CHUCK:
Oh I see, Apple Watch, Apple Watch Sport, and Apple Watch Edition. Sheesh, [chuckles] ten grand. [chuckles] Why!? [chuckles] I don’t understand!
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CHUCK:
Hey everybody and welcome to episode 105 of the iPhreaks show. This week on our panel, we have Jaim Zuber.
JAIM:
Hello from Minneapolis.
CHUCK:
I’m Charles Max Wood. I’m just an accessory to the iJaim. This week were going to talk about the Apple Watch since it came out, and Jaim actually has one. New toy!
JAIM:
That’s true – new toy. Bright and shiny; showed up last week about a month before Apple actually said it would so that’s promising. Underpromise, overdeliver – that's a good way to deliver things including software but Apple did it too. I got mine last week.
CHUCK:
We're you under ADA or something?
JAIM:
Under ADA? No, I ordered it like everyone else.
CHUCK:
Okay.
JAIM:
I didn't wake up at 2:30 in the morning or whatever time it was in the rest of the world. I got up at a reasonable time – in the central timezone – I ordered it. Yeah. They said mid-May, and it came late April.
JAIM:
I’ve been wearing it for three or four days, so I'm obviously the world's reigning expert.
CHUCK:
Nice. It looks like they have a couple of different models. They have the Apple Watch, the Apple Watch Sport, and the Apple Watch Edition. And it looks like the Apple Watch is like a stainless steel case; the Watch Sport is in an aluminum case, and the Watch Edition is – you must be freaking kidding me.
JAIM:
Yeah. For me, of course, I got the Edition.
CHUCK:
Of course you did.
JAIM:
Because, who wouldn't spend ten grand on something that's going to be obsolete in a year.
CHUCK:
I know right.
JAIM:
That’s just how we roll, and it's a right offer, right? I'm a consultant. [Chuckles]
JAIM:
If you don't pay taxes on it, it's free. I think that's the running theory, right?
CHUCK:
That's right.
JAIM:
That’s how it works?
CHUCK:
Yeah.
JAIM:
I got the metal-line stainless steel case with the Milanese loop band. I'm pretty happy with it. I like it, and I'm one of those few that always wore a watch and still wear a watch so having a watch is not a new thing for me. I had an old watch I got from my dad – an old one that he didn't use anymore because mine wore out – the one that I had for 15, 20 years. I'm a watch wearer.
It works well as a watch. I can bring my hand up and tell the time at least when I'm standing. If I'm on the couch and lying back, it doesn't always work – either you tear it or tap it – but it functions well as a watch. Face is very readable, and you configure it how much – how many numbers or seconds. I was pretty happy with it. I like the look, and it's very functional just as a watch. It's 700, 800 bucks. It's a lot to spend for a watch but if you get into watch world, that's not a ton to spend on a watch that looks nice and you enjoy wearing. More than I’ll ever spend but people routinely spend 20 grand on watches. Some people – not most of us but it happens.
CHUCK:
Does the watch face go dark when you're not moving or using it or whatever?
JAIM:
Right. There's a gesture involved that will bring it up -- by bringing the watch up to in a gesture that's going to look like I'm going to view it, the watch face comes on. When I put my hand down, it goes back off for battery reasons.
CHUCK:
Awesome.
JAIM:
But if you're standing, it works pretty well.
CHUCK:
I'm really curious how it interacts with the phone and the apps on the phone and how independent it can be from the apps on the phone.
JAIM:
The watch is completely dependent on the phone for anything non-trivial. It'll display the watch; you can leave your phone at home and go off. It'll work as a watch, but it won't do much of the other things. That's mainly for battery reasons because a watch that runs out of a battery in eight hours probably isn't terribly useful to most of us. But battery life is pretty good. I haven't had any trouble.
CHUCK:
How often do you have to plug it?
JAIM:
I charge it overnight, and I get up and do whatever I have to do and check the watch when I feel like it, and it's fine by the end of the day. I'm not doing any 24-hour marathons with it -- seems pretty good. I'm pretty happy with the battery life.
The phone battery life is a little interesting. When I first got it, my phone battery started dying quite a bit faster than it did before. I suspect it’s one of the apps that’s just cranking on the Bluetooth, and I'm not sure which one it was. But for the past couple of days, I've been had normal usage; checking on things and my phone battery has been pretty good. So I'm not sure.
CHUCK:
Yeah. The other thing I'm wondering though is if I have some functionality – first off, I’ve heard rumors about whether they have or haven't opened up the ability for people to write apps for the watch. Can you write apps for the watch?
JAIM:
There are plenty of apps out there, I think. Just from the apps that I had on my phone that – in the install right when you set up the – at Apple – the watch. When you connect it, they say “Do you want to add your apps?” and, of course, I said “Add all the apps.” just to check it out – just to see what I wanted to use. Most of the apps are terrible – not terribly useful. I'm finding it – the ones where they make a good guess on what I'm interested in seeing at that time and I can get to that very quickly, those I'm finding useful.
I was on a walk with my wife and it's a baseball game on; I'm watching the Twins and I could check on the score a little bit just by tapping my watch real quick. That was cool. If we go in through a news app or Twitter where you're scrolling through things or mail, I'm not finding it terribly useful. My phone's not that far away from my pocket. But there are a lot of cases where I don't want to reach into my pocket to find this information. I think the apps that are going to be useful – moving forward – are ones that are going to predict what the user wants to see and give them the access. You’ll do the microinteractions – not things where you're swiping and doing a bunch of crazy taps because you have your phone for that, at least now.
CHUCK:
That's one thing that I've been thinking about is me – for the most part, the appeal to me is very, very simple interactions with things that I just don't want to pull my phone out my pocket for. For example, if I'm listening to podcasts or music I want to be able to basically pause, stop, start, skip, skip forward, skip backward, those kinds of things. I don't care if it's a gesture or a button; text messages, it'd be nice to be able to look at my watch and say “Oh, Jaim texted me or Alondo is calling me and make that call.” so those kinds of things. So then I can tap it and it answers if I have my Bluetooth in or something or have my headphones in.
But I'm trying to really visualize some of the other apps that I have and how I would want to interact with them beyond just being able to see basic information. Does that make sense?
JAIM:
Yeah. It's everything you have on your phone on an even smaller screen.
CHUCK:
[Chuckles] And the good and bad that comes with that, right?
JAIM:
That's right. Yes, everything we want. I think I agree with what you're saying. It doesn't really make sense to throw on a functionality into the watch – the apps at this point – but that's going to change I think. This is going to evolve and it'll be cool to see what happens but, right now, I think the quick wins are just things that you want to find out right now – start your podcast player or stop it, things like that. Get quick information. I get the temperature on the front screen which is awesome. I use it all the time. Like how hot is it outside. I want to find out right now. I don't want to take the five seconds it took me go through the weather app on my phone. I'm sitting there where I, “Man, I had to dig into my pocket to pull my phone out for this information? What a drag.”
CHUCK:
Yeah.
JAIM:
It's gotten that bad. It took me two hours to get to that point.
CHUCK:
[Chuckles] I'll admit, I actually backed the Kick Starter campaign for the Apple time – or Pebble time watch which cost about half with this cost. My understanding is that it has at least – with what we're talking about the functionality being able to see certain things and stuff – it doesn't work exactly the same but it does get basic information off of the phone and so I'm also curious about the use cases for that.
is:
Is there any storage on it? For example, could I load music onto it and then just go for a run with just the watch and Bluetooth headphones?
JAIM:
There's nothing like that that I'm aware of.
CHUCK:
Okay.
JAIM:
It's a very dumb device. I'm not sure how much Apple gives us to it. I'm sure the device is capable of doing that sort of thing but we're not really given access to it.
CHUCK:
Right. I just keep thinking it would be nice to be able to just go for a run with my watch like I'm saying and have that kind of – I guess you could just get an iPod shuffle or something and load it up and put it into your watch band.
JAIM:
Yeah. One app I'm missing is Map My Ride which I use for everything. We go for a bike ride, commuting to work on a bike or going for a run. I usually get that with me and I'm missing that watch app. That's what I want. How far have I gone at this point? That'll be a cool thing to have on our end. I'm sure there is a watch app out there like that but Map My Ride has all my info right now so I'm locked in at this point. So that's one app I wish was out there. But that's a really good thing in – if you want to stop whatever you're listening to, check how far you've gone. Those are pretty cool app – cool functionality that I would hope someone comes out soon in a watch. It's probably out there right now. I'm not aware of it.
CHUCK:
Yeah. I think I really like the idea of the same thing – whether it's Run Keeper or Map My Ride or whatever. Basically, I don't want to have to pull out my phone or mount it on my bike somewhere so that I can see that information. I'd like to be able to just glance at my wrist and know or have it vibrate when it says, “You've gone halfway” or something like that where you have the interactivity that's a little bit more natural than, “Okay. Where in the heck is my device that's five times [chuckles] as large as the watch?”
JAIM:
Yeah, definitely. And if you're running or biking, you may not want to be out there digging on your phone while you're actually moving. That's a good way to call up Apple Care.
CHUCK:
Yeah. My deal is when I go running, I usually have it strapped to my arm but it's still big enough to wear. I would rather not do that. So I'm also wondering if I go run on the track at the gym, can I set it on the shelf and just run around the track? Will it be able to stay connected to the watch that way?
JAIM:
I doubt it. Bluetooth's not going to reach that far.
CHUCK:
Right.
JAIM:
Maybe I’ll forecast one of my picks; I use a SPIbelt if I go for a run. You don't even notice you're wearing anything. It just fits around your waist. You put whatever in too. It actually fit quite a lot of stuff so I use that. I don't even worry or knows about the phone as much.
CHUCK:
Yeah, so you're Bluetooth – it looks like its good up to about 30 feet so if you're running on a track that gets you further than that from your phone, then it probably won't work.
JAIM:
But it’s one feature I'm finding useful is the notification that gives you a little tap on the wrist like I was sitting here having a lunch and came up, “Oh, iPhreaks start in 10 minutes like oh, okay.” or before my phone would be on the desk; in silent mode in my pocket, I would have missed them. And I miss notifications from my phone all the time but this is nice. So I’ve got it on -- oh a little reminder, this thing happened, maybe you should pay attention to it. So I'm finding that's pretty useful.
So for apps that are easy to miss, you just send a notification on your phone. If you’re like me, it's always in silent mode. Notifications aren't really that useful for me because I don't want to be disturbed. I'm working or I'm with someone talking. I don't want to have my phone on and have a distraction all the time. That’s one way we can notify the user without being obnoxious. I still don't want to take a call but I can look down to see that “Oh, I got a hangout from one of the people I'm working with or a client.” or something that updated on Jira. Those types of things -- that’s useful.
There are a lot of apps where just simple functionality like that will be useful.
CHUCK:
Now, do you have to have special permissions to send notifications to the watch? Or is it all notifications on your phone go to your watch? Or is there some other panel that you can configure that one way or the other?
JAIM:
You can configure whether a game notifications or not. I'm not a master at it but you can turn off sound; you can go onto Do-not-disturb mode. I don't know how much you could filter. I think you might just be in the same notification you get on your phone. That might be a cool feature in the future but I'm not sure how that works now. It would be probably hard to differentiate at this right – the UI standpoint. Send this to my phone but not my watch but I think that's something we'll start looking into in the future.
CHUCK:
Right. Let's say that you have some application on your phone – I don't know what it would be but – let's say it connects to a git repository and it gives you updates when people push stuff. What kind of functionality would you want that to have on your watch? Would it just be the notifications or would you want more like in github -- you have the option of commenting on a commit?
JAIM:
Commit, poll request, something like that.
CHUCK:
Right. So approve poll requests or things like that. Would you want that on a watch or would it just not make sense?
JAIM:
For the most part, that kind of stuff can wait until I get back to trying to get to Peter Aman with maybe something so uncommon just like a poll requests so it comes down to the user. If I do a poll request for a client, I’m waiting for someone to take a look at it so we can merge it in or maybe I want to be on a fight with that. Most part not but direct messages, tweets or something where I
mentioned “That’s cool. Oh, that's good to know.” So I'm finding those types of things to be useful.
CHUCK:
One other thing that I'm wondering is with text messages. Can you reply to text messages on the watch?
JAIM:
You just read them then you dig into your phone.
CHUCK:
Okay.
JAIM:
There's no other way to type anything in.
CHUCK:
I was going to say there's no room on there for keyboard.
JAIM:
I bet someone could do a keyboard and I bet Apple would not let them.
CHUCK:
The other way I could see it working is if you put up common words and then you could finagle getting the right words in the right order. I don't know. But that would still only have limited utility because if it's somebody's name that's weird or something like that, you just may not be able to call it in.
JAIM:
Yeah. Instead of “Kristoffsky”, it's just “You”.
CHUCK:
Right.
JAIM:
I think in five years we're going to figure out how to get text input into a phone pretty well. I'm sure people are working at it.
CHUCK:
Or dictation will be better.
JAIM:
Yeah.
CHUCK:
Siri will actually know what you're saying.
JAIM:
People are probably spending a ton of money trying to solve this problem right now. But right now, it's not really happened.
CHUCK:
The sensors on the back of the watch – that’s the other thing I'm really curious about. Apparently, it uses infrared to track blood flow.
JAIM:
That's cool.
CHUCK:
Have you used any of those health features?
JAIM:
Well, I was going to and I heard that it makes you stand up for a minute every hour and gives you obnoxious warning. So if you're in a movie theater, you'd like to turn that off. I haven't gotten through that point yet and I hate to stand up so I haven't really turned a lot of that stuff on yet. It can scroll over to get your blood pressure – not blood pressure – beats per minute. That's being recorded. So that type of stuff can be done. I haven't dug too far into it but it's pretty cool functionality.
CHUCK:
And Apple Pay? Have you used it with Apple Pay?
JAIM:
I haven’t. I have not. I've only got an iPhone 5S. I’m sure of my ignorance but I’m not sure if that it’ll even work with a 5S.
CHUCK:
My understanding that it is that it works with – because I got an update; I have an iPhone 5 so my phone is actually older than yours – and I got an update and it asked me to put in a credit card for Apple Pay even though I don't have the chipset that does the proximity thing. I just can't remember what it is. Anyway, I don't have that capability on my phone. I can't wave my phone over the Apple Pay thing and have it work because it doesn't have the hardware for it. But it did have me set it up and, apparently, the phone has a capability for it if you have something like an Apple Watch that will do the proximity thing. So you can wave your watch by an Apple Pay thing and have it work.
JAIM:
Ooh, okay. That's a cool feature. I have not tried Apple Pay yet; haven't set it up. Time to start experimenting, I guess. I've heard very cool things. People are very happy with it.
CHUCK:
Yeah. I've heard a lot of people get excited about it. I think it’s funny that Apple became this thirdparty payment system or whatever [chuckles]. They being mostly a hardware and operating system technology company and not really like a banker or a payment system company. So I'm curious to see where they go, what boundaries they push and what issues come up from it.
JAIM:
Just got a text from – direct from A.R. Madsen: “Not making it today.” Alright. So now we know.
Showed up on my watch.
CHUCK:
Very cool. Do you have any apps or clients or other plans to write stuff that interacts with the watch one way or another?
JAIM:
I've got one client that is planning a watch app. I can't really say what it is but it will be a pretty cool app – hopefully digging into whatever sensors we can get access to. Some of the apps I do like – I like the MLB.com as an app and it's smart enough to know that I'm a Twins fan. So I might be – if the Twins are playing, I'm probably should’ve seen the score if I load their app. And that works pretty well. I can if and go and you do like the game setter view where you actually see pitch-bypitch action which is a little tedious on a watch but if you're got a cut situation, it's kind of cool to see. For the most part, just glance up, check the score every half hour or so, see if anything happened. I like that app.
Twitter:
didn't really like; mail: didn't really care for. I’m not even sure what I’ll do with Evernote. That’s a hard to use stuff. By the time I'm probably going to do Evernote, I probably better off going into my phone or an iPad or whatever we have.
It's funny how when we got our phones and iPads, I go into the computer and look something up became this huge ordeal. Now it's – okay -- going into my pocket is a huge ordeal that I don't want to do if I don't have to.
CHUCK:
Yeah. That makes sense.
JAIM:
Not doing a lot of mail; I'm not checking my news apps but things that are basically simple because we need the information I want to see right away, those I'm finding pretty useful.
CHUCK:
How bright is the screen? I guess you can turn it up and down, right?
JAIM:
Yeah, I haven't needed to. It seems like it's in appropriate brightness for whatever I'm trying to do. The watch face – it’s pretty subdued most of it, so it's not really flashy. It's a black background. I think most them are a black background. So even if the lights are off, it's not intrusive. It looks pretty natural. It doesn't look like a big electronic screen or anything. It looks pretty nice.
I have heard the things about your phone going off where you have to stand up in a movie theater and there's no way to turn it off – I’m not sure where I read that – but that seems to be annoying.
So if you're at something very dark, and there's people around, maybe it's not the best place.
CHUCK:
Yeah.
JAIM:
Those are adamantine problem.
CHUCK:
I was wondering about that because I’ve been in movie theaters and you got – they're basically flashing their screen at everybody while they text message their friend in the middle of a movie.
JAIM:
Right.
CHUCK:
It's like, “Okay. You turn the ringer off – thanks – but that's really bright in here.”
JAIM:
Yeah. The difference is pretty drastic.
CHUCK:
So I was just wondering about if the watch had that same thing. Is there anything else that it does or anything else that you've used it for that hasn't really been talked about when people talk about the Apple Watch?
JAIM:
I did not think about that. I'm not really sure. I've headed on. I’ve used it as a watch and played around with it for a few hours just checking it out and seeing how things work. But mostly I've just been wearing it and trying to use it. It's mostly just been a watch and I'm discovering what I like and don't like as I go.
CHUCK:
Yeah.
JAIM:
So I haven’t' really go down into the deeper details of what's going on or what the possibilities are.
CHUCK:
Yeah, I'm also really curious as to whether or not it has – or how complete the motion sensing is in it. And if you could build some kind of game controls off of the way you move your arm or the way you move your body sensing off of your arm. I don't know.
JAIM:
Yeah, that'd be cool. I wonder if it’s – I don’t think that's available at all. I'm sure there are people hacking into it right now and have their off-AppStore apps going with watch-controlled games or just playing with that. It's probably possible.
CHUCK:
Yeah. Cool. I don't know if I have any other questions. It sounds like fun. We'll have to do a comparison once I got my Pebble.
JAIM:
That's true. I'm pretty happy with it. I'm not paid by Apple actually. I'm not actually a product reviewer but I'm enjoying wearing it. It is expensive.
CHUCK:
If you weren’t going to be doing development, would you have bought it?
JAIM:
Probably not. This is a first gen product. It's cool. It's well done but it’s going to improve. If I was going to just buy a watch, I can buy something useful -- I would use as a watch for quite a bit less because I'm not a huge fan of having things I have to worry about. I've had a watch that was probably a $100 or $200 watch that I just got from my dad and I wore it for years. Didn’t worry about it; got a little wet, I didn’t worry.
CHUCK:
Yup.
JAIM:
Going to a baseball game. Tonight it’s going to rain. I’m like, “Wait a minute. How is this watch going to handle this?” It's not how I usually like to operate. I like to not worry about things breaking.
CHUCK:
It's not going to electrocute you much.
JAIM:
Okay. [Chuckles] So, I’ll be safe. That's good. That’s good.
CHUCK:
It’s the person that sit next to you, right?
JAIM:
That’s right. Anyone that holds hands with me is in trouble. I’m sure the battery is pretty powerful.
CHUCK:
Wow. That has nothing to do with the watch.
JAIM:
Okay. This is true.
CHUCK:
Alright. Well, I think we’ve pretty well talked it out. You want to do picks?
JAIM:
Yeah, we can do picks.
CHUCK:
Alright. Do you have a pick for us?
JAIM:
Yeah. We talked about running and when I started running, I wanted to track how far I went because I didn’t really have a route down. I didn’t know how far it was so I took my phone with me, turned on the GPS or Map My Ride and I carried it. That was okay but I'm running around. If I trip on something, my phones going to go flying and that's no good. But I went buying shoes, I talked to the salesperson at the running store and they recommended the SPIbelt. It’s something that you just wear around your waist. You can stick a lot of stuff in there so you can get a wallet; you can get a phone and your keys whatever you do. It's really in line with your center of gravity so you don’t really notice it. You just run and not have to worry about dropping your phone or doing whatever. That's cool so I got my watch in my wrist; my phone on my waist and I don't have to worry about breaking stuff unless I go face down but that's a different problem. So I'm going to make a pick on the SPIbelt if people are running and don't know about it yet.
CHUCK:
Cool.
JAIM:
I think that's it for me.
CHUCK:
Alright. I'm going to pick a few things here. First off, I know this is an iOS podcast but if you're into Ruby, I'm putting on Ruby Remote Conf where I could do javascript so you can go check that out – rubyremoteconf.com. We're working on getting the schedule up now so that should be awesome.
The other thing I'm going to pick is a book called Traction. Now, I may have picked a book called Traction before – I don’t remember. That book's about basically gaining customers as a softwareas-a-service or other business that sells products. But this one is more about how you organize your company and I really, really enjoyed it. I've actually been looking at how I have things organized with Devchat.tv and Intentional Excellence Productions. I'm definitely digging that. There were things that I had to really think through on that. So I'm going to pick that book.
There were few other things I wanted to pick. I can't remember what they were so I'll just pick one more – and that is the new Star Wars movies had trailers come out and so go and check those out. I really enjoyed Star Wars and I’m really looking forward to the new movies being made. Thank you George Lucas for selling the rights.
That's all I got so we'll just wrap it up here I guess. Thank you everyone for listening and we'll catch you all next week.
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