Apple Watch is a personal device. Everyone uses it differently. On the surface, it seemed I could easily replace the Apple Watch with a cheaper, more minimalistic device and get the same outcome. But Apple's blend of features and excellent design make that a lot harder to pull off than I imagined.
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Apple Watch isn't just a simple fitness tracker, but it unlocks your computer, controls your home, finds your phone, acts as a flashlight, and so much more.
“Visual representation of information is attractive and interesting,” says Gunjan Agrawal, co-founder of Logic Roots, a hands-on learning games provider. And he’s correct. Reading plain text about a gold leaf or a pith ball electroscope detecting electrical charges isn’t nearly as thrilling as watching a video on how each actually works. Similarly, walking into an animated lab and creating a bottle organ to understand the characteristics of sound puts mere information into a real- life context, making it both relevant and intriguing for the learner.
“Motivation to learn has been one of the greatest challenges of traditional classroom teaching. Large amounts of plain text no longer attract kids today, who are growing up in an interactive and inter- connected world,” adds Agrawal. While setting up Logic Roots in 2012 with his partner Kunal Gandhi, the duo realised that three basic components need to be integrated to maintain a learner’s enthusiasm and curiosity. “Education needs to have a social angle, a story and variety,” explains Agrawal. Keeping this in mind, Logic Roots became one of the first few providers of game-based learning tools, using board and card games to teach math. This process of gamification or the application of game mechanics of fun, collaboration, competition and rewards in non-game situations has since become one of the focal points of several digital education platforms. Interactive experiments, quizzes and virtual application of concepts are all relevant to teaching because they keep facts and figures from becoming a barrage of monotonous black and white text.
Though Li only has three years of formal education and speaks colloquial Cantonese, not Mandarin, she quickly picked up the handwriting input tool on her iPad with the help of her granddaughter, and now uses it to search for articles and follow news.
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But this method can have its own difficulties, even for those who are literate, according to Elisa Oreglia, assistant professor of global digital cultures at King’s College London. [...] That is where speech recognition technology can make a difference, with apps like Xunfei’s iFLY able to recognise and transcribe several of China’s major dialects, in addition to Mandarin.
StarWalk 7, by Vito Technology, is the general astronomy app I use most often to find things in the night sky. It runs on the iPhone and iPad; this app and many others are available for Android devices, as well.
When you start StarWalk7, it obtains your location, date and time, and then displays the current sky at your location. The default setting will display constellations as art images with the constellations’ names. It will also display the locations of the sun, moon and planets. As you zoom in, it will display more objects, along with many of their names.
There’s probably never going to be a MacBook with a touchscreen. But you can get somewhat close with an iPad Pro connected to a Brydge 12.9 Series II.
This means that NetNewsWire does not have to be designed as if it’s anybody’s only source of news. And it doesn’t have to be designed to please the maximum number of people.
My thinking, instead, is to make it fit into an ecosystem: it’s just one of a number of sources, and not even the only RSS reader.
Removing bezels isn’t just about aesthetics. Yes, bezel-less screens look fantastic, but that’s only a piece of the puzzle. The real advantages lie in the fact that, suddenly, companies can fit bigger screens into the existing form factors we have now.
I hope Apple can tempt me with the Apple Watch by having an even cheaper version next week.
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Thanks for reading.