Category: Photos

A Glimpse of Rivendell on My Wrist

I recently replaced my original model Apple Watch (sometimes referred to as a “Series 0” model) with a Series 4. I really liked my old watch, but Apple stopped issuing system updates for that model so I knew its days on my wrist were numbered. When I finished a couple of particularly big projects recently, I decided that my reward would be a new Apple Watch.

The new Series 4 is a worthy replacement. Everything (except, of course, the time) runs much faster on it. It has a much better speaker. It does ECGs. It has great battery life. It can spit water!

But my favorite feature is its slightly larger display, and its ability to run the Kaleidoscope watch face full-screen on it.

On my old watch I had created a Kaleidoscope watch face based on a photo I had taken of some jacaranda tree blossoms. The result was a watch face I nicknamed “Rivendell.”

Rivendell looked lovely on my old watch, and it continues to look lovely on my new one. But when I made a full-screen version of it for my new Apple Watch, it became mesmerizing. In fact, it’s so mesmerizing that I consume much of my new Apple Watch’s extra battery power by keeping my portal into Rivendell running on my wrist for minutes at a time while I gaze at it. It’s very calming—much more so than the Breathe app.

Rivendell Face Full-Screen
A still image cannot convey the stately Elvish grace of this slowly animating watch face.

Now, I don’t know for a fact that jacarandas grew in Rivendell, but Elrond, who ran the place, knew Gandalf, and he knew the Valar queen Yavanna Kementári (the Giver of Fruits)  back in the old country, and she is the one who basically planted all the original foliage on Middle-Earth, so if Elrond had wanted one of those purple-blossomed lovelies in his valley estate, he could probably pull a few strings.…

Time Lapse Synchronicity

I have one of those novelty cat clocks that has moving eyes and a wagging tail. I thought it might be fun to shoot about 20 minutes of time-lapse video of it so it would look like the cat was manic, with rapidly twitching eyes and tail.

Turned out that the frame-rate of my iPhone’s time-lapse feature is an even multiple of the eye-moving, tail-wagging period. As a result, the clock seems to look quite normal in the video if you don’t notice that its hands are moving rather rapidly (expand the video below to full-screen to see the hands more clearly).

Reading the Writing on the Wall(paper)

With the release of iOS 7, I’ve been hearing lots of muttering about how hard the home screens are to read with new system font (a variant of Helvetica Neue). While I do agree that the new font is slender and not particularly friendly to older eyes, I suspect much of the problem has to do with the wallpapers that people are putting on their home screens.

Here’s the thing: If you choose a bright, highly textured wallpaper image, like the image shown here, you’ll have a real problem.
Bad wallpaper choice

But, if you choose or create a wallpaper image that is relatively dark with few or no highlights, like this one here, the icon labels are much easier to read, and the color bleed-through in Notification Center and Control Center is much reduced.
Better wallpaper choice

Ganging up on the iBookstore

This evening, I went to the iBookstore in iTunes and checked out the Computers & Internet section. Not only is our iPad 2 Project Book featured, but it is #2 in the sales ranking, just behind my friend Jeff Carlson’s book. There’s also another book of mine on the page, another one of Jeff’s, two books by yet another friend, Joe Kissell, and another book by another friend, Tonya Engst.

Weirdest flash mob ever.