Four short links: 3 March 2015

Wearable Warning, Time Series Data, App Cards, and Secure Comms

  1. You Guys Realize the Apple Watch is Going to Flop, Right? — leaving aside the “guys” assumption of its readers, you can take this either as a list of the challenges Apple will inevitably overcome or bypass when they release their watch, or (as intended) a list of the many reasons that it’s too damn soon for watches to be useful. The Apple Watch is Jonathan Ive’s new Newton. It’s a potentially promising form that’s being built about 10 years before Apple has the technology or infrastructure to pull it off in a meaningful way. As a result, the novel interactions that could have made the Apple watch a must-have device aren’t in the company’s launch product, nor are they on the immediate horizon. And all Apple can sell the public on is a few tweets and emails on their wrists—an attempt at a fashion statement that needs to be charged once or more a day.
  2. InfluxDB, Now With Tags and More UnicornsThe combination of these new features [tagging, and the use of tags in queries] makes InfluxDB not just a time series database, but also a database for time series discovery. It’s our solution for making the problem of dealing with hundreds of thousands or millions of time series tractable.
  3. The End of Apps as We Know ThemIt may be very likely that the primary interface for interacting with apps will not be the app itself. The app is primarily a publishing tool. The number one way people use your app is through this notification layer, or aggregated card stream. Not by opening the app itself. To which one grumpy O’Reilly editor replied, “cards are the new walled garden.”
  4. Signal 2.0Signal uses your existing phone number and address book. There are no separate logins, usernames, passwords, or PINs to manage or lose. We cannot hear your conversations or see your messages, and no one else can either. Everything in Signal is always end-to-end encrypted, and painstakingly engineered in order to keep your communication safe.
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