“Hey Siri, Send”

For the first week I used my Apple Watch, it drove me nuts that I still had to tap the screen to confirm sending text messages I’d dictated via “Hey Siri”. Then I decided to try dictating the button press. When presented with the confirmation button before sending a text message, saying “Send”, which is most intuitive, doesn’t work. However, saying “Hey Siri, Send” does. In fact, for any confirmation button that shows up while dictating into the watch, all you have to do do is say “Hey Siri” and then the name of the button.

“Hey Siri, Tell Daisy I’m in jail. Bring bail money.”

Pause

“Hey Siri, Send.”

It is strange that you have to preface every button press with “Hey Siri” and this behavior is different from the iPhone, which asks you to confirm and you just say “yes” or “confirm”. The iPhone method is better. However, if you want to send a text message from your Apple Watch hands free, get ready to say “Hey Siri” a lot.

Update:

Turns out, the iDownload blog figured this out before I did and even made a clever video.

Marco Arment on Apple Watch App Design

I enjoy Marco Arment’s articles on App design and layout. Making an App truly user friendly is a combination of art and science and Marco is one of the best at it. Moreover, he has a way of explaining his thought process that is fascinating to me. This week he wrote about the re-design  of Overcast for the Apple Watch. 

As an aside, Overcast is one of my favorite apps on the Apple Watch. Being able to start, stop, and change podcasts from my wrist is golden. I have it active as a glance and then tap on it to get the app and it works swell.

The Reserve Strap for the Apple Watch

There is a lot of digital ink being spilled today over the Reserve Strap for the Apple Watch. They came up with a clever design that plugs into the watch’s diagnostic port and makes the strap a lot sleeker. Setting aside my concerns about a permanent connection to the diagnostic port as you wear your watch around all day, I have to wonder how many people actually need more power for their Apple Watch. Yesterday I wore my watch 16 hours and had 40% battery left when I took it off. As I write these words, it is 12:38 pm and I currently have 87% of my battery left.

If you need extra power, this may be the strap you are looking for but I’d advise to make sure you actually need that extra power first. I don’t.

 

Talking Apple Watch on the Maccast

This week I joined Adam Christianson and some other smart geeks on the Maccast to talk about the Apple Watch. The guests include Ken Ray (Mac OS Ken), Allison Sheridan (Nosillacast), Veronica Belmont (Sword & Laser, Vaginal Fantasy), Erfon Elijah (Cultcast, Cult of Mac), and me. It’s a fun listen.


 

Needs Versus Wants

John Gruber had an excellent post yesterday about the Apple Watch.

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… Of course you don’t need it. No one, not one person on the face of the earth, needs any $400 watch, Apple Watch or otherwise.3

The right question is simply “Do you want one?”

This really gets to the point. I’ve already grown very attached to my watch but I could get by without it. In fact, I (along with the rest of the world) got by just fine without an Apple Watch for a long time. The difference it makes in my life is many small conveniences as I go throughout my day. The trouble is that the Apple Watch is like your first In-N-Out Burger. You know lived just fine without it before but after tasting it, you can’t imagine going back to life without it.


 

Watch App Screen: X Marks the Spot


I’m having trouble with the app launcher screen on the Apple Watch. (I’m intentionally not calling it the home screen.) The touch targets are small. You can zoom in with the digital crown, but doing so makes it easy to get lost in exactly where you are in your big clump of apps. I also don’t like the way they sort themselves, which seems random. 

I started playing around with the iPhone’s App Layout screen and tried several solutions before landing on this one. The apps lend themselves to this X style organization. I’m going to clump application types together in different branches of the X. For example, I have all time and fitness related apps in the lower left branch.

So far I like this this organizational method. It makes it easier to find what I’m looking for and since the apps aren’t so densely packed, it is easier to launch an app without tapping the wrong one. I’m not sure this is final solution but, for now, X marks the spot.

Two Days With the Apple Watch

 My wife’s Apple Watch showed up on Friday. My own space gray 42mm aluminum watch (ordered just a few minutes after the Apple Watch went on sale) didn’t make the launch day shipment but is now in a truck somewhere between China and my front door and, according to Deliveries, expected to arrive soon.

Feeling sorry for the geek, my wife let me borrow her 38mm aluminum Apple Watch (for science!) and I’ve spent a significant part of the last two days looking at my wrist, tapping out notifications to my fellow nerd friends, and standing up and sitting down because my Apple Watch told me to. I’ve got a few observations:

  • All of the points I made after my first 30 minutes remain true. Apple nailed so many details, especially with the the physical construction. Even the “low end” aluminum watch looks and feels great. I still find myself turning the digital crown, smitten at the way it has just enough resistance.
  • Likewise, my initial impressions of that feature where you can draw on the screen hasn’t changed. I had a series of scribbles with Katie Floyd and my daughter and none of them were intelligible beyond a basic shape or words with three letters or worse. I’ll be surprised if that feature becomes a “thing”.
  • My teenager also agrees with me that the animated 3D animations of a yellow face and hands are “not cool”. If there is any feature of this first Apple Watch OS that we’ll look back on and laugh at, I think it is those 3D faces.
  • The 38mm watch didn’t look bad on me. A grown man can certainly use one. That being said, I’m looking forward to the increased size (and readability) of the 42mm watch.
  • Siri, on the watch and in the wild, works great. I was sending texts in the middle of a crowd at Disneyland Friday night and it just worked. I do have some UI quibbles with it. Specifically, by default I’ve got to tap the watch to send after dictation. I’d prefer to do this verbally.
  • Speaking of Siri, I’ve only accidentally triggered dictation once in two days with some group of words that sounded like “Hey Siri”. I know that equates to several times a week, which is a pain, but I expected it to be worse.
  • Hearing early reviews, I was prepared for the notifications to drive me nuts. I was careful setting them up, which took all of five minutes, and now my watch just notifies me when I really have something worth notification. The net effect is my phone stays in my pocket a lot more than it used to. I guess that was the point.
  • So far, I’ve bought an iPhone accessory and groceries with the watch. The guy at the Apple Store jumped up and down. (I was his first.) The nice lady at Sprouts just commented that things just keep getting “easier and easier”.
  • I aggressively use calendars to keep my act together. I schedule meetings, calls, and even time to work on important projects. Having my next appointment show up on my wrist is super-useful.
  • After hearing initial reports, I was ready for the apps to be a hot mess. They definitely are not as snappy as a native application would be but apps, like OmniFocus, that do not need to go to the Internet for information are useful on my wrist. We are in early days with wrist based user interface and I expect things to evolve a lot in the next 6 months. Exciting times.
  • Both days I used the watch all day and ended with plenty of battery in the tank. The first day, I got down to 15%. The second day, 30%. My daughter used her watch all day today and had 40% when she took it off.

Those decreasing battery numbers are illustrative of something else. The watch will quickly just fit into your life. It was a lot of fun playing with watch faces and apps the first day but by the second day, the Apple Watch was just part of my routine. I communicated with it. I told time with it. I kept track of my activity with it. When I wasn’t doing one of those things, I wasn’t thinking about it. The iPad and iPhone both turned my life upside down for weeks after I first got them. The watch did not have the same effect. Once I sorted it out, I just started using it. I think that is a good thing.

Do you need an Apple Watch? I’d say that very few people must have an Apple Watch. It’s early in the game and we are all still figuring out where it fits and how to use it. If you’re not inclined, you’ll be just fine sitting this out. 

That being said, I’ve now reset my wife’s Apple Watch and paired it with her phone. I was watch-less most of this afternoon. I also gave my Pebble to my younger daughter and found myself frequently looking at my naked wrist this afternoon and expecting it to tell me something. 

If you do get an Apple Watch, very quickly you’ll realize that it does make life with iOS easier and more streamlined. Checking a text message by glancing at your wrist rather than digging in your pocket or purse for a phone is nice and a time saver. I think there are several people that make good Apple Watch candidates. 

If you think about the number of times a day you check your phone for one reason or another and for you that number is anything significant, you probably should consider an Apple Watch. They are not intrusive and make your life easier.

If you are used to wearing a watch and want to see how much more you can get out of it, an Apple Watch may also be a good fit for you. In my case, just putting my next appointment on my wrist makes the watch worth the investment.

Finally, I’d say if you have any interest in fitness tracking, an Apple Watch can make sense. Granted, you can buy a dedicated fitness tracker for less but if you are an iOS user, the Apple Watch delivers so much more.

It’s not every day Apple releases an entirely new product category. While I don’t think the Apple Watch is going to turn the world upside down the same way the iPhone did, it is a really nice upgrade and addition to my iPhone. 

Apple Watch User Guide Online

Dan Moren over at Six Colors points out that Apple has now published the Apple Watch online user guide. I’m very interested in force touch as a new way to interact with touch screens. The magic term of art in the Apple Watch is “firmly touch”. I ran it and found 37 separate instances of the phrase in the user guide. I’m going to go through them later just to see how they are using it. Yes. I’m that kind of nerd.


 

Apple Watch Guided Tour Videos

If you are like me and checking to see if your watch has shipped yet, you may want to spend some time watching the guided tour videos at the Apple Watch website, which are now complete.
This is the first “new category” Apple product I’ve ever bought from Apple where I feel, based on these videos and my experience in store with the sample watches, completely ready to pull it out of the box, strap it on, and get back to work. At least in theory …


 

 

Apple Watch Periscope Today at 4:45 PST


I’ve got a full agenda of meetings today but it looks like my day ends pretty close to an Apple Store. Sounds like an excuse to go play with the demo Apple Watches to me. I’m going to be turning Periscope on at approximately 4:45 PM PST so if you are far away from an Apple Store and would like to look at the demo watches with me, check in with me on Twitter at about that time.