Apple watch

The Apple Watch Face That Counts Down to Your Death Kyle Vanhemert, Wired March 17, 2015 The Apple Watch Face That Counts Down to Your Death Here’s one way the Apple Watch could help you live a fuller life: by counting down the seconds until you die. While Tim Cook was showing off the foot-tapping Mickey Mouse watch face at Apple’s recent event, digital design group Rehabstudio was fleshing out its own vision of time-keeping on the device. The app, Life Clock, estimates how much time you have left on this rock, adding minutes for healthful activity and subtracting them when you indulge in bad habits. You can think of it as a mortality forecaster, or an activity tracker in reverse—instead of tabulating what you did in the past, it extrapolates what your behavior means for your future. More broadly, it’s a reminder that there are a great many ways to represent time, and with a powerful, sensor-laden wrist computer, it’s worth exploring them. Playing With Time Timekeeping is one of the tent pole features of the Apple Watch. Jony Ive has bragged about how deeply his team researched the history of horology while developing the device. Apple says there will be nine official faces available when the watch launches next month. They’ll be customizable to a remarkable degree, at least by Apple standards, allowing users to add and subtract detail. On some faces, watch owners will be able to arrange widgets for things like weather, activity, and moon phase. Five of the designs are analog, four are digital, but none are especially radical in the way they approach time. READ: Can You Hypnotize a Shark? Rehabstudio, which does fancy digital marketing work for clients like Red Bull and Ace Hotel, started pondering the concept of time about the time the Apple Watch was unveiled last fall. “We saw an opportunity,” says partner Tom Le Bree. “We thought, ‘OK, if time is really a human construct, how can we play with it?’” image That question got Le Bree thinking about a discussion he’d had with a professor from the University of Warwick, one of Europe’s leading schools for behavioral economics. Specifically, a concept called temporal discounting. “In essence, the idea is we discount the future in favor of the present,” Le Bree says. “Tomorrow, I’m the guy that goes to the gym, quits smoking, and stops eating fatty foods. But today I’m going to have one last cigarette.” That concept became the kernel for Life Clock. The basic idea: By reminding us of the future, a watch face could help us make healthier decisions in the present. Rehabstudio fleshed out the concept over the course of a week at a company hackathon, using life expectancy data from a handful of sources. It’s an imprecise science, Le Bree admits, though that’s sort of beside the point. If it helps stave off that cigarette, it’s working. READ: Fat? Sick? Blame Your Grandparents’ Bad Habits But don’t start counting down the days until you can start counting down your days just yet. Apple hasn’t yet said if it will allow owners to use third party faces with the watch. There’s no mention of them in the developer tools Apple’s released for the device. For now, Rehabstudio plans to continue working on the project, and it’s considering a version for Android Wear, but it’s possible Apple’s rules could preclude the vision in its original form. Life Clock could exist as an app, but it wouldn’t be the same. Your mortality isn’t quite as powerful when it’s just another icon on your home screen. Other Alternatives Still, Life Clock is compelling if only as a concept. It challenges us to rethink what it means to interact with time. And it’s just one possibility for how we might reframe time on these sorts of devices. Pebble’s new watch software recasts time as an interaction metaphor, using it to organize functionality throughout the day. Le Bree points to Slow Watches, a company that makes time pieces with only an hour hand, encouraging a less hurried relationship with time. Durr, a wearable made by a pair of designers from Norway, doesn’t really have a face at all. Instead, its just a colorful plastic disc that vibrates every five minutes—a haptic metronome designed to highlight the disconnect between time as it passes on a clock and time as you actually perceive it. READ: An Online Game That’ll Help You Pay Off Your Student Debt With smart watches, there’s no reason we shouldn’t dabble with these sorts of alternatives. Time, after all, is a singular resource. “It’s one of the few things you can’t purchase and can’t get back,” Le Bree says. “It’s the same for everybody. And we’ve only scratched the surface of how you can use it as a motivator.” image More from Wired * Hunters Find a Frozen 10,000-Year-Old Baby Woolly Rhino * 12 Tales of Getting It On In the Digital Age * This Hellish Underground Fire Has Burned for 100 Years

RIP Internet Explorer (1995-2015). We Knew Ye All Too Well Dan Tynan Dan TynanTech ColumnistMarch 17, 2015 Microsoft Internet Explorer, a browser familiar to many and loved by few, passed away today after a long illness. It was 19 years old. Bowing to the inevitable, Microsoft admitted today that it had decided to remove IE from life support. (IE will, however, continue to receive tech support through at least 2016.) IE is survived by Windows, Office, and the Microsoft Mouse. RIP Internet Explorer (1995-2015). We Knew Ye All Too Well Photo: YouTube At its height, Internet Explorer — known unaffectionately as IE — dominated the Internet like no other software, accounting for 95 percent of all website visits. In recent times, however, IE’s popularity waned, thanks to the rise of powerful rivals and a long string of security mishaps. But even at the time of IE’s death, one in four Web surfers were using it as their browser of choice. Microsoft marketing chief Chris Capossela says it was a heart-wrenching decision for all concerned. “Many of us here on the Redmond campus loved IE. Yes, he was a cad and a scoundrel and a bit of a loose cannon, and the end got mighty ugly, but he was one of me own kind,” Capossela said, inexplicably breaking into a heavy Irish brogue.* *This didn’t actually happen. The early years Internet Explorer 1.0 started life as a rebranded version of Spyglass Mosaic, itself based loosely on a browser developed by Marc Andreessen when he worked at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. It emerged into the world on Aug. 16, 1995. By then, Andreessen already had his own commercial version of NCSA Mosaic, called Netscape. Like brothers separated at birth, the two browsers became intense rivals over the next four years. When Netscape introduced JavaScript, Microsoft countered with Cascading Style Sheets. Both companies continually upped the ante, creating the most intense head-to-head competition ever seen in the technology world. Then matters threatened to turn violent. Microsoft CEO Bill Gates’s vow to “crush” Netscape formed a key piece of evidence in the Department of Justice’s 1998 antitrust suit against Microsoft. Fearing for its life, Netscape chose to enter the witness protection program, becoming part of AOL in 1999. It has not been seen since. Rise and fall For years, IE’s domination of the browser market remained unchallenged, and the pace of browser innovation ground to a halt. But IE’s meteoric rise was matched by an equally precipitous fall. In 2004, a new rival emerged: Firefox. Based on code created by the old Netscape team, it was the first browser to pose a credible threat to IE. Four years later, Google released Chrome, another nimble alternative for Web surfers. Both free browsers slowly began to eat away at IE’s market share. Then the security scandals hit. In 2006, researchers identified hundreds of vulnerabilities that could allow rogue websites to steal information or take control of users’ computers. PC World magazine named IE 6 the eighth-worst product of all time and “the least secure software on the planet.” In 2008, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) recommended turning off the ActiveX controls inside IE because of security concerns. In August 2014, CERT told users to ditch IE entirely until it was patched. image Photo: ZDNet There were regulatory battles as well. To comply with a European Union antitrust ruling, Microsoft was forced to release a version of Windows without IE in June 2009. Those loading Windows 7 were able to choose from among a dozen browser alternatives. The browser ballot program concluded last December. The final days By this time, IE had plummeted from a commanding lead to a distant second or third place in the browser market, lagging well behind Chrome in nearly every survey. Even reports showing that IE 10 was actually more secure than its browser rivals could not forestall the inevitable. If not universally mourned, IE will be long remembered for its many contributions to browser technology as well as for bringing Web surfing to the masses. In lieu of flowers, Microsoft requests well-wishers to please support Project Spartan, the new and allegedly much-improved browser set to debut in Windows 10 later this year. Send sympathy cards and bequests to Dan Tynan here: ModFamily1@yahoo.com