Apple’s Watch event happened, prices from $349 to literally $10,000 for the gold one. Apple selling a five-figure fashion object with the same chip as the cheap one is the boldest margin experiment in consumer tech history. The dev question that matters: what’s an app that’s good on a wrist? Glances, not sessions. Notifications that deserve you. Nobody’s cracked it yet, including Apple.
SXSW belonged to an app called Meerkat: live-stream from your phone, one tap. Then Twitter, who owns a competitor called Periscope they haven’t even launched yet, cut Meerkat’s access to the social graph mid-conference. Platform risk in real time, at the same festival where everyone learned Meerkat’s name. Google Reader taught me this lesson as a user; Meerkat is learning it as a company: build on someone’s platform, live at their pleasure.
Champions League quarter-final draw is out, and my crest-coolness bracket methodology has a Final Four of pure chaos (Monaco vs Juventus!) and I stand by the science.
TIL: React at work now, not just tutorials. We’re rebuilding our dashboard in it. The one-way data flow finally clicked: the UI is just a function of state. I can never go back to jQuery spaghetti. My hands know too much.