Apple watchOS 3 announced | Hacker News Reader

Apple watchOS 3 announced

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43 pointsnimeshneema15 comments

Okay - now this looks interesting: write with your finger on the watch to send short messages! I think this may actually be the feature that tips a lot of people over the edge from "The smart watch is just a toy" to "I can actually do something useful with this thing in my productive life".

I wonder if it would be an effective way of doing an interview and taking notes. Reminiscent of the Graffiti days!

Sounds like another gimmick to me. It's slow and not convenient. Might be good to write where you parked your car, but I doubt it would be convenient for taking notes.

IMO Pebble got it right. The watch is a companion to your phone, not another phone.

I still don't understand why smartwatches need their own OS and power hungry processor...

Why not make it an accessory for a smartphone that simply displays everything from it and inputs to it, using its processing power mostly?

At least then they would last a bit longer...

Probably because the power hungry processor is less power hungry then the amount of power that would be required by the wireless chipset if it needed to offload everything to the phone.

Eat up Martha.

(For those who didn't get the joke... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Newton_eat_up_martha.jpg)

Wouldn't it be strangely ironic if they chose to use the Palm Grafitti glyphs? (explained, below) If so, I'd say we're circling right back around to Newton Messagepad days!

---Quick bit of background--- The original MP100 went to market with a text recognizer that was initially marginal in accuracy (and therefore, of limited usefulness) but in later releases became quite good (especially the MP2000/2100). However, in that period of years between marginal->good, a little package called Grafitti came about to provide an alternative text-entry system to supplement/replace Apple's digitizer. Grafitti had a peculiar system of entering one-"character"-at-a-time, one over top of another in a little corner of the screen. It was enormously popular because it increase recognition accuracy to near-100%, but the tradeoff was these glyphs were modified latin characters -- easy for a computer to recognize, quick for a human to learn, but not quite ordinary letters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_(Palm_OS)

Grafitti was written by a little company called Palm. They poured their earnings from Grafitti into creating a device to challenge Apple's Newton. The PalmPilot PDA dominated the market due to two features: great battery life (1 week per charge) and form factor -- it fit in a man's jacket pocket. The Apple Newton Messagepad was much more sophisticated but was physically 2x-3x the size and weight of the PalmPilot. Overall the PalmPilot was clunky but those two features were so compelling the rest didn't matter. It was "good enough" to challenge Apple (and win) in the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) market, which Apple invented.

So, Palm created software to address the shortcomings of the Newton text entry, went on to address the shortcomings of the Newton hardware, and eventually owned the PDA market. A technology David vs. Goliath story. --history lesson over--

Of course the text recognition system in the Newton (actually a trio of products working together under the hood: Rosetta, Mondello, and CalliGrapher) got to be good enough that many consider them to be among the best out there, even today. (And it's not hard to find traces of Rosetta even in modern macOS.) Newton folks were pretty good sports, and someone converted the "Eat Up Martha" Simpsons clip to display on later Newtons in 16 shade grayscale and it was pretty widely distributed, and the Doonesbury jibe about "Egg Freckles" ended up as an easter egg in the device itself.

No, smartwatches will never be the new smartphone as some claim.

I kinda hope Apple is investing in VR/HUD/AR/glasses, 'cause that's where the real future is...

The writing input seems particularly interesting with the annonced Chinese support.

Writing a long message letter by letter is inconvenient, but for a three or four characters reply it seems the right balance between time to write it and the funny way to do it vs using the smartphone.

It is great to know that WatchOS3 will have better performance, and background processing for fitness apps will also help, but aside from that, I don't see any other big Watch OS news for developers.

Takes guts to do a rethink like that. I like a hungry and threatened Apple.

Do all these performance improvements require the new Apple Watch 2 hardware?

What new Apple Watch 2 hardware? There is none.

Supposedly this OS release is supposed to coincide with a hardware refresh.

Possibly but they wouldn't demo anything that would only work on unannounced hardware. As far as the demos were concerned Watch 2 doesn't exist. They usually demo extra stuff that requires the hardware when it is announced officially.

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