Linked List: November 20, 2015

Friday, 20 November 2015

Hardware Is Hard 

Peter Ludwig, product manager for Android Wear, nine days ago:

No more worrying about Bluetooth or Wi-Fi — your watch will automatically switch to a cellular connection when you’re out of range. As long as your watch and phone are connected to a cellular network, you’ll be able to use your watch to send and receive messages, track fitness, get answers from Google, and run your favorite apps. And yes, you’ll even be able to make and take calls right from your watch, for when your hands are full, or your phone is elsewhere.

The first Android Wear watch with cellular support is the LG Watch Urbane 2nd Edition LTE.

LG, today:

We understand that you are currently reviewing our latest smartwatch; however, late in the quality assurance process for the LG Watch Urbane 2nd Edition LTE, our engineers were made aware of a hardware issue which affects the day-to-day functionality of the device. After further investigation, the decision was made to cancel the rollout of the Urbane 2nd Edition LTE due to the complicated nature of the issue.

Whether the device will be available in the future will be decided at a later time. For now, our top priority is to ensure that only products that meet our very specific quality standards are available for purchase.

Jimmy Iovine: ‘I’ve Always Known That Women Find It Very Difficult at Times — Some Women — to Find Music’ 

Really looking forward to Jimmy Iovine’s comments on women drivers when the Apple car comes out.

PowerPhotos 1.1 

Remember the app iPhoto Library Manager — a Mac utility that let iPhoto users split their photo collections across multiple iPhoto libraries? The company behind it, Fat Cat Software, has a sequel called PowerPhotos, which fills a similar role for the new Photos for Mac. It lets you do things like split a large library into multiple smaller ones (e.g. one for MacBook’s internal SSD, and an “archive” library you store on an external hard drive) or take multiple smaller libraries and merge them into one single library.

Here’s Glenn Fleishman’s take on PowerPhotos 1.0 from back in August. (Not a bad app icon, either.)

Update: It occurs to me that PowerPhotos is also exactly the sort of utility that couldn’t exist for iOS, and couldn’t go through the Mac App Store. That’s not to say I think this sort of thing should be possible on iOS — only that this is why I continue to love the Mac.