Linked List: September 5, 2014

Friday, 5 September 2014

Charlie Rose Interview With Jony Ive and Marc Newson ★

Worth another look given today’s news.

Timepieces Designed by Marc Newson ★

Food for thought.

My thanks to Pixate for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Pixate is a mobile development tool that allows designers to visually define sophisticated animations and interactions that come to life in real-time on iOS and Android devices as 100 percent native prototypes. Native UI code, not web views.

Pixate is in private preview release currently, and working for great design teams from companies like Apple, Google, Yahoo, and Twitter. They’ve got a special offer for DF readers: sign up now to get on the waiting list and you’ll get a free month of service when it launches.

Marc Newson to Join Apple on Jony Ive’s Design Team ★

Anyone else starting to get the feeling that Tuesday’s event might not be just about iPhones?

Is Switzerland Fucked? ★

Nick Bilton, writing for the NYT:

While we don’t have much of an idea what the coveted iWatch will look like, I was able to glean one small detail from people at Apple who work on the company’s wearables.

According to a designer who works at Apple, Jonathan Ive, Apple’s design chief, in bragging about how cool he thought the iWatch was shaping up to be, gleefully said Switzerland is in trouble — though he chose a much bolder term for “trouble” to express how he thought the watchmaking nation might be in a tough predicament when Apple’s watch comes out.

Sure sounds like a watch, in particular, not a wearable, in general.

Yours truly, back in June:

If Apple is indeed making a wearable device that goes on your wrist, it should look like something you’d want to wear before you even see what it does.

(Betteridge’s Law holds, of course, that Switzerland is not in fact fucked.)

‘The Problem With Apple’s Juice’ ★

Jessica Lessin, writing for The Information (paywall, alas)

In the build-up to the new Apple Watch, it is easy to get seduced by the rumored features. Curved screen! Wireless charging! Jony Ive thinks it’s slick!

But — and I hate to burst everyone’s bubble here — the appeal of the world’s most highly anticipated wearable computer is going to come down to something a lot more mundane: battery life.

And I have some bad news. I think it is going to be disappointing. People who have talked to Apple about the watch said that Apple employees have set low expectations. Maybe it’s Apple sandbagging. Maybe the battery life really is bad. We’ll learn more on Tuesday at the big unveiling and, eventually, when it ships next year.

If true, and it’s really a “watch”, that’s a problem. If it’s something more like a wearable iPod Nano, maybe not so much. But Lessin is saying it’s a watch.

[Retracted] ‘Just Photoshop in the Missing 90 Degrees’ ★

~~Motorola’s promotional image of the Moto 270 shows the entire display filled in down at the 6 o’clock marker. That’s one way to solve the problem.~~

Ends up it only renders this way in Safari. Load the same page in Chrome, and when the animation finishes, it includes the flat tire.

Tim Cook Says Apple to Add Security Alerts for iCloud Users ★

Daisuke Wakabayashi, writing for the WSJ:

In his first interview on the subject, Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook said celebrities’ iCloud accounts were compromised when hackers correctly answered security questions to obtain their passwords, or when they were victimized by a phishing scam to obtain user IDs and passwords.

He said none of the Apple IDs and passwords leaked from the company’s servers.

To make such leaks less likely, Mr. Cook said Apple will alert users via email and push notifications when someone tries to change an account password, restore iCloud data to a new device, or when a device logs into an account for the first time.

Until now, users got an email when someone tried to change a password or log in for the first time from an unknown Apple device; there were no notifications for restoring iCloud data.

That Cook would take time this week, in the run-up to Tuesday’s event, to address this says to me he’s taking it pretty damn seriously.

Joanna Stern Reviews the Moto 270 ★

Joanna Stern:

And the problem for women like me, with thin wrists, is that the watch may sound small — 1.8 inches in diameter and just a half-inch thick — but it almost looks like I grabbed a clock off the wall and strapped it to my arm.

Of course, size wasn’t an issue for everyone who tried it on. It looked decent on my father’s medium-size wrist, and just right on my co-worker’s extra-large one.

Motorola says it is working on smaller versions, but that makes me concerned about battery life: Even this big, honking model had to be charged twice a day. Most days, after charging it overnight, I had to put it back on its wireless charging cradle by 4 p.m. If only the large black circle could also work as a sundial so I could still tell the time when the battery dies.

So it’s way too big for at least half the population and has to be charged twice a day.

Good luck.

Side Note to Those of You Seeing Wacky Fonts on DF Using Chrome on Windows ★

It’s a bug in Chrome that hit when they switched to a new font renderer on Windows. Hopefully they’ll fix it soon.

The Moto 270 Goes on Sale Today ★

Congratulations to Motorola and Google for beating my joke by four days.

Update: Maybe they won’t beat my joke. I said “shipping”, and they’re quoting pick-up at Best Buy in “3-5 days”.

AppleInsider: Aerial Footage of Apple’s Mysterious White Box Next to Tuesday’s Event Site ★

Hats off to AppleInsider for getting some impressive flyover drone footage of Apple’s intriguing (and I presume temporary) structure for next week’s event. The theory that it’s a large hands-on area for after the keynote is my guess as well, but who knows? This event is uncharted territory. (Via Jim Dalrymple.)