MyAppleMenu - Wed, Apr 8, 2015

Wed, Apr 8, 2015The Bring-It-On Edition

Watching The Reviews Coming In...

Apple Watch Review: Bliss, But Only After A Steep Learning Curve, by Farhad Manjoo, New York Times

There’s a good chance it will not work perfectly for most consumers right out of the box, because it is best after you fiddle with various software settings to personalize use. Indeed, to a degree unusual for a new Apple device, the Watch is not suited for tech novices. It is designed for people who are inundated with notifications coming in through their phones, and for those who care to think about, and want to try to manage, the way the digital world intrudes on their lives.

Still, even if it’s not yet for everyone, Apple is on to something with the device. The Watch is just useful enough to prove that the tech industry’s fixation on computers that people can wear may soon bear fruit.

The Apple Watch, by John Gruber, Daring Fireball

If you’re the only person you know with an Apple Watch, your timekeeping will still be precise, your activity tracking will still be accurate — but digital touch as a form of communication will be pointless. Digital touch only works, only becomes a thing, if Apple Watch becomes a thing. Digital touch is not designed for an isolated product. It is designed as a tentpole feature for a hit product with widespread appeal and adoption. The single most innovative feature of Apple Watch — the most intimate feature of the company’s most personal device — will only matter if some of the people you care most about wear one too.

Apple Watch Review: You’ll Want One, But You Don’t Need One, by Joshua Tpolosky, Bloomberg

Eventually, I figured out that getting the watch to really work for you requires work. I pruned a list of VIP contacts in my mail app to make e-mail notifications more tolerable, I killed several app notifications that I found to be consistently interruptive, and I streamlined my list of applications to those that seemed truly vital to my day.

My First Week With The Apple Watch, by Ben Bajarin, Techpinion

Because of how powerful the Apple Watch is, I believe it will appeal differently to different people and for different reasons. What I’ll share here are the experiences that stood out most to me and the observations I’ve made.

Apple Watch Review, by Nilay Patel, The Verge

It’s also the first smartwatch that might legitimately become a mainstream product, even as competitors flood the market. Apple has the marketing prowess, the retail store network, and the sheer determination to actually make this thing happen.

It just has to answer one question: would you actually use the Apple Watch instead of your phone?

Apple Watch Review: The Smartwatch Finally Makes Sense, by Geoffrey A. Fowler, Wall Street Journal

What’s valuable is your time. The Apple Watch is a computer built to spend it better. And if you can tolerate single-day battery life, half-baked apps and inevitable obsolescence, you can now wear the future on your wrist.

A Week On The Wrist: The Apple Watch Review, by Lauren Goode, Re/code

Smartwatches are still unproven, but Apple has made a pretty strong case for them.

Video: Watch The World’s First Apple Watch Unboxing, by Benjamin Mayo

Inside the square outer box is a rounded rectangle which contains the Watch itself, presented on its side with band already connected. An insert helps keep the Watch band in a curved shape when you unbox the lid for the first time.

HBO To Netflix: Bring It On, by Nicole Laporte, Fast company

When I ask Plepler if launching HBO into even more direct competition and an even less certain future makes him anxious, he barely blinks. "No, I’m not nervous," he tells me. He’s the cool cat of the cable content wars.

Also:

HBO NOW Standalone Streaming Service Debuts on Apple TV, iPhone & iPad with 1-Month Free Trial, by Zac Hall, 9to5Mac

HBO NOW is available at launch exclusively through the App Store and Apple TV. This means movies and TV shows can be watched through the channel with the HBO NOW app for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch or on your HDTV with a connected Apple TV using the HBO NOW channel. Once you subscribe to HBO NOW through Apple from any of those devices, you can also watch content online through hbonow.com with your Mac or presumably any other PC.

Tackle Your Mac Booting To A Gray Screen, by Topher Kessler, MacIssues

Given the efficiency and convenience of sleep mode on Mac systems, it is often a rarity that we end up restarting our Macs. When we do, we expect it to boot to normal operation; however, sometimes a snafu may result in your Mac booting to a gray screen, and no further. Often such behavior happens because of a specific problem, such as a power outage, or the installation of a new software package, but regardless, if it happens there are essentially only a few things that you can do.

Stuff.

Will Deep Links Ever Truly Be Deep?, by Scott Rosenberg, Medium

About a year ago I started seeing a lot of headlines about “deep links.” Developers, I soon discovered, are frantically trying to get mobile apps to work together, so that clicking on a link in one app takes you directly to relevant content in another app. Deep linking means to bore a wormhole-tunnel that hops you directly from a specific spot in one app to a spot in another, no side trip to a browser or a home screen needed.

But as I reviewed the coverage I noticed something a little odd. The idea of a deep link has a much deeper history — but no one was making the connection between the hot new trend in mobile and the one that I remembered from the 1990s.

Develop.

Notes.

Parting Words

You know what's really really sad? None of the other Apple Watch reviewers sent me their heartbeats.

— Farhad Manjoo (@fmanjoo) April 8, 2015

Thanks for reading.