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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.
shit
We all knew the Apple watch was going to be overpriced trash, this is less like news and more like confirmation.
I'd not be surprised if this is intentional on Apple's part, and a direct result of restricting information or access to certain hardware features in order to make native Apple apps to seem better.
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.
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.
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! --
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 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
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
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.