The Watch Changeover

Back in November of last year the Pebble went on sale and I bought myself one as an apertif in preparation for the Apple Watch coming into my life. Six months later my Apple Watch arrived, so I set down the Pebble and switched over. During my first couple of days with the new watch, I missed my Pebble a lot. Why? Two reasons.

The main thing I did on my Pebble was home automation - Nest Thermostat, TCP Lights, WeMo Fan, etc. The apps just aren’t there on the Apple Watch yet. I suspect this is because HomeKit still isn’t complete and launched and so Apple isn’t allowing other home automation apps onto the watch just yet. I did realize that IFTTT Do has an Apple Watch companion app so I was able to get a few things setup on it: Turn on Bedroom Fan, Turn On/Off Nest. This is going to go away with time.

The second thing is that the Pebble has four physical buttons to do anything and can leave an app up and running that is really awesome. A whole lot of features of the Apple Watch require swiping and tapping on the screen. The main time I want to use the watch is when I’m taking care of the baby (often holding him in my arms) which makes swiping and tapping impossible. I like to play music (or podcasts) and then use the watch to pause/unpause the stuff playing. On the Pebble there was a nice easy physical button to do it. On the Apple Watch I have to wake the watch, swipe down to glances, and tap to pause/play. Super annoying.

Give it six months and I won’t be holding a baby all the time, HomeKit will be complete, and the watch app ecosystem will be a lot more robust. We might even have native watch apps by that point.

Future of the Workplace

A little over ten years ago, the place I was working closed the San Francisco office and I became a work-from-home employee. It was a cool deal to be without a commute and I made sure that all my teammates in Denver, Boston, and Dehli had webcams so that when we did our meetings we could all see one another. I’ve pioneered making remote employees not be second-class citizens and three separate companies since then.

I thought highly distributed teams would be the future of working. Everyone will just work out of their home office, or a coworking office across the street, with their teammates throughout the world and when you need have meetings you’ll use video conference or holo-conference. It seems like that’s where we’re going to end, but I would have expected a lot more tech companies to already be there. In the real world, people are still pushing for offices.

If self-driving cars were a thing today I’d probably go into the office every day. I’d hope in the car at 8am and be hard at work on the phone, video, etc, rolling into my office around 11am. After a few hours doing the face-to-face, I’d jump back in the car at 2pm and be home for dinner putting in a full eight hour work day.