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Should HomePod Get an App Store?

Posted on April 11, 2019 by admin Posted in Hardware, User Interface Leave a comment

What it is: The HomePod is a stand-alone device, but rival smart speakers offer apps so the HomePod should too.

Every time Apple introduces a first-generation product, you can be certain the second and third generations will be more capable. Initially, the iPhone didn’t allow you to install apps. Only later did Apple give the iPhone the ability to add apps, and this has turned into a billion dollar industry.

Now with the HomePod, Apple is in a similar situation. The HomePod represents a smart speaker that offers hands-free computing. The only problem is that HomePod does little more than play music or answer telephone calls.

If Apple opens up the HomePod to its own App Store, that would allow third-party developers to create unique voice-activated apps solely for the HomePod. Such apps could also work for the iPhone/iPad as well as long as users are willing to speak to control the app.

Unless you absolutely want a speaker with excellent audio capabilities, there’s little reason for most people to buy and use a HomePod. Wait for the second or third generation of the HomePod to appear that will offer more features and possibly an App Store of its own.

For HomePod to really become popular, Apple needs to figure out a must-have use for HomePod. With the Apple Watch, the must-have use is real-time health monitoring. With the HomePod, there is no clearly defined must-have use. Because there’s no must-have use, there’s little reason to to use a HomePod.

Until Apple makes a compelling case for using a HomePod, an App Store can give third-party developers a chance to give HomePod unique features that people might want. At the very least, an App Store can give people a reason to customize HomePod.

Breaking Up iTunes

Posted on April 6, 2019 by admin Posted in Business, Music, Software Leave a comment

What it is: For years, iTunes has been used to play music, movies, audio books, and podcasts. Now Apple is rumored to be breaking iTunes into separate apps.

The iTunes app began as a music player and a way to store songs on an iPod. Then Apple started adding more features to iTunes to play all types of audio and video files including movies, podcasts, and audio books. Not surprisingly, iTunes is now a clumsy, monolithic program that tries o do everything but does none of it well.

That’s why the latest rumor is that Apple will break iTunes into several smaller, specialized apps. That way if you don’t listen to podcasts, you don’t have to worry about podcast features. If you don’t listen to audio books, you won’t have to wade through audiobook features.

Part of the reasoning behind this rumor is that Apple is creating a cross-platform tool that will allow iOS developers to create macOS apps. Apple already announced this cross-platform tool last year so everyone’s expecting them to release it this year.

iTunes is a perfect example of a dedicated program that simply grew too big with more and more features until it became a mess. Few people will mourn the loss of iTunes for doing everything so it’s likely this is a low-risk move on Apple’s part to make everything easier for everybody.

Keep your eye on Apple’s cross-platform tool. This will likely become a major focus at the upcoming Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC), which will allow iOS developers to turn their apps into Macintosh apps as well. This will give iOS developers another way to profit from their work while giving Apple more apps to market and entice others to buy and use a Macintosh.

The future of Apple is iOS. To read more about Apple’s plan to break up iTunes, click here.

Real-Time Health Monitoring is the Purpose of Wearable Computers

Posted on March 18, 2019 by admin Posted in Hardware, Medical, User Interface Leave a comment

What it is: The “killer” app for the Apple Watch is real-time health monitoring.

When the Apple Watch first appeared, critics dismissed it as a gimmick. That’s because even Apple couldn’t define a specific use for the Apple Watch at first.

The whole purpose of technology is to solve a problem that was too difficult or impossible to solve previously. The PC made computers accessible to more people beyond the mainframe and minicomputer users. What made the PC useful was the spreadsheet, first embodied by VisiCalc and then by Lotus 1-2-3. People bought PCs specifically to use spreadsheets.

When the iPhone first came out, it represented a giant improvement over existing mobile phones, but also gave you a computer in your pocket. Combined with mobile location tracking, the iPhone defined how smartphones work, which eventually led to location tracking services like ride-sharing services.

The Apple Watch first appeared with no specific purpose in mind, but the latest Stanford study indicates that the Apple Watch does a decent job detecting heart abnormalities. To detect this usually requires expensive equipment at a doctor’s office, but the Apple Watch is bringing this capability to the masses. That makes real-time health monitoring the real killer app for wearable computers.

If you’re concerned about your health, then the Apple Watch is for you. For people who still refuse to buy and use a wearable computer like the Apple Watch, they’re essentially telling the world that they either can’t afford a wearable computer or they don’t think their life is worth a few hundred dollars.

The next step for wearable computers will be health enhancement. That can come with smart glasses that enhance a user’s vision while also tracking health conditions at the same time. Real-time health monitoring and enhancement is the ultimate goal of wearable computers.

Apple’s Augmented Reality Smart Glasses Project

Posted on March 7, 2019 by admin Posted in Business, Hardware, User Interface Leave a comment

What it is: Apple filed more patents for smart glass wearable computers.

Two years ago, Apple acquired an eye-tracking company called SensoMotoric Instruments. The company’s Eye Tracking Glasses were capable of recording a person’s natural gaze behavior in real-time and in real world situations with a sampling rate up to 120Hz. A YouTube video that has since been removed showed how an athlete could wear such smart glasses to evaluate their performance.

Now Apple has recently filed patents for cooling smart glasses by blowing air to cool the user’s head, making the smart glasses more comfortable to wear for long periods of time.

Perhaps one of the more interesting patent filings is eye tracking to monitor the distance between the lenses and the display assembly and the user’s eyes. This could detect the relative motion of the headset to the eyes to produce a more accurate visual experience when in motion. That’s likely where SensoMotoric Instrument’s eye-tracking technology is being used.

If you want to see the future of Apple, simply look at which companies they’ve acquired. When Apple acquired Metaio’s augmented reality technology, it was obvious they would eventually release augmented reality technology, which later appeared as ARKit.

While ARKit is limited to iOS devices, augmented reality is really suited for wearable smart glasses. Hence the future of ARKit is learning to develop apps for Apple’s smart glasses.

That requires learning the Swift programming language first, and ARKit second. When Apple releases smart glasses, they’ll likely expand ARKit’s capabilities to include eye-tracking. That means developers will soon be in demand to create smart glass apps as yet another spin-off from iOS like watchOS and tvOS.

If you want to profit from the future, you can’t go wrong learning to develop apps in ARKit.

To learn more about Apple’s smart glasses patents, click here.

Another Augmented Reality Patent by Apple

Posted on February 26, 2019 by admin Posted in Business, Hardware, User Interface Leave a comment

What it is: Apple filed another patent for augmented reality that hints of its future plans.

Augmented reality is already a part of iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad. While augmented reality hasn’t yet become commonly used like location tracking (for getting rides through services like Uber) on the iPhone or real-time health monitoring on the Apple Watch, augmented reality is coming in the form of smart glasses.

Apple’s latest patent highlights how augmented reality could track the location of interesting objects and transpose that information when you walk near it. For outdoor use, this could help you find directions while for indoor use, this could help you find the location of your iPhone or iPad.

Like most patents, this may never become part of a real product, but it shows what Apple is thinking about and where augmented reality will be heading. It will start with the iPhone and iPad and gradually when it becomes more useful, it will migrate to smart glasses. Apple will likely test the concepts for augmented reality on iOS devices. Then when the most practical purpose appears, Apple will introduce smart glasses.

What most companies are doing now is releasing smart glasses and then hoping people will find a use for them, which is backwards thinking. These companies should be thinking of what pressing problem smart glasses can solve and then build smart glasses optimized to solve that particular problem.

Augmented reality is a growing field and will only improve with each passing year. That means augmented reality will become commonplace soon but only when it can solve problems that can’t be solved easily with todays’ technology.

How to Fold a Smartphone

Posted on February 22, 2019 by admin Posted in Hardware, User Interface Leave a comment

What it is: Foldable smartphones are the future, but which way should they bend?

Samsung recently announced their Galaxy Fold smartphone which bends vertically down the middle from top to bottom and unfolds like a book.

While interesting, the Galaxy Fold is also expensive ($1,980) which will limit it to early adopters while Samsung improves on its design. However if you look at the above two pictures, you can see there are two ways to fold a smartphone.

Samsung Galaxy Fold bends vertically while Apple has filed patents for a smartphone that bends in half or in thirds, but bends horizontally. It may not seem like much of a big deal, but from a technical point of view, it makes a huge difference.

The crease where the phone bends will exhibit repeated stress from opening and bending over and over. That means that hinge is the single most likely point of failure where failure could range from outright breaking to simply affecting the visual quality of the screen in that hinge area.

That’s why a vertical bend (like the Samsung Galaxy Fold) may look good, but creates a large stress area from top to bottom. On the other hand, a horizontal bend mimics the old style flip phones and creates a much smaller crease.

Assuming both creases fail at the same rate, the vertical fold displays the largest point of failure while the horizontal fold displays a far smaller area of failure.

The more area that could fail, the more likely it will fail. That makes the vertical crease the least reliable option from an engineering point of view.

If a phone bends in thirds, that creates two areas of potential failure, which roughly doubles its chance of failure over a phone that bends in half. Therefore a phone that bends in half like a flip phone is probably the best design to minimize stress on the foldable screen.

The hardest part about a foldable screen is making sure the creased area displays images as sharp from day one over the lifetime of the phone, which is typically 2 – 4 years. If creases become noticeable over time, then the foldable phone becomes less valuable solely due to the screen deterioration.

Foldable screens are the future, but the technology must catch up to the point where a screen can bend multiple times over years without ever affecting the visual quality of the screen. When this happens, foldable phones will become the norm. Until then, large screen non-bendable phones will continue to dominate but fade away over time.

To learn more about Apple’s patent filings for foldable phones, click here.