TechnoBB – Page 28

Creating and Managing Custom Watch Faces on Apple Watch

One of the best features of the Apple Watch and smartwatches in general, is the ability to completely customize the watch face. You’re no longer bound by the physical and unchangeable face of a normal watch. Now you can decide exactly what kinds of information you want to display on the watch, where it will be placed, and the general style of the watch face.

First we’ll start with the simplest task, which is switching between the stock watch faces that ship on the Apple Watch.

1. Bring up the current watch face, then press firmly (Force Touch) the screen to go to the Faces gallery.

2. Here you can see the default faces available to you can swap instantly. Swipe left or right to change the face and tap it to select it as the new watch face.

Now is the more fun part, creating your own customized watch face. You don’t have complete creativity as you cannot use your own images or fully control the placement of elements. You do get a huge number of options however, in terms of color, types of information to display, and the placement of those elements.

1. Bring up the current watch face, press firmly (Force Touch) on the screen and tap the Customize button on the bottom.

2. Swipe to the right until you find a blank face with ‘+’ New displayed. Tap this face and choose the template stock face you wish to customize.

3. Now bring up the watch face again, press firmly and tap Cuztomize again.

4. Anything now highlighted in green can be changed and customized by moving the Digital Crown.

5. Swipe left or right to see more options for customization, again move the Digital Crown to adjust these.

6. When you’re satisfied with the final result, tap the Digital Crown once, then tap the watch face to exit and save your custom watch face. It will also be saved and available with all customizations in the Faces gallery.

Finally if you create one too many custom faces or decide you don’t like one that’s been saved, you can delete custom faces too.

1. Bring up the watch face and press firmly to enter the Faces gallery.

2. Swipe to the face you wish to delete.

3. Swipe up and a trashcan icon will appear. Tap it to delete the face.

Now you should be able to find and set a watch face that suits your style and personality while also being functional.

The WristBoom Wearable Bluetooth Speaker

With the rise of wearable devices, along comes a fun little portable Bluetooth speaker, dubbed the WristBoom. It’s designed to be worn on the wrist just like a watch and features a surprisingly capable speaker that can work with any Bluetooth device. It’s a sort of big brother to the Bluetooth headsets that have been around for ears except with a much more powerful speaker. WristBoom is currently trying to achieve a crowd funded goal to support a full release at a price of $49.

In terms of technical specs, WristBoom features both a speaker and a microphone. It can connect to any Bluetooth capable phone and functions much like a Bluetooth headset. The difference here is that because the speaker is so much more powerful you can actually use it as a portable music player, speakerphone, etc. where you couldn’t on a standard headset or trying to rely on the weak speakers in many portable devices and phones.

The sound quality is reportedly quite good, even at high volumes. There is no noticeable distortion and the volume can be surprisingly loud which makes it a very usable speaker. It likely handily beats most portable small speaker devices in that department.

The biggest drawback is a complete lack of controls on the device which would have definitely increased price and complexity. Instead, you’ll have to manage everything from your phone from playback, to pausing, to selecting audio. You’ll need to keep that phone nearby as long as you want to interact with what’s being played on the phone or if you’re using it as a microphone.

The real fun comes from the wearable and portable applications of WristBoom and that is where it separates itself. Any place or time you’d need a wearable speaker and microphone, WristBoom would be an amazing device. If you want to quickly share some music with friends, invent some sort of new game, or even use it in a work environment to relay information, it could definitely find a strong role in such applications. If you’re a fan, you can pre-order one now for $20 on WristBoom’s Indiegogo campaign.

Source: WristBoom | INDIEGOGO

Google’s New Tone Extension for Chrome

Tone is a new experimental extension for Google’s Chrome browser. It leverages the fact that nearly all devices have speakers and microphones to transmit information using actual sound waves instead of standard wireless radio signals like WiFi and Bluetooth. Although these familiar ways of transmitting data are also present everywhere, they are so common and so numerous that they often interfere with one another or make transmitting data more troublesome than it should be. This is especially true in the simple environment of a room full of friends or colleagues.

In essence, Tone allows for computers to literally talk to one another using sound as the information medium and a codec to make it understandable. As long as each device in the area has Tone installed, and as long as they can hear the transmitting device, information can be exchanged just as it would between two people speaking. It’s a clever way to get around the hassle of fiddling with various Bluetooth or WiFi settings or having to transfer information between conflicting OSes. Funnily enough, problems can happen if the machines aren’t oriented in such a way that they can easily hear one another, just like humans speaking!

If you want to give Tone a try, you can use it to broadcast a URL to nearby machines with Chrome and Tone. All you need to do is the following.

1. Install the Tone extension for Chrome.

2. Check that the volume on your computer is sufficiently high and on.

3. Press the Tone button in Chrome. Tone will beep (talk) to nearby machines and tell them the URL being sent.

4. If you’re receiving a Tone URL, a notification will pop up in Chrome that you can click to go to the URL that was sent!

This is a pretty cool tech demo and could become quite useful in the future as support is enabled for sending various other types of data besides simple URLs. Google is already experimenting with that internally but it seems very likely that if Tone becomes popular, this capability will be added for everyone.

Source: Google Research Blog | Google Tone – Chrome Store

Increase Haptic Feedback (Vibration) on the Apple Watch

Haptic feedback has been around for quite a while now. In essence, it’s controlled vibration on a device that allows for some more interactivity and adds a sensory element. As with all things Apple, they weren’t content to just slap on a little motor inside the Apple Watch and have instead created a more sophisticated haptic device dubbed the Taptic Engine. Inside every Apple Watch is a Taptic Engine motor which provides subtle vibration based feedback to the wearer’s wrist. This is what allows you to feel a tap on the wrist with an incoming notification or even feel someone’s heartbeat from anywhere in the world.

Just as you might miss a tap on the wrist while walking through a party or down the street, it can be easy to miss a Taptic Engine alert on your Apple Watch. The motion of walking around or carrying something can easily mask the gentle tap that your Apple Watch is so kindly trying to provide. Luckily, Apple has thought through just such a contingency and has provided a setting to enable much stronger feedback which makes it harder to miss. Follow these steps to increase the force of haptic feedback.

1. Open the Apple Watch app on your iPhone.

2. Under My Watch, tap Sounds & Haptics.

3. Toggle the Prominent Haptic switch to On.

If you want to switch Prominent Haptic on directly from your Apple Watch that’s also possible.

1. Open Settings on your Apple Watch.

2. Tap Sounds & Haptics.

3. Toggle the Prominent Haptic switch to On.

Once Prominent Haptic is enabled, the Apple Watch will send a longer, more intense vibration to tell you that an alert of some kind is incoming and to take note. This makes it much more likely that you’ll notice the Prominent Haptic warning and the subsequent, more subtle alert. Of course if for some reason you don’t like the pre-alert warning, you can toggle Prominent Haptic to off to disable it. For most users, it does seems to be quite an improvement over the standard alerts which can be easy to miss during the motion of everyday life.

How to Force Quit Any App on Your Apple Watch

In a world of countless apps on countless devices, we’ve all run into the occasional stubborn app that freezes and just won’t quit. It can be frustrating and a waste of time trying to force such apps to quit and they can even necessitate a shutdown of the device entirely. The Apple Watch with its smaller screen and less area to touch can make such freezes especially troublesome. Luckily, Apple’s software and the Apple Watch can be expected to run without issue the vast majority of the time. Should you ever encounter a frozen app however, force quitting it is extremely simple. Follow these steps to force quit any app that is currently running on the Apple Watch.

1. Press and hold the side button (the smaller button just under the Digital Crown) for a few seconds.

2. Continue holding the side button and some sliders will appear (Power Off, Power Reserve, Lock Device).

3. When you see these sliders appear, let go of the side button. Then press and hold it again.

4. The running app will force quit and you’ll be back at the home screen.

Once the app has force quit, you can simply start it up again or run any other app. It’s a very simple process and thankfully makes use of the physical button on the Apple Watch. This is a great way to prevent any issues if the touch interface is frozen so you can always default to the actual button on the watch to force quit an app. Using the side button is also a nice way to prevent smudging your pretty Retina display as you tap away at the frozen app trying to get it to respond.

As stable as it currently is, future software updates and improvements should only serve to increase the reliability of the Apple Watch and its apps. Hopefully the need to force quit an app will be a very rare occurrence indeed and you can continue to enjoy your Apple Watch with blissful ease.

Download and Use 153 Animated GIF Apple Watch Emojis

Apple has kindly provided a great number of animated emojis for use with the Apple Watch. When a simple text message won’t do, it can be fun to send a lively emoji and as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. The Apple Watch is particularly suited to displaying emojis with its vibrant Retina screen and placement on your wrist. There’s a certain charm to glancing at your watch to be greeted by an animated emoji at just the right moment. It could really become something rather special as the number and variety of emojis grows and the Apple Watch becomes a newer platform for them. Where it would be a hassle to read a lengthy text on the Apple Watch, maybe a flashy and well timed emoji might do better.

For everyone without an Apple Watch however, the German site GigaApple has kindly provided animated GIF conversions of every animated emoji on the Apple Watch. Because animated GIFs run on nearly everything, these are easy to use on the web, PC, mobile device, etc. so you’re free to use them wherever and whenever you wish. If by chance you find your online postings have become stale and your emojis, emoticons, GIFs, and various links tired and worn, take heart…for these lovely new animated emojis have come to the rescue to lend some cheery motion to your digital world. The popularity of emojis seems to only be growing so there should be even more variety arriving steadily in case even these new ones get old and played out.

Why even use words or sounds at all? Why not compose e-mails and postings comprised entirely of animated, bouncing, flashing emojis I ask? Perhaps we are slowly returning to a hieroglyphics based society like that of the ancient Egyptians. Ok, maybe I took it a little too far there. In any case, enjoy the latest batch of emojis whether it be on your shiny new Apple Watch or from GigaApple’s animated GIFs!

->> Source: Animated GIFs via GigaApple