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John Gruber On Third-party Apple Watch Apps: They Suck and Are Really Slow
An anonymous reader writes During this week's episode of John Gruber's podcast, The Talk Show, Gruber sat down with Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal to talk all things Apple Watch. About two hours and 9 minutes into the podcast, both Gruber and Stern began lamenting the poor performance they saw with third-party Apple Watch apps. 'It makes me question whether there should be third party apps for it at all yet,' Gruber noted. The pair also took umbrage with what they perceived to be a poor design choice for the Apple Watch app screen, with both noting that the app icons were far too small to be practical.
Apart from the gold model, the Apple Watch isn't any more overpriced than the high-end versions of Samsung smart watches.
With that said, we're still amazingly primitive to think that smart watches are a pretty neat idea.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Probably some pun there.
It's a new field. Vendors are going to trip and stumble until the lessons of the street straiten things out. The first PC apps sucked, the first Mac apps sucked, the first Linux apps were...all in EMACS, anyhow, you get the point.
Table-ized A.I.
That makes no sense. They don't achieve anything if their apps look better than the other apps on the device, they just make the entire experience worse. It would be like cutting off their nose to spite their face.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
What's worse than the apps on an Apple watch?
A 2 hour podcast about the Apple watch.
That makes no sense. They don't achieve anything if their apps look better than the other apps on the device, they just make the entire experience worse. It would be like cutting off their nose to spite their face.
Because no company has ever done that before.
The real question, of course, is whether the apps are the problem or the device itself?
After all, Apple no longer has perfectionist management at the top. It seems to me that they are more likely to release a product before it's fully baked. When the iPad was release, Apple had gone through hundreds of prototypes. I wonder if they put the same amount of design effort into the Apple Watch.
Smart watches ARE a good idea, they just need to have better characteristics then they have now. They need a much longer battery life, a LOT cheaper and they must universally work with any device, not just proprietary ones. There is nothing wrong with the idea of a programmable display on your wrist, but so far the implementations suck.
Good-bye
So what you want must be something like a pebble e-ink display. And if so, why not just buy that? Apple sucks.
Hell, remember that Apple didn't originally allow native apps on the iPhone. SO they've done it to themselves before.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Keep in mind that you're looking at people who spent hours upon hours writing blog posts speculating about the leather and alloys Apple would be using in their watch bands.
A 2 hour podcast about an actual shipping device seems comparatively reasonable.
Log in or piss off.
Currently the application are hosted remotely on the I-Phone. Apple has promised that the will release a native api in the near future. What they are seeing right now are NOT native apps.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Unless it's in China, who the heck wears a watch nowadays, other than old people?
I mean, come on!
And why would I want to be constantly interrupted by stuff I don't want to do anything about?
Maybe an Apple Monocle. That I could see. Give it a wider spectra range so I can see IR and UV and display stuff, but pop out of the eye when I don't want to be bothered, like a real monocle. Totally retro steampunk. That's the ticket!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I was beginning to write a lengthy rebuttal, but then I realized something fundamentally important.
You're absolutely correct.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Ohh FFS -- that was at the initial launch and not done as a fuck you but simply because they were more interested in just getting the new product and OS out the door. Initially, Apps were JS based and highly sandboxed. But they realized that Devs wanted something better and Apple set themselves to creating an entire Development Platform and App Store to support that. So any claims that Apple is somehow hostile to developers is utter BS. If anything, Apple stands to make millions off 3rd party Apple Watch Apps in regards to App Store and In-App Purchases.
Apps, period?
And now most of these apps are just wrappers for accessing their web site.
Too bad Pebble doesn't actually have an E Ink display, which is why it only gets five days on a charge.
Thanks for your opinion, shill.
Ohh FFS -- that was at the initial launch and not done as a fuck you but simply because they were more interested in just getting the new product and OS out the door.
It was definitely a "fuck you, this is a phone; this is not another fucking Newton".
Full disclosure: I was an Apple Core OS kernel team member at the time. I wrote 7% of the kernel that runs on the things.
Idiot. GP is correct.
If on the watch, between application and screen, XML is being generated and parsed into DOM like things to render the user interface of the application, web browser stylee, it's no surprise it runs slow.
I may be wrong, but I fear I may not be.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
The check is in the mail.
-Tim
Pedantic. And it's five to seven days, which in my case is six and a half days.
The Pebble really is a good product. It doesn't try to be something that makes no sense at the size of a watch. It's not a data input device, or even a substitute for a phone. It's just a nice notification device so your phone can stay in its sheath or pocket or wherever you'd like to keep it.
"Oh no... he found the
The UI definition is held in a Plist format (like, but not, XML) but that's not what the device gets. It gets a very compact binary form of your UI, that is loaded onto the watch before the user even opens your application.
The Apple Watch API is actually EXTREMELY conservative with what gets sent over to the watch, to the extent that even attempting to set the same label value twice in a row is rejected with a warning. and UI elements on the screen are wits-only (you cannot query the watch see what currently displayed values are).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What's worse than the apps on an Apple watch?
A 2 hour podcast about the Apple watch.
That's wrong. The iWatch is a platform to talk about the various products in the Apple product line.
The problem is the naked emperor part.
I'm waiting for Mirasol displays. F'n stupid to try to overpower the sun for a watch, unless you're indoors all day.
And in my case it's 10. Maybe I'm just lucky.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
The Pebble is 1/3 the price, has a 1-week battery, and works with iOS, Android, and Sailfish. I will be interested to see how the Apple Watch actually does after release, since every smart watch review I've read for the past 2 years has measured against the hypothetical iWatch rather than the real competition.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
Too bad Pebble doesn't actually have an E Ink display
Yet.
uhm, actually plist files are xml
ACTUALLY plist files can be either textual or binary, which is very much not XML
I should have said not necessarily though, instead of just "not"... but it was kind of irrelevant to the main point.
They certainly aren't very compact as far as formats go, even on the watch.
Sigh, didn't read much of that original message, did you?
They don't NEED TO BE EXTREMELY COMPACT because they are sent over only once, when the app is loaded on the watch - that said, it is in the binary format which is much more compact than the textual format.
In use the watch pulls files from that bundle at runtime. And if you were any kind of programmer you'd know there is a tradeoff between compression and computation (which the watch has little of) in terms of file formats, so a fairly but not maximally compact file format is better for performance than whatever you are thinking of.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Remember how when Steve Jobs stood up and said "hey, we've got an awesome solution! Webapps!" everyone said it would suck and it did? Remember when Google said the same thing?
"e-paper" is not E Ink. "e-paper" is a catchall term for any kind of display technology that the manufacturer claims "looks like paper". The fact that they use this term throws up red flags because it means that it undoubtedly is just using another LCD.
E Ink is a very specific display technology that is ultra low power, only using power when the display is refreshed, and easy on the eyes like ink on paper. My Nook has an E Ink display and the Pebble does not compare in the slightest.
And now I know who to blame ;)
You didnt work on the swift syntax highlighting in xcode right?
Eat sleep die
Full disclosure: I was an Apple Core OS kernel team member at the time. I stole 7% of the kernel that runs on the things from Mach and BSD.
FTFY
A two hour talk, containing lots of things that are good about it and beginning to feel to them as indispensable, and this guy cherry-picks the two worst complaints.
Full disclosure: I was an Apple Core OS kernel team member at the time. I stole 7% of the kernel that runs on the things from Mach and BSD.
FTFY
Given that I also wrote much of the init.c in FreeBSD, you probably failed to fix that for me. :p
we're still amazingly primitive to think that smart watches are a pretty neat idea.
Who thinks that? Everyone I know thinks they're a stupid gimmick.
I will be interested to see how the Apple Watch actually does after release, since every smart watch review I've read for the past 2 years has measured against the hypothetical iWatch rather than the real competition.
Lol, you really think most of the people buying iStuff do it for the features?
They saw one of the Kardashians use it, and now they want to look cool and rich too.
Why are you so angry?
If you didn't install Opera then yeah, mobile browsing was pretty damned bad. Truth be told though, I was much more impressed with a mid-2000's Palm with stylus, than the near painful to use Android that came a few years later - mis-clicks, miss-drags, inaccurate to type on, a horrible default browser. Android had what 10 times the RAM of those PALM devices, yet performed worse and still to this day only gives you about 5 hours on a single charge.
Small hard drive, no WiFi, lame.
Full disclosure: I was an Apple Core OS kernel team member at the time. I stole 7% of the kernel that runs on the things from Mach and BSD.
FTFY
Have you read the BSD license? It's kinda hard to steal something that is truly free. I respect and appreciate the GPL, but write code under BSD because I want my (pretty crappy) code to be free for anyone foolish enough to use it without restrictions.
Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
He's riffing on Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
@spire - Total bullshit - the Apple watch is a sophisticated advanced computer. There is no reason for it to work with other devices as it is part of the best and most advanced ecosystem. Period. Have you even seen and tried it? I have and the criticisms are nonsense. The battery life is very good for such a small and sophisticated device. Further, I found the demo unit at the Apple Store actually to be very responsive. And contrary to the main "article" the icon sizes are just fine, especially when you see how you can move them around to enlarge them.
Go get yourself a good education... Your lack of intelligence is showing.
Doubtful and even if so, you worked on a tiny portion of the boot loader. You are not a kernel developer.
Eat my shorts.
http://code.metager.de/source/... /*-
* Copyright (c) 1995 Terrence R. Lambert
* All rights reserved.
*
* Copyright (c) 1982, 1986, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993
* The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
* (c) UNIX System Laboratories, Inc.
* All or some portions of this file are derived from material licensed
* to the University of California by American Telephone and Telegraph
* Co. or Unix System Laboratories, Inc. and are reproduced herein with
* the permission of UNIX System Laboratories, Inc.
*
As I said, you haven't contributed shit. That is not an important file and any developer could have easily written it. It's not even kernel level stuff.