Today, Apple begins a new chapter in its history, with the Apple Watch going on sale and being delivered to the first customers. Sure, it is just an iPhone accessory, but it is also a new type of device, one with a different kind of interface, different input methods and different ways of acquiring and presenting information. Will the Apple Watch become a significant new product, or is it instead destined to enter the history books next to the Apple iPod Socks? My hunch is that the Apple Watch in particular, and wearable devices in general, will indeed be an important new type of product for Apple, and as Apple learns from the first generation Apple Watch and issues software and hardware improvements, we will one day look back and be amazed at how interesting the product is and how far the product category has come, much as we look back now at the progress since the first Mac, the first iPod and the first iPhone. This could be pretty exciting, and it all starts today. And now, the news of note from the past week:
- Last year, I reviewed an app called DkT that you can use to access PACER on the iPhone or iPad. The developer of the app tells me that some folks are now experiencing login errors with the app, but he needs more information to fix the problem. If you have noticed this problem with the DkT app, please contact Matt Zorn ([email protected]) to help him to troubleshoot.
- Whether you get notifications on your iPhone, your iPad, your Apple Watch, are all three, you need to effectively manage those notifications so that you are only interrupted by the stuff that really matters. New York attorney and TechnoLawyer publisher Neil Squillante shares some good advice on notifications in an article that was published in the SmallLaw newsletter a few months ago but was just recently posted online.
- California attorney Scott Grossberg discusses the excellent GoodReader app.
- Even if you don't yet have an Apple Watch, you can get a sense of how it works with some new items on the Apple website. First, you can now watch ten guided tour videos. Second, you can now read the Apple Watch User Guide online.
- John Gruber doesn't think that Apple will allow custom watch faces, except for a few hand-selected by Apple. He explains why in this article, and he makes a pretty compelling argument.
- If you are wondering what it is like to try on the expensive Apple Watch Edition with the gold face, Caitlin McGarry and Leah Yamshon describe the Edition experience in an article for Macworld.
- If you are wondering how durable the Apple Watch is likely to be, Greg Koenig wrote a detailed article on the subject for iMore.
- Juli Clover of MacRumors reports that you have 14 days to exchange an Apple Watch band for another one. Many folks (like me) ordered an Apple Watch before they even saw the bands in person, so if you now wish that you had selected a different band, it may not be too late.
- If you use a Mac, the new Photos app has the amazing ability to store every single one of your photos on the cloud so that all of the photos are available to you on your iPhone and iPad. I love that I can now find that picture from many years ago on my iPhone or iPad, and when I tap the picture my device loads a better quality version from the cloud. It works great. However, please be aware that you need to pay Apple for storage space in the cloud, and that cost can add up. For my library of almost 50,000 pictures and a lot of videos, I needed to sign up for the 500 GB, $10/month plan to have enough space online. Second, and especially if your library is large, it takes a while to upload all of your data, and as Glenn Fleishman of Macworld notes, your Mac will flood your broadband to upload as fast as possible.
- Microsoft debuted a new service called Office 365 Video that lets companies upload and share videos to their employees. There is an iOS app for the service, and Harish Jonnalahadda of iMore explains some of the details.
- Caleb Melby of Bloomberg raves about Apple CEO Tim Cook in this article.
- Lisa Jackson, Apple's VP of Environmental Initiatives, and Larry Selzer of The Conservation Fund talk explain how and why Apple is now working to protect forests.
- And finally, Ben & Jerry's introduced a new ice cream product this week, one which plays off of the 420 theme. Ice cream and pot are usually not things that I discuss on iPhone J.D., but I was amused at how they created a video for the new product that is a parody of the famous ad that Apple used to introduce the Mac in 1984:
