MacRumors

While Apple CEO Tim Cook recently confirmed that there are over 3,500 apps available for the Apple Watch, several reviewers and early adopters have complained that many fail to provide useful functionality on the wrist. Despite strict approval guidelines, the App Store for Apple Watch is cluttered with basic or poorly designed apps for the wrist-worn device, likely due in significant part to the apps having been developed before the Apple Watch was available.

To help users discover some high quality watch-based experiences, MacRumors reached out to its forum community and skimmed through the App Store to handpick five Apple Watch apps that we've found particularly useful. Some of the useful Apple Watch apps worth mentioning include Workflow, Philips Hue, Things, Calcbot and Clear.

Workflow

Workflow is an automation tool that enables you to drag and drop any combination of actions to create custom workflows for completing various tasks. You can, for example, use the app to get directions to nearby coffee shops within a preset radius directly on your Apple Watch. Workflows are created using a paired iPhone and automatically appear on the Apple Watch for one-tap use.

Workflow features over 200 actions, including those for Contacts, Calendar, Maps, Music, Photos, Camera, Reminders, Safari, AirDrop, Twitter, Facebook, Dropbox, Evernote and iCloud Documents. The app, created by DeskConnect co-founders Ari Weinstein, Nick Frey and Conrad Kramer, is currently $2.99 on the App Store for iPhone and Apple Watch as part of a limited time 40% off sale.

Philips Hue

Philips Hue for Apple Watch displays up to 10 different lighting configurations for Hue lights that can be activated by pressing a circular button -- there's one button per screen, and you swipe between them. One minor inconvenience is that Hue has no Glance, so you have to actually open the app to turn on your lights, although it's a simple issue that could easily be addressed in a future update.

You choose your desired scenes in the Hue for iPhone app in settings, where available scenes to choose from are listed under Widget & Apple Watch. Scenes you pick will be available on the Apple Watch and in Notification Center on iPhone if you have the widget turned on. The scenes will be the same in both places -- you can't pick different ones for the iOS widget and for the Apple Watch.

If you don't have a Hue Tap, quick selecting scenes on the Apple Watch is easily the fastest way to control your lights since the device is right on your wrist. With 10 scenes, there are a lot of options for controlling lighting all over the house. You can get more scenes by creating them on the iPhone or downloading them from the Meet Hue website.

Philips Hue for Apple Watch is free on the App Store.

Things

Things is one of several to-do apps available for the Apple Watch, displaying a list of day-to-day tasks and long-term goals on your wrist that can be assigned to categories, marked as completed or added to larger projects related to, for example, planning a vacation, preparing for a presentation or filing taxes.

To-dos can be added directly from the Apple Watch using Siri dictation, and categorized under Inbox or Today with a single tap. Things for Apple Watch can also provide notifications to remind you about scheduled to-dos for a specified date so that you don't forget, and all tasks automatically sync to a paired iPhone.

Things for Apple Watch is $9.99 on the App Store.

Calcbot

Calcbot by Tapbots makes up for the lack of a stock calculator app on the Apple Watch, enabling you to perform basic calculations and conversions, calculate tips and split bills right on your wrist. The regular calculator mode features a basic numeric keypad, and a firm press using Force Touch brings up a menu with add, subtract, multiply and divide options.

The conversion mode brings up a similar looking number pad with options to convert US dollars to euros, pounds to kilograms, miles to kilometers and Fahrenheit to Celsius using Force Touch. Calcbot Pro, $2.29, enables users to customize the four conversion options using the Calcbot app for iPhone, with over 500 units across 22 different categories to choose from.

Perhaps the most useful functionality of Calcbot for Apple Watch is the tip calculator, which allows you to enter the total cost of your bill, calculate a 10% to 30% tip and divide the amount between up to 10 people if necessary. Apple Pay and Calcbot combined make the Apple Watch a more convenient option than fumbling with your iPhone and wallet when the check comes.

Calcbot for Apple Watch is free on the App Store.

Clear

The Apple Watch's small screen size is ideal for displaying bite-sized information, making Clear a perfect match for the wrist-worn device. Clear for Apple Watch brings tasks, reminders and to-do lists to your wrist, featuring a Glance that shows you how many items are on your list and displays upcoming reminders. Adding new tasks can be done using Siri dictation.

Tapping on the Glance brings you to the full Clear app, where you can view all of your lists on the Apple Watch. If you create your own list, such as a grocery list or task list, you can check off items directly on the watch. If you press firmly on a list using Force Touch, you can sort the list, add new tasks or mark all tasks completed.

Clear for Apple Watch is $4.99 on the App Store.

These are by no means the only useful Apple Watch apps available so far, and we encourage readers to share some of their other favorites in the discussion thread associated with this post. It is clear, however, that many developers have struggled to find the right balance and user experience for the new platform.

With the Apple Watch now available and users and developers able to figure out the best way for apps on the wrist to fit into their daily lives, there will no doubt be improvements to the user experience and we'll continue to watch for interesting and novel apps making their way to the Apple Watch.

Ahead of the rumored debut of Apple's upcoming streaming music service, Re/code has shared several details on the initiative, sourced from industry insiders. As we've learned previously, Apple will charge $9.99 per month for the service and will not offer a freemium streaming tier as other music services like Spotify do, but the company is aiming to introduce ways to let people listen to some content for free.

First and foremost, Apple hopes to offer listeners a free trial period, which lasts between one and three months, letting them sample the music service for an extended period of time before opting for a full subscription. The length of the trial will depend on what Apple is able to negotiate with music companies.

Apple is also working on a feature that may let artists and music creators upload samples of songs that could be listened to without subscribing to the service. Re/code's sources are describing this as "something akin to SoundCloud." SoundCloud is a music sharing platform that lets users upload and share originally-created music, and a similar feature within Apple's new music service would give indie artists an easy way to share music while providing listeners with free content.

The third way Apple plans to potentially get music to listeners for free is through a revamp of iTunes Radio. We've heard hints of this previously, but the new version of iTunes Radio may feature stations that are curated by humans rather than computers, with different content available in different locales. New Apple hire BBC Radio 1 DJ Zane Lowe and other recently hired radio staff may spearhead this initiative.

Re/code's report also shares some details on the streaming music negotiations that have already landed Apple in a bit of hot water with various regulatory bodies, including the FTC and the Department of Justice in the United States and the European Commission. Apple has been attempting to convince music labels that ad-supported free streaming music does not generate enough revenue.

But as we have previously reported, Apple doesn't intend to provide free, unlimited on-demand streaming, as competitors Spotify and YouTube do. In private meetings with label executives and other music industry figures, Apple has been arguing that free streaming won't generate enough money for the industry via advertising, and doesn't give enough people incentive to pay for subscriptions.

Apple is still working to complete deals ahead of the launch of the streaming service, but it is said to be on track for a WWDC debut. According to a report earlier this week, the streaming service will be introduced during the Worldwide Developers Conference in June and released later in the month alongside the public launch of iOS 8.4.

Apple's streaming music service is built on its existing Beats music service, and will continue to focus on curated content. To draw in additional customers and to distinguish itself from competing services, Apple is planning to offer a range of exclusive content. There are also plans to rebrand and revamp the music service, deeply integrating it into iTunes and the newly revamped Music app introduced in iOS 8.4.

In Nintendo's financial results briefing posted today, which relays the company's past fiscal year ending in March 2015 and looks ahead to the future, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata provided a few more details regarding the company's future release plans with mobile gaming partner DeNA.

Essentially, the first game in the lineup will launch "by the end of this calendar year," with the current long-term plan to release five games in total by the end of the company's next fiscal year ending in March of 2017, just under two years away. Iwata promises that while that estimation for a release schedule seems low, the company hopes to retain its well-known degree of polish and customer satisfaction when transitioning to mobile, and taking a quality over quantity approach is its way of doing that.

You may think it is a small number, but when we aim to make each title a hit, and because we want to thoroughly operate every one of them for a significant amount of time after their releases, this is not a small number at all and should demonstrate our serious commitment to the smart device business.

During the briefing, Iwata also went further into detail regarding the actual strategy for creating games on a mobile device, such as an iPhone and iPad. While the initial announcement of the deal with DeNA had fans excited, Nintendo was quick to specify that the experiences provided on mobile wouldn't simply be ports of existing franchises and would be more tailored for a smaller, bite-sized experience.
Although that dashed most fan hopes for full-fledged Pokemon, The Legend of Zelda, and Animal Crossing experiences on the iPhone, it does provide hope that the sometimes fumbling company is at least aware of what makes mobile games work in the first place.

As we confirmed on March 17, all of our IP can be considered for a smart device game. On the other hand, since the game business on smart devices is already severely competitive, even with highly popular IP, the odds of success are quite low if consumers cannot appreciate the quality of a game.

Also, if we were simply to port software that already has a track record on a dedicated game system, it would not match the play styles of smart devices, and the appropriate business models are different between the two, so we would not anticipate a great result. If we did not aim to achieve a significant result, it would be meaningless for us to do it at all. Accordingly, we are going to carefully select appropriate IP and titles for our smart device deployment.

Iwata last mentions the company's hope to "expand this business," in regards to the mobile games, to global markets so more and more fans will have a chance to experience Nintendo games on mobile. "We are aiming to make this one of the pillars of Nintendo’s revenue structure," Iwata said.

Since the deal with DeNA, the company has begun slowly relinquishing its stranglehold over its precious characters and IPs, after first being burned by various motion picture and CD-i partnerships in the past. Most recently, this week Nintendo announced a partnership with Universal to include the former company's popular characters as various attractions and locations in a theme park expansion of the latter's well-established park experiences.

Ericsson has filed lawsuits against Apple in Germany, United Kingdom and the Netherlands after failing to reach a global licensing agreement with the company over both standard-essential and non-standardized patents.

Ericsson claims that Apple continues to sell the iPhone, iPad and other products that infringe upon its patented technologies, some related to 2G and 4G LTE standards, even though its licensing agreement expired in January.

Ericsson has been attempting to license its standard-essential patents with Apple on terms that are fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND), but the two companies have failed to reach an agreement following over two years of negotiations. Unable to resolve the situation outside of the courtroom, Ericsson has since filed patent lawsuits against the iPhone maker in the United States, and now Europe, for mediation by the courts.

"Apple continues to profit from Ericsson's technology without having a valid license in place," said Kasim Alfalahi, Chief Intellectual Property Officer at Ericsson. "Our technology is used in many features and functionality of today's communication devices. We are confident the courts in Germany, the UK and the Netherlands will be able to help us resolve this matter in a fair manner."

Ericsson, the world's largest provider of mobile network equipment, originally filed two complaints with the U.S. International Trade Commission and seven complaints with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas against Apple earlier this year. In late March, the ITC agreed to investigate the patent infringement claims, involving 41 wireless-related patents.

Apple originally filed suit against Ericsson in January, arguing that it was demanding excessive royalties for patents not essential to LTE standards. Ericsson, which holds over 35,000 patents, countersued in a Texas courtroom just hours later, seeking an estimated $250 million to $750 million in royalties per year for Apple to continue licensing its patented wireless technologies.

Since the Apple Watch was released on April 24, several teardowns from iFixit, Chipworks, and ABI Research have divulged information on the inner workings of the device, detailing everything from battery capacity to the manufacturers who created the miniaturized parts for the device.

A report last week took a deep look at the S1 package that runs the Apple Watch, pointing towards 512MB of RAM, a Broadcom Wi-Fi chip, an accelerometer/gyrometer from STMicroelectronics, and today further investigation from Chipworks (via Ars Technica) has revealed 30 individual components inside the 26mm x 28mm S1 package, a feat Chipworks calls "quite an accomplishment."

Apple and/or their suppliers have designed and manufactured a 26 mm x 28 mm package that is very unique. Let's consider its construction for a moment. We have a common motherboard to which all of the components (wafer scale packages, PoPs, BGAs, etc.) have been attached. The entire motherboard, with all of its components, is then overmolded with a packaging compound containing silica or alumina spheres suspended in a resin. We see this same type of material in conventional IC packaging, but we have never observed this being used over a 26 mm x 28 mm motherboard.

Among the more interesting discoveries Chipworks has made is the manufacturing process for the APL0778 application processor (CPU/GPU) on the S1. It was made with Samsung's 28 nanometer LP process, which, as Ars Technica points out, is no longer cutting edge technology. A 28-nanometer processor was also used in the iPhone 5s, while the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus used 20-nanometer A8 processors.

A 28-nanometer chip in the current-generation Apple Watch suggests Apple could size down to a newer process in future devices, bringing a jump in performance alongside a reduction in space to make room for additional components. Samsung's chip technology has progressed to a 14-nanometer process, which we may see in the next-generation iPhone, among other products.

In short, the use of a 28-nanometer processor suggests there's a lot of room for improvement when it comes to processing power in future Apple Watch devices. Though the Apple Watch has only been available for two weeks, we've already heard some rumors about the next version. According to reports, health sensors that did not make it into the first-generation device may be added to the second-generation version, perhaps allowing it to track health-related metrics like stress levels, blood pressure, and oxygen levels.

We've also seen rumors suggesting the first update to the Apple Watch will come in the form of additional casing options, perhaps later this year. A second-generation device with upgraded internals is not expected until 2016.

App developer Sam Soffes today published a blog post detailing the early monetary performance of his new app Redacted [Direct Link], which allows users to easily obscure sensitive information on personal photos.

Yesterday, Soffes tweeted out a question, asking his followers to guess how much profit the app received in its first day on the market. While the guesses averaged $12,460.67, Soffes revealed his app had achieved just 87 paid downloads, earning him a mere $302 worldwide for the eighth top paid app in the U.S. Mac App Store.

There were 37 guesses. I threw out the lowest and highest guesses which were both hilarious. The average guess was $12,460.67. 7 of those units were promo codes I sent out. Only 59 of those units were in the US. It's pretty nuts that 59 sales is top paid on the Mac App Store in the US.

In response to Soffes' blog post, Dan Counsell, a developer of popular organizational app Clear, shared a few numbers on the app's profits over a single day. Counsell tweeted that Clear earned $453 the day before the tweet, noting the list app is third in productivity and fifteenth overall in the top paid app list for the United States.

The top paid ranking is a measure of download volume (with some tweaks to account for sales momentum), not profits, so developers of higher-priced Mac App Store apps are in some cases certainly doing better than Redacted. Even so, with a drop in sales following the launch surge, Redacted is currently the #81 top grossing app in the U.S. Mac App Store while sitting at the #19 spot in paid apps.

Towards the end of his blog post, Soffes mentions that he nearly decided to continue working on another indie app, Whiskey, in an attempt to make a living off of that app. "I'm glad I didn't," he states honestly. He now is employed at mobile payments solution Venmo as of early this week.

AT&T has quietly updated one of its policies to reflect that it will now only throttle customers that are connected to a cell tower experiencing network congestion, reports Ars Technica. The carrier previously throttled all grandfathered customers with unlimited data plans that exceeded 5GB of 4G LTE data usage in a single monthly billing period, regardless of network congestion.

The updated policy reads as follows:

"As a result of AT&T's network management process, customers on a 3G or 4G smartphone or on a 4G LTE smartphone with an unlimited data plan who have exceeded 3 gigabytes (3G/4G) or 5 gigabytes (4G LTE) of data in a billing period may experience reduced speeds when using data services at times and in areas that are experiencing network congestion. All such customers can still use unlimited data without incurring overage charges, and their speeds will be restored with the start of the next billing cycle."

Last October, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission filed a federal court complaint against AT&T, accusing the carrier of misleading its smartphone customers by charging them for unlimited data while reducing their data speeds by up to 90 percent. The FTC claimed that AT&T did not adequately inform its customers that they would be throttled for using more than a certain amount of data during a billing cycle. AT&T could still face penalties from the FTC if it loses the case, despite changing its policy.

AT&T customers with unlimited data plans have experienced speeds as low as half a megabit per second when being throttled, according to the report, resulting in barely usable service. By throttling unlimited data plans, AT&T is naturally encouraging customers to switch to one of the tiered data plans that it introduced in the years after discontinuing unlimited plans. Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile have similar throttling practices where there is network congestion.

It has not been a good week for Apple's developer services. Less than a day after iTunes Connect experienced a lengthy outage that lasted several hours, TestFlight is now unavailable for many developers. The beta testing service for iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch apps has been returning a "currently unavailable" message since as early as Wednesday afternoon around 6:00 PM Pacific.

Apple's Senior Vice President of Operations Jeff Williams will speak at the annual Code Conference, held this May 26-28 in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, reports Re/code. Williams joined Apple in 1998 and leads a team responsible for the company's supply chain management, and during the past two years has also overseen development of the Apple Watch and health initiatives such as ResearchKit.

Apple executives Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi spoke at the inaugural Code Conference last year, with Cue discussing how today's TV experience "sucks" and is a complicated problem to solve.

Code Conference is a successor to the D: All Things Digital Conference that Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, among other Apple executives, have participated in the past before Dow Jones closed technology website AllThingsD and replaced it with WSJD.

Williams will participate in Code Conference just over one month after the Apple Watch launch, which some customers believe has not gone as smoothly as past product releases due to, among other reasons, limited supply and no in-store availability. Much of the criticism has been directed towards Apple retail chief Angela Ahrendts, although Williams is directly in charge of Apple Watch development and manages the worldwide supply chain. His interview at Code Conference may offer more details about the launch.

Other notable Code Conference speakers announced include GM CEO Mary Barra, Pivotal CEO Paul Maritz, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti and editor-in-chief Ben Smith, Xiaomi vice president Hugo Barra, Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure, Reddit interim CEO Ellen Pao, GoPro CEO and founder Nick Woodman, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky and Google business lead Omid Kordestani.

Apple today launched a new microsite focused on the iPad, exploring the way the iPad can "change the way you do things every day." The site offers up a selection of apps and usage ideas for the iPad, organized into several categories: Cooking with iPad, Learning with iPad, Small Business with iPad, Traveling with iPad, and Redecorating with iPad.

Like the company's past advertising efforts, this new campaign aims to portray the iPad as a tool that's useful in all aspects of life that goes far beyond mere content consumption, as can be seen in the introductory video on the site. The video features people using the iPad in a whole range of situations, from cooking to managing a business.

Some of the recommended apps include Green Kitchen, Cook, and Epicurious, and the site also recommends the Smart Cover as a tool for propping up the iPad while cooking. Siri is highlighted as a way to use the iPad hands-free in the kitchen, and a long list of apps is linked at the bottom of the page.

Learning with iPad focuses on using the iPad to learn at all ages, with sections highlighting learning through play, programming, exploring space through apps like Star Walk 2, using textbooks in iBooks, using apps like Notability and Coursera for learning, and exploring free courses on iTunes U. Hobby-based apps are also included in a "Never stop learning" section.

The other three iPad sections, Small Business, Traveling, and Redecorating, are equally as extensive, suggesting a range of use cases and apps for different situations that people might otherwise have missed. Every app used on the new site and within the "Everything changes for iPad" site is also listed in a special section on the App Store.

Over the course of the last few years, Apple has explored several different advertising campaigns for the iPad in an effort to spur people into purchasing one of its tablets. We've seen "Why You'll Love an iPad," "Your Verse," and "Start Something New" in 2013 and 2014.

Apple changes its iPad advertising tactics much more frequently than it does for other products, likely because its iPad sales have been down for several quarters in a row. During its the second quarter of 2015, Apple's iPad sales were down to 12.6 million from 16.35 million in the year-ago quarter.

Tim Cook has remained optimistic about iPad sales, however, suggesting that the company's future product pipeline (which includes the rumored "iPad Pro") and its efforts in the enterprise market will ultimately cause iPad sales to grow again. "I believe the iPad is an extremely good business over the long-term," he said. "When precisely it begins to grow again I wouldn't want to predict, but I strongly believe that it will."

Tim Cook's third annual CharityBuzz auction ended this afternoon, earning $200,000 for the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. The auction, which had more than 20 bids, includes a one hour lunch date with Tim Cook at Apple's headquarters in Cupertino and two VIP passes to an Apple keynote event to watch Apple unveil new products.

Though the auction earned an impressive $200,000 for the RFK Center, it brought in less money than previous auctions held in 2013 and 2014. In 2013, the inaugural CharityBuzz auction for a coffee date with Cook brought in an impressive $610,000, and 2014's lunch auction ended at $330,001.

Today's auction winner will be able to bring one additional person to have lunch with Cook, with the cost of lunch being included in the auction price. Transportation and accommodations to Cupertino are not included, however, and the exact date of the lunch will be scheduled at a mutually agreed upon time.

This year's event, like last year's, included two VIP tickets to an upcoming Apple keynote event -- WWDC is on the horizon, so the auction winner may be invited to attend the WWDC keynote. WWDC promises to be quite exciting this year, as rumors have suggested a whole slew of products could see an unveiling, including a new streaming music service, a new streaming television service, and a new Apple TV. We'll also see iOS 9 and OS X 10.11.

Proceeds from today's auction benefit the RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights, a charity that Tim Cook has now supported for three years running. The RFK Center aims to achieve "a just and peaceful world by partnering with human rights leaders, teaching social justice, and advancing corporate responsibility."