Smartwatches with Higher-Bandwidth Vibration Notifications

harlan@harris.name (Harlan Harris) — Mon, 30 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This is an updated version of an article first published on Medium on Oct. 24, 2015.

I love my smartwatch, way more than I thought I would when I bought it, over a year ago. It’s a Moto 360, which is still better looking than the Apple watch, I think.

Why do I love it? It’s not the health monitoring. I turned that junk off as soon as I got the thing. Do not care. It’s because it separates my phone and its alerts (and temptations) from my interactions with other people.

Apple TV and cross-device user-interface integration

harlan@harris.name (Harlan Harris) — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

On last week’s Build and Analyze – a great podcast nominally about iOS development, but actually more about just living a tech-geek lifestyle – Marco talked a lot about the rumored “Apple TV” and whether it could actually be a groundbreaking product. He concluded that it probably couldn’t. Most people wouldn’t dump a working TV just for an Apple brand; the touch-screen interface that Apple has been using for the iPad and iPhone wouldn’t work for a TV; the only apps that would work well on a TV would be just ways of getting better content (I note that Roku apps are laughable, with the exception of Angry Birds); getting access to better content than other competitors is probably impossible, even for Apple.

For these reasons and more, Marco suggested that there’s little that Apple, or anyone else, could do to substantially improve the TV experience, with the exception of better menu design.

I think there’s a way that Apple (or someone) could integrate modern technology into a TV that would be actually compelling, though. And in some ways it’s the same way that I earlier blogged about for MP3 players. Cross-device user-interfaces. Here’s how it might work for a television:

Technology on Harlan D. Harris

Smartwatches with Higher-Bandwidth Vibration Notifications

Apple TV and cross-device user-interface integration