Great evolution story. Also love seeing what can be achieved by stepping outside design lines, re. centred, symmetrical UIs. Makes me want an apple watch ;)
As an aside there's a screenshot in the article showing the Hidden Valley at Glen Coe, which happens to be one of my favourite short walks in Scotland.
A less happy aside of that aside is the house at the base of the valley. I used to look at it dreamily as we drove past, always closed up, nestled by itself in a remote nook between the mountains. What an extraordinary place it would be to live. The park for the hike was only a couple of hundred metres up the road. A few years later I recognised the house in a Louis Theroux doco, when he travelled there with its owner - TV personality Jimmy Saville. Wow. And then a few years later again, after I'd returned to Australia, it came out, posthumous, that Saville was one of the UK's most prolific child and sexual predators. Horrific stuff. The name and outline of the cottage structure can actually be seen at the top of the map in the screenshot.
The fact that there is no 1st party Apple made hiking and topography map on the Apple Watch is such a failure, not even on the most expensive “made for explorers” Watch Ultra. And things like gpx import is just a mere dream
Honestly, the less Apple made apps, the better for the ecosystem and the quality of the apps in general. Apple's recent "sherlocked" apps are not good quality at all, but they make it substantially more difficult for 3rd parties to compete with the now default offerings.
For others curious like I was, it seems he hired a cartographer to render essentially a set of huge, nice-looking, custom map images with details like hiking trails that Apple Maps doesn't have.
So unlike Apple Maps, which is dynamically rendered, it basically shows image tiles. It allows for a nicer-looking, more detailed map, but affects things like needing separate downloads for different zoom levels, rotation, updatability.
Apple Maps on WatchOS is pretty good but the usual routine is that I get on my bike with a route set and 3 minutes in the “are you working out?” screen takes over and I can’t see the maps without stopping to turn it off. Surely that screen should turn into a notification or silently record after some time without taking over the screen.
I’m surprised to hear people at Apple work on this because surely they must encounter this issue.
If this guys maps can somehow take the screen and hold it, I think he’s got a killer feature for me. Though I glanced at the App Store page and it wasn’t clear to me which features are subscription gated and which ones aren’t and I despise apps that won’t tell me till I’ve set everything up (it just feels so frustrating that it wasn’t clear ahead of time) so I’ll probably just endure and try to remember to start a workout manually so it won’t take over.
He really is such a committed and dedicated developer. This here is of course a perfect example—"So… I commissioned a custom map" aka hiring a cartographer—but it was really cool how he blew up with Widgetsmith because he put in the effort with Watchsmith before, and was basically the world's expert on widgets? Couldn't happen to a better guy.
Let's start by banning words like 'pediatric' instead, which directly reference children and are thus more related to pedophiles. We can just call people 'doctor/dentist for small people'.
We really can't afford to keep blacklisting words for reasons that have no basis in reality. We're gonna run out of words.
(parent edited their comment - the suggestion was that "pedometer" is a bad name because of the first four letters being reminiscent of pedophiles and Epstein)
As an aside there's a screenshot in the article showing the Hidden Valley at Glen Coe, which happens to be one of my favourite short walks in Scotland.
A less happy aside of that aside is the house at the base of the valley. I used to look at it dreamily as we drove past, always closed up, nestled by itself in a remote nook between the mountains. What an extraordinary place it would be to live. The park for the hike was only a couple of hundred metres up the road. A few years later I recognised the house in a Louis Theroux doco, when he travelled there with its owner - TV personality Jimmy Saville. Wow. And then a few years later again, after I'd returned to Australia, it came out, posthumous, that Saville was one of the UK's most prolific child and sexual predators. Horrific stuff. The name and outline of the cottage structure can actually be seen at the top of the map in the screenshot.
It’s a lifestyle device after all but still
So unlike Apple Maps, which is dynamically rendered, it basically shows image tiles. It allows for a nicer-looking, more detailed map, but affects things like needing separate downloads for different zoom levels, rotation, updatability.
I’m surprised to hear people at Apple work on this because surely they must encounter this issue.
If this guys maps can somehow take the screen and hold it, I think he’s got a killer feature for me. Though I glanced at the App Store page and it wasn’t clear to me which features are subscription gated and which ones aren’t and I despise apps that won’t tell me till I’ve set everything up (it just feels so frustrating that it wasn’t clear ahead of time) so I’ll probably just endure and try to remember to start a workout manually so it won’t take over.
(parent edited their comment - the suggestion was that "pedometer" is a bad name because of the first four letters being reminiscent of pedophiles and Epstein)