Linked List: March 19, 2015

Thursday, 19 March 2015

Kyle VanHemert, writing for Wired, on haptic feedback as the new frontier in user interface design:

Apple showed its eagerness to explore this potential earlier this week, with an incremental upgrade to iMovie that adds haptic feedback for a handful of interactions. As explained in the release notes, “When dragging a video clip to its maximum length, you’ll get feedback letting you know you’ve hit the end of the clip. Add a title and you’ll get feedback as the title snaps into position at the beginning or end of a clip. Subtle feedback is also provided with the alignment guides that appear in the Viewer when cropping clips.”

So much potential here.

‘I Can’t Tell You Where I Work, and I Can’t Tell You What I Do, but I Need to Talk to You’ ★

Daniela Hernandez, writing for Fusion, “The Inside Story of How Apple’s New Medical Research Platform Was Born”:

He was closer than he thought. Sitting in the audience that day was Mike O’Reilly, a newly minted vice president for medical technologies at Apple. A few months earlier, Apple had poached O’Reilly from Masimo, a Bay Area-based sensor company that developed portable iPhone-compatible health trackers. Now, he was interested in building something else, something that had the potential to implement Friend’s vision of a patient-centered, medical research utopia and radically change the way clinical studies were done.

After Friend’s talk, O’Reilly approached the doctor, and, in typical tight-lipped Apple fashion, said: “I can’t tell you where I work, and I can’t tell you what I do, but I need to talk to you,” Friend recalls. Friend was intrigued, and agreed to meet for coffee.

Great story. This is the best piece on ResearchKit that I’ve seen.

Tesla Can Now Resume Car Sales in New Jersey ★

Matt Burns, writing for TechCrunch:

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie just signed a law that will allow Tesla to start selling its vehicles again to residents of the state.

About a year ago, New Jersey started enforcing a law that required vehicles to be sold to consumers through dealerships. Tesla doesn’t play nicely with dealerships. It sells its vehicles directly to consumers through company-owned showrooms instead of independently owned and state-certified dealerships. So about a year ago, Tesla stopped selling cars in New Jersey and the company’s two showrooms were unable to offer test drives or discuss sale information.

Nice outcome to this year-old piece.

Inside the U.S. Antitrust Probe of Google ★

Fascinating look from the WSJ at a 2012 FTC staff report that recommended filing an antitrust lawsuit against Google:

In discussing one of the issues the FTC staff wanted to sue over, the report said the company illegally took content from rival websites such as Yelp, TripAdvisor Inc. and Amazon to improve its own websites. It cited one instance when Google copied Amazon’s sales rankings to rank its own items. It also copied Amazon’s reviews and ratings, the report found. A TripAdvisor spokesman declined to comment.

When competitors asked Google to stop taking their content, Google threatened to remove them from its search engine.

“It is clear that Google’s threat was intended to produce, and did produce, the desired effect,” the report said, “which was to coerce Yelp and TripAdvisor into backing down.” The company also sent a message that it would “use its monopoly power over search to extract the fruits of its rivals’ innovations.”

The FTC revealed this report to the Journal by mistake:

The Wall Street Journal viewed portions of the document after the agency inadvertently disclosed it as part of a Freedom of Information Act request. The FTC declined to release the undisclosed pages and asked the Journal to return the document, which it declined to do.

“Unfortunately, an unredacted version of this material was inadvertently released in response to a FOIA request,” an FTC spokesman said in a statement to the Journal. “We are taking steps to ensure this does not happen again,” the statement said.

Google Reportedly Preparing Android Wear App for iPhone and iPad ★

A few readers have asked about this, regarding my comments earlier today regarding the lock-in advantage Apple Watch has for iPhone owners. An Android Wear app for iOS could definitely be a thing — look no further than Pebble. But the integration between an iPhone and an Android Wear device would be limited by the constraints of what iOS apps from the App Store are capable of. Apple Watch integration is built into iOS itself.

Jason Snell, who’s worn a Pebble for two years, writing for Macworld a few weeks ago:

Unlike all the Android Wear watches out there, Pebble’s watches have always claimed iOS compatibility. That’s true of the Pebble Time, too. But in the past two years as a Pebble user, one thing has been abundantly clear: My Pebble’s relationship with iOS has been fraught with difficulty. I had to fiddle endlessly with Notification Center settings to get alerts to properly display on my watch, and since the release of iOS 8 I’ve found that more often than not my Pebble has just silently lost its connection to my iPhone — or the Pebble app says it is connected, but it doesn’t actually send any notifications. Except when it does.

Meanwhile, Pebble keeps announcing new features that work pretty well with Android.

Apple Watch and the World Wide Web ★

Paul Canetti:

The point is, if Apple announced a computer with no web browser, or a new version of iOS with no web browser, or I don’t know, a new MacBook with no ports, people would freak out. Like the way they freak out about everything Apple has ever removed ever.

And yet the lack of reaction, or even acknowledgement, that there is no Safari on Apple Watch, leads me to believe that not only is Apple right to not include it, but we are actually ready to accept it: a wearable world with no web browsers.

I disagree with Canetti’s headline — “Apple Watch Doesn’t Have Safari And You Didn’t Even Notice”. I certainly noticed, and I think many others did too. But I didn’t give it much thought, because it made no sense for me for there to be a web browser on a watch-sized display. But now that I think about it, it is interesting — the HTML/CSS/JavaScript web has no place in the wearable world.

Gucci and Will.i.am Unveil Wearable Tech Collaboration ★

Alessandra Codinha, Vogue:

The musician has joined forces with Gucci Timepieces on a “smartband” that is completely standalone, which is to say untethered from any existing smartphone or mobile device. What makes it so smart? Well, it has the ability to make and receive phone calls; send and receive text messages and emails; hold music, maps, and your calendar; track your fitness; and even possesses a “sophisticated personal assistant” activated by voice command. “Wearable technology and smart devices represent a new frontier for the fashion industry. It is very appropriate that Gucci is leading the way through this collaboration with will.i.am, as innovation has always been such an important part of our DNA,” wrote Gucci President and CEO Marco Bizzarri in a statement.

Dan Seifert, writing for The Verge back in November:

The Puls is a fully independent smartwatch — it has its own SIM card and doesn’t rely on being connected to a smartphone to work. Will.i.am introduced it to the world on a stage at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference last month in front a bunch of devotees to CRM.

I got a chance to use an early production model earlier today. It’s objectively the worst product I’ve touched all year.

Good luck with that, Gucci.

Gene Munster Claims Apple Has Augmented Reality R&D Team ★

Mikey Campbell:

Citing sources within the virtual and augmented reality industry, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said in a report published Wednesday that he believes Apple is fielding a small team tasked with experimental work in the AR space.

Consumer oriented AR systems are likely ten years out, the analyst said, but Apple’s purported involvement suggests it is already plotting out the next evolution in computing. Munster suspects AR technology could be as transformative to the tech landscape as the smartphone.

For what it’s worth, I’ve heard about people getting hired for something like this at Apple. But it would be more surprising to hear that Apple isn’t doing any R&D regarding augmented reality than to hear that they are. Of course they’re looking into this.

Unscrupulous Website Ads Again Redirecting Some Users to App Store From Safari ★

Benjamin Mayo, on a rash of web ads that are redirecting people to App Store links:

This is Apple’s problem to fix, not an attack on the websites shown. All of these websites use third-party networks that are outside of their control — it’s not their decision to cause the redirections. We’ve reached out to Apple for comment on the issue.

Bullshit. If you publish a website with ads, and those ads do scammy things via JavaScript, that’s your responsibility. Of course Apple should close whatever hole these dirtbags are exploiting, but publishers are responsible for the ads they serve.

Update: Mayo’s demo video includes Jason Snell’s Six Colors, the only ads on which are from The Deck — and The Deck, rest assured, is not serving scammy JavaScript redirects. It’s not even possible. So something else is going on here. Seems more like a man-in-the-middle attack — a compromised network or router.

Update 2: Here’s a piece from last week from AraLabs explaining how this hijack works.

Update 3: Jason Snell, “Ad Networks, Redirects, and Assumptions”.

A ‘Real Watch’ ★

John McCarthy, reporting for The Drum:

Jean-Claude Biver, chief executive of TAG Heuer told Reuters at Baselworld, a watch industry event in Basel, that his firm’s entry will heavily resemble the Tag Heuer black Carrera: “People will have the impression that they are wearing a normal watch,” he said.

TAG has some great-looking watches in the Carrera collection, but most of them are decidedly masculine. Unsung among Apple’s achievements with Apple Watch is that no one else has a smart watch even close to the size of the 38mm Apple Watch — and most dwarf Apple’s 42mm model.

“Apple will get young people used to wearing a watch and later maybe they will want to buy themselves a real watch.”

This is how watch collecting works. You get hooked, and start buying more watches. And then you choose between them based on your mood or the occasion. Not so easy when one watch is tied to Android and the one you already own is tied to iPhone. The best hope for existing watch brands is for people not to like wearing Apple Watch, because if they do like wearing Apple Watch, they’re not going to switch.

Google, Intel, and TAG Heuer Team Up on Luxury Smartwatch ★

Bloomberg:

In his announcement at the Baselworld watch expo today, LVMH watches chief Jean-Claude Biver said this was his “biggest announcement ever” in his 40 years of working in the industry. He predicted the device would be the “greatest connected watch.” David Singleton, the head of Android Wear development for Google, added: “When I think about the watch, it’s always been a marriage of beauty and utility. We’re going to do that with our partnership.” TAG Heuer is set to handle design and manufacture, while Intel will provide an SoC platform and Google will lend its Android Wear platform and help develop software. The watch is set to be launched by the end of the year, at which point price and functions will be announced.

No details as to what the watch looks like. Not even clear they’ve started designing it. Smart though, not to let Google be involved with the design.

“The difference between the TAG Heuer watch and the Apple watch is very important,” Biver said. “That one is called Apple and this one is called TAG Heuer.”

TAG Heuer is a great brand, no argument about it. But there’s another difference: only one of them is going to work with iPhone.