Apple : Could Apple's latest hire help iWatch become king of fitness wearables? |
| Could Apple's latest hire help iWatch become king of fitness wearables? Posted:  Apple has made yet another key hire in the fitness wearable realm ahead of the rumoured iWatch launch this autumn. The Cupertino firm has acquired the services of Alex Hsieh, formerly of Atlas Wearables, who has experience of getting an independently-built, unique fitness tracker off the ground. Hsieh was chief software engineer for the Indigogo-funded Atlas tracker, which not only monitors basic metrics like speed, calories, heart rate and time, but also the type of activity and quality of your workout. It can identify your activity and also counts reps and sets and offers live feedback on the display, arguably making it a cut above the likes of the Jawbone UP and Nike FuelBand. Health kickWith the Apple iWatch expected to be a health-focused device boasting 10 or more biometric sensors, the Hsieh hire could prove vital in harnessing data and displaying it on the device or via HealthKit in iOS 8. Whether Hsieh has arrived at Apple in time to have any considerable impact on the iWatch at launch is debatable, but the Atlas man is the latest in a long line of health and fitness focussed hires at Apple. The firm has picked up former Nike designer Ben Shaffer, who reportedly played a key role in the development of the Fuelband, as well as long-time Nike fitness advisor Jay Blahnik. Apple has also picked up a gaggle of medical experts and even a sleep guru over the course of the last year. The firm has also reportedly called on star athletes like LA Lakers NBA star Kobe Bryant to test out the device in a professional training environment. The Apple iWatch is expected to be unveiled at a special event in October with a release prior to the holiday season. |
| In Depth: MacOS through the ages: a visual guide Posted:  MacOS through the ages: early yearsWhen you're busy making photo books in iPhoto, browsing the web in Safari, or preparing rich, beautifully laid-out documents in Pages, it's easy to forget about the operating system that powers your Mac. It's just… there, isn't it? It's such a fundamental part of your Mac that lots of people understandably struggle to even really know what an operating system is. Without one, though, your Mac would just be a pretty but utterly useless collection of metal, plastic and silicates, so let's take a moment to honour the Mac's operating system. This, after all, is the soul of the Mac. Broadly speaking, these days it's the only thing that differentiates a Mac from a PC – at least at the level of the individual components that make it tick – and makes it special. There are two great ages of the Mac OS; the first started with the introduction of the original Macintosh a full 30 years ago, and the second started in 2001 when OS X made its formal debut. Mac OS X – the Roman numeral being pronounced 'ten', of course – was a much bigger change from Mac OS 9 than the simple version number increment might suggest. It might be for you that what follows is a lovely warm hug of nostalgia as you remember icons and quirks of the OS that have disappeared, but if you're new to the Mac, enjoy watching the evolution of the operating system you're using today... Macintosh System SoftwareIntroduced: January 1984
30 years ago, Apple introduced the world to the graphical user interface – and the world loved it. No, Apple was not the first to make a GUI, and no, the Mac OS wasn't even Apple's first GUI. But it was this approach – using metaphor and pictures to make it easier and more intuitive to use a computer compared to having to remember and accurately type lines of code to achieve anything – that stuck, and influenced every personal computer that came after it. It's only now that we're beginning to get a glimpse of a computing system that's not a direct descendent of the Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointers paradigm introduced with System 1 – with touch-based, personal devices such as the iPhone, and then possibly with wearable devices such as Google Glass and immersive platforms such as the Oculus Rift. System Software 0.7Introduced: January 1986
System Software 5Introduced: October 1987
System Software 7Introduced: May 1991
System Software 7.5Introduced: September 1994
System 7.5 added a lot of features to the Mac's operating system – many by the simple expedient of Apple purchasing shareware apps and integrating them into the OS. It had taken 12 years, for example, before there was a clock in the menu bar – previously a control panel called SuperClock. Stickies, the ability to collapse a window down to just its title bar, a hierarchical Apple menu system, and even the app for managing system extensions were all third-party acquisitions, too. Plus, the bundling of MacTCP meant that, for the first time, a Mac could connect to the internet out of the box. System 7.5.5, the final version of System 7.5, was the last version of the Mac operating system to run on Macs with the original 68K processors – and it was the last version to be called 'System Software'. MacOS through the ages: OS yearsMac OS 8Introduced: July 1997
Mac OS 9Introduced: October 1999
The end of the classic Mac OS versions. Indeed, when OS X was introduced, an emulated version OS 9 was included, literally called 'classic' mode. Although it was completely different technically and aesthetically to the OS that was to succeed it, its influence on the Mac OS's set of features is clear; OS 9 introduced a central Software Update engine and the concept of a password Keychain as well as a lot of technical frameworks we still use today. The great-grandfather of iCloud, iTools, also made its debut in OS 9. Although it looks old-fashioned to us these days, it isn't functionally that much different to OS X. And do you remember Sherlock? It was an app for searching the web and your hard disk, and it gave rise to the term 'Sherlocked', used to describe a situation where Apple is accused of just copying a third-party app (Karelia Software's Watson in this case) without payment. Mac OS X 10.1Introduced: September 2001
Mac OS X 10.2Introduced: August 2002
With the introduction of 10.2, it was now accepted that running OS X as your main operating system was indeed realistic. While 10.0 (Cheetah) was missing many features and was slow, and 10.1 (Puma) added features but was still slow, 10.2, for the first time was both fast enough and feature-complete enough for many folks to adopt it full-time. One fun aside: although it was common to have code names for operating systems especially, they were usually for internal use only. But with 10.2, its 'Jaguar' (or 'Jagwire', if you were Steve Jobs) code name leaked out ahead of the OS, and Apple decided to embrace it. Since then, we've know each OS iteration increasingly more by its code name than by its version number – even though now we've switched from big cat names to places in California with Mavericks. Mac OS X 10.3Introduced: October 2003
Mac OS X 10.4Introduced: April 2005
Mac OS X 10.5Introduced: October 2007
Mac OS X 10.6Introduced: August 2009
Mac OS X 10.7Introduced: July 2011
OS X 10.8Introduced: July 2012 OS X 10.9Introduced: October 2013
OS X 10.10Introduced: June 2014
OS X's interface is now a strange combination of stark minimalism, subtle colour effects and cartoonish icons.
|
| You are subscribed to email updates from TechRadar: All latest Apple news feeds To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
No comments:
Post a Comment