By Jason Snell

February 9, 2017 10:06 AM PT

Vacation with the Apple Watch Series 2

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

I haven’t written a lot about the Apple Watch Series 2, despite having worn it for the past few months. But when I went on vacation in January, I began to appreciate the Apple Watch even more.

If you haven’t heard, Hawaii is sunny. (Except when it’s raining, but wait a little while and that’ll pass.) I spent the better part of the week walking around in bright sunlight wearing sunglasses. At home I noticed that the Series 2 Apple Watch was brighter (Apple says twice as bright!) as my original Apple Watch, but the real validation came when I was on vacation: Despite my sunglasses and the bright light, I never had a problem reading my Apple Watch at any point. That’s not something I could say about the original Apple Watch.

Most of the time, my iPhone is within reach—either it’s in my pocket, on my desk, or a few strides away. But on vacation, there were numerous instances where my phone wasn’t really accessible. We went to a lot of beaches, and generally our stuff would be packed away in a backpack and not particularly accessible, especially if we were wet or covered in sand.

But that Apple Watch was on my wrist, and as a result, I was able to answer calls and reply to texts (we had eight people and three cars, so there was a lot of coordinating going on) without needing to dig my phone out of the bag. It was pretty great. I realize that some people will view this as a negative—didn’t I want to be entirely cut off from communication when I was on the beach?—but honestly, I didn’t mind. I was more relieved to know that I could respond quickly to someone without checking my phone. It helped, rather than hindered, my relaxation.

When I’m asked about the waterproofing features of the Series 2, my stock response has been “I don’t swim.” Not that I can’t swim, but I generally don’t. In Hawaii, however, that’s an entirely different story. I kept my watch on when we walked the beaches, when I went in the water, and yes, even when we were swimming and snorkeling. And when I came back home, I could take off my watch and show the resulting tan line to prove that, yes, I had gotten some sun.

Finally, the fitness and GPS features came in handy, too. We spent a lot of time hiking, paddling, and otherwise actively exploring the island during the week. I used the activity app on the watch to track those outings, which also generated geotagged maps I could review later to see where we’d gone. (Think of it as a digital souvenir of the trip.) We were staying a short but steep hike away from a secluded beach, and by using my Apple Watch I was able to give the rest of our party an accurate assessment of both the distance and time it took for us to get down to the beach.

I’ve woven the features of the Apple Watch into my regular life over the last couple of years. Every now and then I realize I should probably try a new app or change my notification settings, but I’ve largely settled into a comfortable relationship with the device. A week in a different location gave me a much better perspective on how I use it and what it offers. But that’s the great thing about vacation, isn’t it? It lets you step outside your life and alter your perspective a little bit.

By Jason Snell

February 8, 2017 1:08 PM PT

Easy group scheduling is only a Doodle away

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

Doodle is a web-based scheduling tool that I use all the time, and the other day I was shocked to realize that I’ve only mentioned it once on Six Colors. Let me rectify that.

Doodle is the tool I use to schedule all of my podcasts and meetings. At its simplest, it’s a free tool that lets you quickly find common times between disparate groups of people. I log into Doodle, create a new event, and pick a bunch of dates and times when I’m available. At the end of the process, I’m provided with two URLs—one that lets me administer my poll, and another that I send to everyone I want to participate in the poll.

Everyone I’m inviting to my meeting or podcast gets that second link, and clicks through to see all of the date and time options. (There’s a time-zone feature that automatically converts all times to local time—I wish it was on by default, because sometimes I forget to check the box.) My potential participants fill out their availability, and I’m sent a notification (via email or, once I installed the Doodle iOS app, on my phone) that they’ve entered their information.

Once everyone’s been heard from, I visit the administration link—or just log in to Doodle, where it shows me my recent items—and see the results. The site automatically highlights any events where everyone has answered in the affirmative. If there aren’t any, then I have to make the difficult decision about who’ll make it and who will be left on the outside looking in. Once I select a time, I can close the poll and notify my attendees about the final time.

Doodle has a bunch of other features that make it a more flexible scheduling tool than you’d think. I frequently make use of the “if need be” scheduling option, which lets people indicate that they can make a time but would rather avoid it if they could, which is surprisingly useful when no meeting time is perfect.

You can also limit the number participants in a specific slot, and limit a person to a single option. Turn both of those options on and you’ve got a sign-up service for appointments—if I were teaching a college class, I’d consider using Doodle for office-hours sign-ups, for instance.

Doodle is free with basic features, including some calendar integration. For $39/year, you get an ad-free version with more data collection and encryption. For $69/year and up, there’s a team version with a bunch of other benefits. It has made the job of scheduling podcasts and nonprofit board meetings—both of which involve wrangling a whole bunch of people with very busy schedules—vastly easier for me.

By Dan Moren

February 8, 2017 7:18 AM PT

Go Play: Stagehand

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

Sorry, I almost couldn’t drag myself away from my iPhone to write this post. Stagehand is a new game from Big Bucket’s Matt Comi and Neven Mrgan¹, who previously brought you Space Age and The Incident. The latter’s hero, Frank Solway, returns in Stagehand, which Big Bucket describes as a “reverse platform.” That is, in this game, instead of controlling Frank, you control the ground he’s running on, raising and lowering the platforms as your hero continues his endless quest to collect coins, which inevitably ends with a faceplant into a wall.

You might call Stagehand an endless runner–the game it reminds me the most of is perhaps the classic Tiny Wings, in that it features a procedurally different map that changes on every playthrough.

It took me several tries before I wrapped my brain around the game’s mechanics, so if it seems tough at first, don’t give up. (Tip: remember, don’t worry about chasms which would be obstacles in other games–Frank will hurdle them on his own.) Once I got with the program, though, I found myself itching for another try every time, knowing that I could do better. As you hit certain scores, you’ll unlock additional characters to play as–and, of course, you’ll be able to compare yourself to your friends, and really, what other reason do you need?

I love many of the little cues of this game, including the haptic feedback on iPhone 7, the can’t-get-it-out-of-your-head score by Mrgan’s Panic colleague Cabel Sasser, and, of course, the ability to share a GIF of your particularly ignominious ends. Here’s just one of my many:

Stagehand is $1.99 and well worth every penny.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Dan Moren

February 7, 2017 6:04 AM PT

Last updated July 27, 2020

Automate This: Red alert, shields up!

Note: This story has not been updated since 2020.

Look, we’re all nerds here, right? Maybe some of you have never watched a single episode of Star Trek, but I sincerely doubt that’s the case for the majority of you folks. Nothing to be ashamed of!

When I first got my Amazon Echo last year, I thought I’d try my hand at a simple task using IFTTT: creating a Red Alert effect. It turned out to be pretty easy to create an Alexa keyword to turn my lights red but it was hardly close enough. For one thing, there was the whole having to say “trigger red alert” to get IFTTT to respond–booo. For another, it was just too darn quiet. What’s a red alert without a klaxon going off in your ears? Just makes you feel like you’re in a photographer’s darkroom.

Future experimentation took me down some cul-de-sacs: using the Yonomi app, I could instead say “turn on red alert” and get the lights to turn red and blink, but there was also quite a delay. I even briefly dallied with trying to create a simple skill for the Echo that would play the red alert sound, but it proved to be slightly too complicated for the time I was willing to invest–just a bit too much in the way of programming, and my skills in that department are sorely rusty.

But the other day, as I was mucking around with the Google Home for some articles I’m writing elsewhere, I discovered that the Home’s IFTTT integration is wayyyy superior to the Echo’s. Not only does it allow you to simply define a phrase–any phrase!–to trigger a command, but it also provides options for passing variables, including a string, a number, and both.

Naturally, this reignited my interest, and after an hour or so, I finally struck gold. Now witness the power of this fully armed and operational nerdery!

Wow. I know. It’s pretty nerdy. But I bet a few of you out there are wondering: how can I bring that nerdery home? Well, friends, I’m here to tell you how I accomplished it. All you need is a slightly ridiculous amount of home automation equipment. To wit:

Equipment

• A Google Home (or an Amazon Echo or Echo Dot, though it will have some limitations)
• A Philips Hue White and Color Starter Set
• A Harmony Hub (you don’t even need the one with remote, though if you’re going to use it for actual home entertainment stuff, I would get one)
• A Sonos speaker (or speakers): I used two Play:1s, but the Play:3, Play:5, and even Playbar should all work fine.

You’ll also need to have an IFTTT account, and have configured the Home/Echo and Harmony hub to work with it.

Continue reading “Automate This: Red alert, shields up!”…

By Jason Snell

February 2, 2017 4:08 PM PT

Apple, ARM, and the coming of the hybrid Mac

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

There’s been a lot of debate about whether Apple would ditch Intel processors and start making Macs with ARM processors like the ones that power the iPhone and iPad. Those discussions have generally been about a binary choice between Intel and ARM, even after the new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar muddied the waters substantially.

Now here comes a new report by Mark Gurman and Ian King at Bloomberg that suggests the new MacBook Pro could be a bigger clue to the future of the Mac than previously expected. It’s an approach that blows away the binary choice of Intel-versus-ARM and potentially leads the Mac down a product design path that’s quintessentially Apple.

Like every Mac released since 2006, the MacBook Pro with Touch Bar is powered by an Intel-built processor. But the Touch Bar, Touch ID sensor, and front-facing camera on the MacBook Pro are operated by the T1 processor, an Apple-designed ARM processor in the lineage of the chips that power the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Apple TV. It’s being controlled by an embedded variant of watchOS.

According to Bloomberg, this hybrid approach to building a laptop may be just the beginning:

Apple engineers are planning to offload the Mac’s low-power mode, a feature marketed as “Power Nap,” to the next-generation ARM-based chip. This function allows Mac laptops to retrieve e-mails, install software updates, and synchronize calendar appointments with the display shut and not in use. The feature currently uses little battery life while run on the Intel chip, but the move to ARM would conserve even more power… by connecting to other parts of a Mac’s system, including storage and wireless components, in order to take on the additional responsibilities.

Intel processors have a lot of advantages. They’re built for traditional PC operating systems like the Mac and Windows, and the tasks that big desktop (and laptop) computers work on. The entire Mac software base is compiled for them. The slowest Intel processors Apple uses in the slowest Macs are about as fast as the fastest Apple processors used in Apple’s most advanced iOS devices. Building an ARM-based processor that could power a high-end iMac¹ is probably something Apple could accomplish, but it might not happen anytime soon—and making such a processor might not be a priority for Apple’s development road map.

This report suggests that Apple may instead be investigating the advantages of a hybrid computer, one that can harness the power of the standard Intel processors that every PC maker uses, but combine it with the unique characteristics of Apple’s own ARM processors. You could argue that since 2006, Apple has only been able to differentiate the Mac from the PC based on software and industrial design. If the Mac evolves into a product that’s a combination of Intel and Apple-designed ARM processors, coordinated by Apple’s operating system, that makes the Mac unique—and potentially gives it some major advantages over other PCs.

The strength of the A-series chips found in the iPhone and iPad is that they are incredibly power efficient, optimized for battery-operated devices, while also providing remarkable graphics and processor performance. If you were to list Mac functions that might be offloaded to an ARM processor, Power Nap would be a good place to start, especially if macOS were tuned to be more aggressive about putting the system to sleep.

What would an ARM-Intel hybrid Mac look like? Would whole segments of the operating system run on the ARM processor, allowing the more power-hungry Intel chip to be put to sleep except when it was absolutely needed? There are a bunch of big questions here, most notably the identity of the code that would run on the ARM processor and where it came from. Would Mac apps include extensions or plug-ins that would be designated to run on ARM? Would Mac apps provide two separate sets of program binaries so that the system could switch them between processor architectures at will?

And then there’s the question of what the change would mean for the specs of Apple’s future laptops. Presumably the value of doing all this work would be to create a MacBook or MacBook Pro with vastly improved battery life, because theoretically the more work gets shifted to the power-efficient ARM processor, the more power efficient the entire system gets. If done right, it could give Mac laptops a huge advantage over ones that run Windows—and it would be an advantage that would be much more difficult for competitors to overcome.

(This might also mean that users who truly take advantage of the power of the Intel processors—video editors might be a good example—might continue to find that Apple’s battery-life breakthroughs don’t seem to actually improve battery life for them, because most battery-life improvements have to do with being more power efficient when the computer is idle or doing non-taxing work.)

It’s a weird idea, but I can see the appeal. And this approach allows Apple to dip its toe in the water, experimenting with ARM on the Mac without going all-out and releasing a line of entirely ARM-based Macs. If all goes well, though, it’s hard not to imagine that Apple would eventually do away with the Intel processors altogether… but a hybrid approach would allow that shift to happen over years, rather than all at once.

As for the near future, well, this seems to be the answer to the question, “If Apple’s going to embed a separate processor and operating system in every MacBook Pro, what if they were capable of doing more than just running the Touch Bar?” If this report is accurate, that’s exactly what we’ll see. Maybe the Mac’s future is weirder than we’ve previously imagined.

By Dan Moren

February 2, 2017 11:49 AM PT

Plex enables voice control of media via Alexa

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

Even though I’ve been waiting for the much-anticipated Sonos-Alexa integration, it hadn’t occurred to me that I could be using my Amazon Echo in conjunction with other media. So today’s announcement by Plex that it was rolling out an Alexa skill allowing control of your media library took me by surprise. So I fired it up and quickly ran it through its paces. The verdict? Definitely shows some promise–though it’s hampered by a few limitations, not all of which are under Plex’s control.

The Plex skill is definitely one of the more complex third-party features I’ve used. First you have to enable it, then log in to your Plex account, then authorize Alexa to access your Plex account. But wait, there’s more! After that, you have to set both your default server and player. The latter was where I ran into my first hiccup: I intended to set my Apple TV as the default player, but at first it wasn’t detected–presumably because the set-top box was asleep. But eventually after waking it up and opening the Plex app (and opening the Plex app on my iPhone and on the web), I was finally able to set the Apple TV as my default player.¹

Once the setup’s done, there are actually quite a few commands available in the skill. You can have Plex play back a specific movie, album, or TV episode. You can ask what’s in your On Deck listing (which is Plex’s version of the Up Next feature that Apple added in its TV app), what you recently added to your library, or what you left off watching. You can even have Plex recommend what to watch or listen to next, complete with slightly snarky commentary–when I turned down listening to a new song, it then suggested I instead go with an old favorite which it commented I had listened to a lot. It wasn’t wrong.

There were a couple minor glitches, though. For example, the Plex skill didn’t understand when I asked it to “play the newest episode” of a show (or “play the latest episode”), in both cases saying it couldn’t find the first episode of that show. When I did get to play the newest episode of a show–by simply telling it to play the show–I ran into a weird behavior where the audio started playing even as the Apple TV was still displaying the screensaver. (Not sure if that one was Apple or Plex’s fault, frankly.)

As cool as that feature is, there are some drawbacks, some of which have been long predicted for this kind of interface. For example, it took a couple tries to get Alexa to successfully pause the video on Plex, since it seemed to have a tough time hearing me over the audio from the TV. ²

And, of course, the Plex skill is somewhat limited because it talks directly to the Plex app; there’s no control of hardware. Once you have the TV and media player turned on, it’s fine, but you have to get to that point first.

But despite all that, there’s a lot of promise here because it combines two features we’ve seen independently: ubiquitous voice control and voice control of media playback. My biggest problem with voice control of the Apple TV is that I don’t usually use the bundled remote, which makes its Siri functionality a non-starter. I do often use the Echo to turn on my Apple TV while I’m doing something else, like preparing dinner, so being able to now use that to furthermore start playing a show is a nice improvement.³ Being able to simply ask Alexa to play something and not having to fumble around and look for a tiny slab of glass and metal is a huge plus. Apple should take a page out of this playbook for future versions of the Apple TV.

One of the other major advantages that the Plex skill brings is the ability to address multiple players. For example, I can tell it to play a certain show on my iPhone, or on my Apple TV, or in any other Plex app I currently have running.⁴ I can see that potentially being a handy feature for households that share an Echo but have multiple screens. It also seems like it might be a beneficial thing for young kids who haven’t quite mastered the art of remotes yet.

Overall, the Alexa-Plex integration seems like a winner. Really, my biggest regret is that I’ve moved so much of my media consumption away from Plex of late, relying instead on the Apple TV’s other apps like Netflix, Hulu, and the network-specific offerings. Because now that I have the ability to cue up some of my TV via voice, I want to be able to do that everywhere.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]