AutoSleep has been invaluable to me. To the best of my knowledge stock watchOS won't track sleep unless you set or schedule the Bedtime mode, which is annoying -I might forget to toggle it each night, or the schedule will kick in when I plan on staying up. AutoSleep automatically detects whenever I go to bed and wake up, along with history/metrics for a flat fee and no subscription.
I don't deeply trust many of the metrics but anecdotally it's very accurate for the amount I'm sleeping, which is mainly what I'm concerned with
I had a Beddit which was a device made by a company that Apple bought. I find the sleep tracking and general activity tracking at least vaguely interesting. Though if I have a bad night's sleep I know it--sometimes better than the Watch indicates. But the more we can track things and be aware of those things changing, the better I guess. With the Ultra's battery life I have found using the Apple Watch most days and nights a more matter of habit experience.
I'm pretty sure Google Maps and a plethora of other applications on the App Store simply use the MUNI schedules (http://www.sfmta.com/cms/mroutes/schedules.htm) for the purposes of "time prediction." Since buses in SF are basically never time due to many reasons (traffic, accidents, once I was on a bus where the trainee who was driving took the wrong exit on the way to Daly City BART and the actual Muni driver on the bus had to take over the wheel) the predictions are never accurate.
The only app that has done me right is Transporter, and I'm pretty sure it scrapes Nextbus or some other service for time predictions.
Having taken a small spin of the app, I'm inclined to agree. A few things I noticed:
- Locational services permission required. They inform you that it's not to track your location, but to track the location of the photos you send so that information can be included.
- Unable to preview photos I'm queueing up for sending. When you're selecting photos to send, you're shown the grid view for whatever photo collection you have, and tap on ones you wish to send - but there's no obvious option to view the photo in a full view for the purpose of making sure I'm sending the right one.
Like you say there are already a wealth of photo sharing options that don't create another layer of abstraction, at least in my limited usage and experience. IMO the ability to share multiple photos doesn't warrant a separate app but a service that photo sharing applications should provide given the demand.
I've had my 4S since launch. I agree it's overall functionality is more than satisfactory without a jailbreak, but there's a few annoying but not dealbreaking issues that jailbreaking would solve - fast text replies, quick access to wifi and airport settings, etc. I'm not hurting to jailbreak for these reasons, but it is annoying that this functionality has been available to jailbroken phones for a good deal of time.
Not disagreeing with virtues associated with compactness and pixel density, but to quote Tim Bray: "When I switch from the NG to my Nexus S, I think “This is pleasingly compact.” Then when I switch back to the NG I think “My eyes are happy.” Because the upside, of course, is that you have a great big honkin’ huge ginormous beautiful screen!" via http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2011/10/18/ICS-and-Ga...
I'd argue that an interface is only as cluttered as a user allows it to be. Plenty of people I know own iPhones with similarly cluttered home screens. You point out how the guy in the video takes a while to find the camera but I've had that exact problem looking for it on friends' iPhones, and that's knowing exactly what the icon looks like. Any interface can be made cluttered given a bad enough user.
I'm not a developer, just a 4th year CS student who doesn't even own an Android handset yet, but I do agree about how apps being kept running even when side-swiped away is kind of troublesome. It would be nice of we were offered some sort of option as to whether we'd like to permanently close it - but that distinction and its effects are probably lost to a majority of handset users, and is probably Google's justification.
You're right, any sloppy user can make a mess of the iPhone interface. But as a mobile platform, the OS shouldnt promote sloppiness and with all its tabs and panels and pages in addition to all the physical buttons already present.
The VM that Android runs on, as is pointed out in another comment, is designed to kill off processes if it needs resources. Either way, its never been a selling point of Android for me, personally.
I am under the impression that iOS works the same way in that it closes off apps it doesn't need. The only difference is that it enforces a stronger save state feature. Is this not correct?
Thank you. All 2D surfaces can/are accelearated I would bet money that the lag is in legacy apps. For some reason, new apps have to opt-in to hardware acceleration. I can't see any lag at all in all of the hands on videos I'm seeing.
By opt in, they have to bump their targetSdkVersion, so it's not a big deal. Source: http://developer.android.com
Yes, it seems that although hardware acceleration was possible prior to Android 3, it wasn't as easy as it is now. It also requires a degree of care to be taken by the dev to do well.
Given that it hasn't been available in phones until now (that is, in ICS), it’s understandable why we've seen laggy UI.
I don't deeply trust many of the metrics but anecdotally it's very accurate for the amount I'm sleeping, which is mainly what I'm concerned with