhone Kinnect” (depending on the strength and range of the IR projector.)
With respect to jailbreaking iPhones/Watches, I’d say it’s one of those things that “is rather useless unless it isn’t”. When you consider that Apple has an unspoken symbiotic relationship of sorts with the jailbreak community, it becomes important. As Eorlas stated (#54), things that started as JB tweaks have been taken/stolen/borrowed by Apple later on (in Hemsworth's Thor voice). Having a Swype-type keyboard is an idea - can you write your own keyboard-class extensions and replace the standard implementation for non-JB iOS? But if Apple doesn’t somehow "more openly" recognize this symbiosis, they will come up with things that *they* don't see a use for (in their Steve-Jobsey-And-Some-Modern-Liberals-We-Know-Best way) - and then they just die on the vine. The Touch Bar may-be-soon a prime example.
(I don't know what they "haven't opened up" about programming TB - the bigger problem is they kept it as a "gimmick", so developers couldn't be assured it would be there - and so were hesitant to/couldn't use it to the fullest extent they might have.)
For that matter (with the Watch), simply allowing the Watch app to be installed and used on an iPod rather than a phone. Yeah, the price difference between an iPod and low-end phone is “small”, but it’s still significant. I’m guessing the price difference between “iPhone+Apple-Watch” versus “Android-phone+Android-Watch” might be significant, when compared an “iPod+Apple-Watch combination”.
Say for a teenager for their 13-16th birthday. (I have no idea what the “appropriate/whining-about-having-to-have tech ages” for kids are these days. Who then gets “pulled into” the Apple ecosystem versus The-Big-Evil-Google one. Case in point - me - who uses an iPod with the Loop closed-insulin-pump app, which also has a Watch extension. I have no real use for a Phone.
<hint if any Apple person reads this, or someone who *knows* an Apple person.. Do the damn iPod thing - make a bit - or a lot - extra money.>
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