Someday soon, when workers at Minneapolis advertising agency Space150 leave their key fobs at home, they will have another way to gain office access: the Apple Watch on their wrists.
Apple’s much-publicized smartwatch, due for release later this month, will become a kind of key for unlocking the doors with a screen tap or a wrist flick. (Intoning “Open Sesame” will be optional.)
Space150, like thousands of other companies in Minnesota and around the world, are hard at work on apps for the Apple Watch in the belief that the shiny wrist device will become the next hot mobile-software platform.
The Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, recently revealed it’s developing an Apple Watch app intended for doctors. The physicians would use the app to monitor their schedules, know when patients have arrived at a clinic lobby or exam room, and access patient information such as age, sex and weight.
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Minneapolis-based Target Corp. also is focusing on the Apple Watch with features for making and updating shopping lists, locating aisle locations, checking store hours and snagging hot deals — all right on the wrist.
A recipe-timer app associated with Betty Crocker, the famed food-related brand owned by Golden Valley-based General Mills, also is in development. Attendees at MinneBar, a business- and technology-related conference, got a sneak peek of that app during a local developer’s smartwatch-related presentation last week.
But the news for such developers isn’t all good.
Apple has placed limitations on the kinds of Apple Watch apps that can be developed. These must be extensions of iPhone apps and not independent apps that exist only for the watch, for starters. (Such standalone watch apps will come later, Apple promises.)
Also, Apple Watch apps are limited in what they can do because developers do not have unfettered access to the smartwatch hardware and cannot access certain of its features, such as its accelerometer, for now.
At least Apple has not barred third-party apps, as it did, initially, with its first iPhone in June 2007.
The hugely popular App Store didn’t arrive until October 2007, setting off a mobile-app stampede that spread to other smartphone platforms and, now, smartwatches. Rivals to the Apple Watch — such as Pebble watches and wrist gadgets running Google’s Android Wear operating system — all have app ecosystems.
Apple’s App Store remains very popular among mobile-app developers because iPhones are hot global sellers, though, and that looks to continue with the Apple Watch given its tight initial integration with its smartwatch sibling.
For Eden Prairie-based Starkey Hearing Technologies, developing for the Apple Watch is a no-brainer because a number of the company’s hearing aids already interact closely with the iPhone.
Users of such hearing aids can fine-tune their audio using a Starkey app on the iPhone, and select noise-filter presets for different environments, such as cars and restaurants.
Now they will able to make a number of those adjustments and selections on the Apple Watch as well, said Dave Fabry, Starkey’s vice president of audiology and professional relations.
Additional Apple Watch-related possibilities may exist, Fabry added, but the company won’t know for sure how these will develop until it gets the the watch later this month.
The Apple Watch could be a microphone for hearing-aid users conducting telephone conversations, with incoming audio piped through the Starkey hardware, he said. The hearing aids also could serve as sound gear when music is being played on the watch.
The medical implications for older Apple Watch users are also intriguing, Fabry said. The watch’s customized-vibration system could be used to remind users they need to take their medication or leave for a doctor’s appointment, and do so more effectively than a phone since the wrist device is always available.
Space150 will also find itself on a journey of discovery once it gets its hand on watch hardware and refines its app ideas, which focus mainly on security and identity, said Marc Jensen, an agency managing partner and its chief technology officer.
A few times a week employees are locked out late at night, typically having forgotten to bring their keyfobs but not their smartphones, Jensen said.
As a result, the agency is experimenting with an app that can know, via the employees’ iPhones, that they’re standing outside the office. The workers are then able to confirm their identities via the phones’ Touch ID fingerprint sensor, and be given office access.
Once the Apple Watch comes, Space150 aims to adapt this security system for use on a wrist.
Mock-ups of the watch interface show a location alert that would appear when workers have arrived at the front door, followed by a message asking if the employees want the door opened. They’d tap the “unlock” button.
Space150 is also using location and identity in an Apple Watch app it is designing for a client, Jensen said.
Date: April 11, 2015