Please stop making a big deal about how you don't like hipster beards.
It really makes HN look like pretentious douchebags instead of intelligent thinkers.
It makes HN people look like the have no understanding of marketing.
If you're going to criticize the marketing, do it from a metrics perspective, rather than being exactly what you're claiming to hate by telling people to stop being hipsters - arrogant.
Let people be who they are. Measure them by their output and their product, and the effectiveness of their decisions. Not on whether or not they conform to your taste/style.
I get it - if you have design critiques, it makes sense to share those. If you have marketing critiques, it makes sense to share those (like: "If you market this to hipsters, you will not get the hipster-hating crowd to buy"). If you have a personal soap box of despise for another person's tastes, please do not bring it here.
> Let people be who they are. Measure them by their output and their product, and the effectiveness of their decisions. Not on whether or not they conform to your taste/style.
I would guess that the true point being made is that these people are not "being who they are," because someone else has caused them to "conform to [their] taste/style."
Your reaction is actually pointing out exactly the same thinking on their part as you're using to criticize it: hackers don't like it when someone has forced their idea of aesthetics on them--because hackers are, fundamentally, aesthetes--so we get vicariously offended when they see a trend of some group "forcing" their idea of aesthetics on some other group.
This applies even if that "force" is just the majority declaring some particular style to be "objectively fashionable." Hackers don't like the idea that things can be "in vogue", because it coerces their ability to self-style down set paths they might not want to have gone down. Even if they would have liked a particular style, having it be popular means it's no longer their creative idea to choose it--so it doesn't demonstrate their creativity, and that's all they cared about doing in the first place.
> these people are not "being who they are," because someone else has caused them to "conform to [their] taste/style."
This is assumption based on cultural hints. There have been quite a few times on HN where hackers have proven to indeed not be aesthetes, because hacking marketing requires aesthetic. This goes down to whether or not you appreciate aesthetics of your own appearance, as well.
I don't see anyone making the claim that this is "objectively fashionable". What I see is a bunch of people who rage against a marketing decision because it bastardizes their seemingly misguided need for aesthetic "purity" (whatever that means).
The criticism I'm offering isn't to stop liking your aesthetic preferences. If you don't like beards, don't grow one.
But someone posts a link on HN, and people bitch and moan because the primary subject of marketing is sporting a beard. It really misses the point of HN discussion. Again, I understand if the conversation is centered around the marketing (or other) implications of the decisions made by those who created the product and the site. But the conversation doesn't revolve around that at all. Instead, it's a bunch of "get off my lawn" and raging against trends without any particularly discernible purpose.
> But someone posts a link on HN, and people bitch and moan because the primary subject of marketing is sporting a beard.
I see two posts making fun of beards. Two.
Why are you even making this discussion? Meta discussion is frowned upon on HN. If you feel someone's discussion is off-topic, down-vote them and move on.
The irony is your meta discussion is now the top-voted post, instead of discussion on the actual product.
Totally agree with the idea that meta discussion should be limited. And, to be fair, it's not my fault my comment is the top voted post. I think the discussion about the fake/real login screen should be upped more than this one, certainly. But, I will say that I don't agree that this thread is invaluable or should be frowned upon for this discussion.
I think the product is quite nicely done. I bought it. And I believe the discussion revolves around not only the product, but the presentation and the reception of that presentation. So the "meta" value here isn't limited to the beard conversation. It's a larger discussion about the HN community, which isn't quite "frowned upon." It's important that we all contribute to moderation and encourage better thought.
I posted early in response to a initial negative discussion (which indeed is a pervasive issue on HN) about the pretension of the video, the aesthetics, etc. It's not just a response about beards - it's a response regarding the product and a more valuable way of understanding marketing, which I think will contribute to the discussion of the OP in the future.
And thus, I think it is quite relevant to this particular thread. But I will rest my case here.
> so we get vicariously offended when they see a trend of some group "forcing" their idea of aesthetics on some other group.
I like ties, and I enjoy wearing them. Are you vicariously offended that I might jeopardize my chance to get a developer job at Google or an SV startup if I wore a tie to the interview?
The negativity in this thread is a perfect exemplar of the say-anything-critical-to-look-smart, "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.", poisonous middlebrow dismissal that pg complains about.
This is an amazingly light convenience, with really solid, streamlined execution. People, it's ok to think something is good.
It's a tough call sometimes. Or it feels like it. I didn't care for the site. Took too long to show what it was about so I closed the tab. Just a bit too cute for my taste.
I was going to post a comment about it, mainly as a data point, in case such things matter to the site owner. OTOH I have on iPhone and I don't have a Mac I use often enough to care about this sort of product anyway; it's in perpetual sleep mode 99% of the time. I'm not the target audience.
Does mentioning my dislike for the site make me negative? Is it to the long-term good that people feel reluctant to offer criticism?
I do get the point about "Knock stuff to show your IQ"; it's unpleasant and an easy habit to fall into. I've been with groups of geeks where it's impossible to discuss almost any piece of software because it turns into a dick measuring contest. (So to speak.)
Still, sometimes some things really are flawed and those flaws are worth pointing out.
I suppose that every criticism should be accompanied by some suggestion on how to fix or improve things, but that's not always possible.
I don't have any really good suggestions on how to temper negativity other than to encourage people to pause and consider why they are posting something, and for others to try to ignore the posts that irk them.
I like your point and it is a valid critique of HN commenting. Many dismissals are perfunctory and incorrect.
All the same, though, it is expected that almost all new startups will fail and most products will not be "the best" or even original. That's the nature of competition; only the top products get any traction at all. Given that, I would expect critiques of most new ventures.
The "Ugh", that's what the GP is talking about. A number of the posts come across as spiteful, which is not objective and as such, has no place here. In fact objective criticism is something that developers aren't good at at all, but such an important engineering skill. Speak to designers and learn how to do it. You'll be a better engineer as a result.
+ Really well thought-out interactions (noticing when I download, auto installing to /Applications)
+ Plain-English ToS under creative commons.
- An unsigned latest.zip for downloading, at least use a dmg so you can sign and have more control over the presentation
- Extremely difficult to find Knock on the app store. The app could open a web page or itunes, right now I'm left searching and wading through knock-knock joke apps.
- Making me run software before telling me the price of the software
All in all, you're doing great with presentation, but it has a few minuses. I can't use the software because I don't have an iPhone now, so this is where my review ends.
I disagree on the zip. dmg used to be the preferred format for reasons I never entirely fully understood, but that ship has sailed, and I think for the better. Zip is much more convenient. You can, of course, sign the app within the zip.
You can sign the app within the zip, true. The advantage of using a dmg is to control the presentation, which seems like a strong desire for this particular product. Downloading a file named "latest.zip" that had an unsigned binary in it was by far the worst part of the excellently designed experience of installing the software.
Please, don't use DMG. Just .app in a plain .zip please.
The nifty "presentation" adds a several needless steps and pitfalls to running an application:
• Mounting and verification of DMG is slow (Zip CRC and Developer ID signatures give you verification too).
• "Nothing happens" after clicking DMG — user has to find DMG mount on a cluttered desktop.
• Clicking app icon in the DMG window is tempting, but generally it's a no-no (some apps don't mind, but some ask to be moved to Applications, and some throw "error -13 read only volume" kind of errors).
• User is expected to copy the app to Applications folder, with instructions given in form of non-localizable non-accessible text-in-image, and it's trickier when sidebar with shortcut to Applications folder is hidden (and remember "Applications" folder name is localized and sounds nothing like it in many languages).
• User has to unmount and delete the DMG, but that gives non-obvious behavior when the app is running off the DMG.
• It gets super confusing when user has pinned app in the Dock while it was running off the DMG
>• Clicking app icon in the DMG window is tempting, but generally it's a no-no (some apps don't mind, but some ask to be moved to Applications, and some throw "error -13 read only volume" kind of errors).
Really a non-issue and only apps built on an old SDK should have this behavoir any more (more recent SDKs will let them shove things in /tmp while run from a mounted dmg)
>• User is expected to copy the app to Applications folder, with instructions given in form of non-localizable non-accessible text-in-image, and it's trickier when sidebar with shortcut to Applications folder is hidden (and remember "Applications" folder name is localized and sounds nothing like it in many languages).
The user also has to drag the zipped app to applications. You can also solve this "problem" by including a finder shortcut to the Applications folder in the the DMG. Finder automatically localizes the Application's folder alias because it's a special URI
>• User has to unmount and delete the DMG, but that gives non-obvious behavior when the app is running off the DMG.
User has to delete the .zip and sometimes a, now empty, folder.
>• It gets super confusing when user has pinned app in the Dock while it was running off the DMG
No it doesn't, the DMG is automatically mounted and the app run if they do this
> No it doesn't, the DMG is automatically mounted and the app run if they do this
It really does, especially if you're one of the 99.999% of users who deletes their dmg's after installing. Then you just see an app icon with a big (?) in the middle of it.
Mounting and verification is slow: Perhaps. Enough to matter?
Opening a DMG is a two-click operation from either the download progress bar on the top right, or two clicks (which visibly floats to the Downloads folder and bounces again when done). Hardly "finding DMG on a cluttered desktop". The mounted DMG pops to the front, at least on my system.
Many applications, if they detect they're running from a DMG, will offer to restart and copy themselves to the applications folder. This deals with the next 3 problems. Even then, it's possible to put text in the window saying "Drag this to the applications folder". It's a dance that anyone using a mac for a reasonable amount of time is familiar with.
I'd say, overall, the presentation on a DMG is so much better than an anonymous zip file dropping an anonymous app in the downloads folder.
No, don't use a .zip please. The point is to get the user to "install" the app, not open it once. A big aliased "Applications/" folder with a visual prompt to drag and drop the .app is all you need in the dmg. downloading & opening the dmg is a fairly seamless experience from Safari.
From a consumer (end user)'s perspective, you're pretty much wrong on all points except the last two. Those are valid, and i have accidentally done that before. Tis annoying.
And I disagree on the disagreement. :) If I download a dmg file, I assume the author knows how to write software for a Mac. If I download a zip, I assume they don't.
At least they need to change the name from "latest.zip" to "Knock for Mac.zip" or something like that.
Even better would be having it in the Mac App Store. Since you need to download the iPhone version from the App Store anyway, it would be better to keep things unified.
Actually everything says you can't do that with a zip. Custom background images and layouts are folder properties not supported by a zipped directory (or really any directory that isn't a DMG's top-level dir)
Layout works fine for me in testing, but the custom background image does not. I wonder what causes that. The .DS_Store file is present and clearly has a reference to the file in the unzipped version, but it doesn't show.
I've just bought the app just to try it out. It works as advertised. But I was even more interested in security.
When you install the Mac application, it will ask for your computer's password. This password is then stored, as I understand, on your phone.
//////
Quote:
When Knock connects to your Mac, it sends your password over that signal using both Bluetooth's built-in encryption and our own proprietary, 1024-bit RSA encryption.
//////
I think for many users, this is secure enough. This will probably not do if you are more interesting than an average joe.
What I don't like is that 'proprietary' remark. It almost sounds like they wrote their own crypto implementation of RSA 1024. Again: probably safe enough for home use.
I searched on knock unlock in the IOS app store and found it immediately.
It seems that the Knock application also records usage.
Furthermore, I seem to have troubles with sleep, if the computer does not wake from sleep with this app, I'm not sure if I think it's useful.
This is pretty clever, but is this much better than the existing Bluetooth proximity unlock utilities?
The iPhone app that this pairs with costs $3.99 by the way.
If you use Mac OS, Proximity is similar to BlueProximity, there are probably other solutions that don't require an iOS app and accomplish the same thing without the magical novelty, all the same, I think it's neat and if the app weren't $4 I would try it out.
I suspect that this kind of delight, even though it becomes routine, actually enhances user experience in the long run.
For example, I have compiz set to use the "Burn" effect when closing windows. This is delightful and unobtrusive, and completely pointless. But man is it a stress reliever when I decide to close all of my windows in frustration.
This is a good observation. You're probably right. Routine and habit and the actual experience of those routines and habits do have intrinsic value in the way you go about executing them :)
But having a car stolen is way less of a problem than all your personal data being stolen. If my car is stolen because someone stole my bag with the keys in it then all I lose is my insured car.
If my laptop is stolen with the 'keys' to the laptop also in the bag, my life could become very difficult very quickly taking me years to recover from.
I think the point is you don't want to have the same paradigm as car + keys when it comes to your private information.
That's a totally valid point. My guess it that they assumed most users would keep their phone in a pocket (since it's easier to tap than if it's buried in a bag).
In any case it's a big upgrade from people who leave their computer unlocked all day. I'd love to see them add automatic proximity-based locking.
If you're using Filevault for full disk encryption you can't have Prey installed and use it on an open guest account. You can have a guest account and use the iCloud 'Find My Mac' though.
But that's exactly what I did on my last Mac (which wasn't using Filevault).
You use the guest account as a honeypot so they open the Mac and use it for long enough (without wiping it) for you to get a wifi connection and can get the location with Prey :-)
This assumes the thief is techy enough to know that Knock To Unlock is installed, and then know how to use it. Granted, it's not a great situation to be in having your stuff stolen, but thieves doing rip-n-runs aren't typically high tech users.
It doesn't actually unlock your machine. If you lock your computer it will not work. What it does is put up a page that looks nearly identical to the login page with small changes. It's a cool app (I tried it) but I'm disappointed that I can't find a way to toggle the lock via Alfred/Keyboard shortcut.
I can get in the habit of hitting a key combination/alfred command when I get up but having to click the icon in the menu bar will get annoying.
Indeed. I'm thinking this is less and less secure with every word I hear about it. Here I was imagining it used overlay effects from a system process and some kind of Kerberos certificates or other mechanism to convince the computer to login for real. A fake password screen... sigh. Sounds like the next virus.
I completely agree, I'm actually really annoyed because I paid $4 for something that I wouldn't have paid $0.99 for if I knew this is what they were doing. Now $4 isn't going to break the bank but still I thinks it's misleading not to point that out.
I locked with Ctrl-Shift-Power and was able to unlock with my phone. Does Knock use this shortcut to lock with its own lockscreen, or is it using the real lockscreen? I'm not sure.
I just tried this and yes I see the Knock login screen. There is a possibility that I am wrong but I have seen apps that do this sort of thing before and they can't lock using the system lock because there is no way for an app to unlock the system lock. I would guess that Knock just hooks that hotkey combo and shows their screen (Which again, is just a fullscreen app at it's core). I have never locked using that hotkey combo before so I'm not sure. I always use Alfred to lock.
That sounds right. OSX definitely encrypts your keys in memory while sleeping, to further prevent DMA attacks. So this would be tough to do without a kernel extension.
Another major caveat: locking your screen this way is a security risk if you are running FileVault. When OSX puts the computer to sleep and FileVault is enabled, DMA is automatically disabled until the screen is unlocked. If you use this app to lock your screen you will be removing the DMA prevention.
I would also be willing to bet there are other security concerns, as the iphone has taught us - lock screens can be hard :) be careful guys!
I'm not sure I understand what you are saying or maybe you didn't understand me. I am saying the it doesn't use the built-in locking mechanism but instead it's own "screen lock" that looks similar.
Out of curiosity, how can you tell it's not the built-in locking mechanism? The lock screen looks the same, except for the glow around the avatar to me. It even shows the alerts in the top right corner. The screen locks in the same fashion as normal (using the hotkeys, waiting for it to time out, etc), too.
What am I missing that makes you think it's not the built-in locking mechanism?
I'm not 100% sure but all signs point to this being the case. I have used multiple Bluetooth unlock proximity apps in the past and they all do the same thing. They throw up their own lockscreens in place of the real one. I am fairly certain that, as mentioned in this same comment "family", that this lockscreen is less secure than the system lockscreen. There was speculation that this might not engage all the security mechanisms like disk encryption. If I were one of the developers of this app I would be first in line to tell my visitors/customers that my product didn't compromise at all on security. Unfortunately, I don't recall any such claim on their site (if I'm wrong please let me know, I'm on my phone).
Hmm, that is interesting. I still would like an addressing some of the other very valid concerns here that certain safeguards might not be engaged but if this is true then this is really cool. From elsewhere in this thread there are people saying it doesn't work with certain full-disk encryption setups but that's to be expected I guess. I have it installed, if not always running, and it is a cool app and from what they have said they have planned I will be following it. Thanks for the update!
Oh, also, I see now that I have a very unclear typo. I am able to unlock my computer using Knock after using the system hot key commands to lock the screen.
I noticed it hijacks the wake up when I put my computer to sleep, which is available with a key command (either command-option-power or command-option-eject depending on your keyboard) and using the energy saver system preference panel you can configure it to automatically lock after x amount of time.
If you turn on drive encryption and then add a "bios" password in the firmware to prevent recovery, that's about as protected as things get on Mac.
Which means until your hard drive is decrypted it's still protected and this app won't work.
In my case, this app won't work even when the computer goes to sleep. Why? I've set mine to re-encrypt on sleep, so it prompts me for the password -- to unencrypt -- every time.
I'm not adding this until Apple can use this as a second factor for the encryption -- or as a way to select a profile and load user data from the phone.
This looks really cool, but it's pretty annoying that you allowed me to download and install on my Mac without telling me the iPhone app costs $3.99. In fact, I can't find anything on the website that says this thing does or does not cost money. Maybe you are hoping that people will assume it's free, download from the website, and then buy it on the app store because they already got that far. If so, it seems a bit dishonest.
This reminds me of a comment I made a week or two ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6540827 I made a similar comment about hiding the price on your launch page and got a response from the creator who was very helpful.
i may be completely biased because i have long hair & a (sweet) beard, but …
i'm finding it odd that there are people who feel like commenting on the appearance of the gentleman (actor/friend/founder/dude) in the video in a negative way. who cares how a guy in a video is dressed to demonstrate a product? and then even if you don't associate with the type of grooming or style of dress, that's totally cool, but to start throwing around gross oversimplifications like 'hipster'?
"If your page scrolls, you should have some indication that your page scrolls."
That's my approach. I don't think scrollbars are entirely necessary (and in a slide-to-slide webpage like this, having a scrollbar wouldn't really work since it'd break the UI), but having some indicator that you can scroll is necessary. It doesn't necessarily have to be a scrollbar though. Having content peeking out from beneath the fold is often enough to let the user know, "Hey! There's stuff down here! Scroll and check it out!"
Scroll bars can look ugly, but at the least they should have a graphical representation that the page is scrollable. I also completely missed the rest of the website.
I legitimately missed the rest of the page and dismissed it as totally broken until I read this comment. Hopefully that emphasizes how right lifeformed is.
Here's a controversial position: This is not going to be popular amongst iOS devs (I am an iOS dev) but the best thing for iOS as a platform is for Apple to appropriate this.
With the M7 coprocessor, iOS would be able to register a callback for a given "gesture," like two knocks. Then the phone could implement such functionality while staying in standby! Combined with a facility for securely determining proximity, you could use such a facility to securely unlock everything.
How you reconcile which app gets which gesture then? Would two unlocks trigger both a machine unlock, a text to my mom, and to start playing my podcasts? Not to mention that it's like pulling teeth to get Apple to allow things to happen in the background.
I was intrigued at how they did this from a locked phone, and it turns out they don't. You have to have the app launched before knocking, meaning at it's core, this is just a shake listener with a count and some Bluetooth code. Not that it's not worth $4 (yeah, app isn't free), but it's not getting my $4 yet, since typing my password is still easier and plenty secure.
Neat product. FYI, on your home page, I get the background image, then "Watch This" > (I click) > "Watch This" goes away, but nothing happens. And content below the fold is not visible or hinted at. (Mac OS X 10.7.5, FF 25)
Reminds me of BlueProximity.
Unrelated: Too bad my neither my 3 year old laptop nor my one year old Chinese phone support bluetooth 4.0, I'll just have to waste a lot of battery if I use BlueProximity. Wait a sec, I can have a bluetooth toggle widget on my screen, how about that!
If when browsing on my phone I come across your website, and it doesn't work on there (i.e. it is completely unusable), I'm not going to come back and view it when I'm at my desk.
(This site seems to work ok on my iPhone 4 though)
I have been knocking my iPhone 5s for the past 10 minutes, but nothing is happening.
On my mac, it seems that everything has been setup correctly, I can see my iphone name in the unlink button, so everything must be set up correctly.
On my iPhone 5s, I see my personal icon for my macbook Pro retina 13'' and a big picture of a macbook pro. I have been knocking everywhere in my iPhone: the picture of macbook pro, my macbook pro personal icon, the white spaces around the app, my home screen, notification center, my locked phone, and nothing seems to happen.
I understand that you are trying to make this as simple as possible, but things you assume to be obvious might not be obvious for others. For example, where do I knock? Does the phone have to be awake? Does the app have to be open? etc.
Also, your app seems to be failing silently. I have been knocking all over the place and it would help tremendously if there was an alert telling me what had gone wrong. That way, I can email support and pinpoint exactly what is wrong. As of now, I have no idea why your app is not working.
edit
Finally figured out what I was doing wrong. Put your phone flat on the table. Then tap twice on your phone and you should see rings show up on your macbook pro. Your phone can even be locked.
Do not hold the phone in your hands while you tap it. I was holding the phone in my hands before, which causes the taps to fail to register.
Back when KDE got the ability to wake on bluetooth, I set my phone up to unlock my computer whenever I was in the room. This eliminated logging on, but at the price of requiring my phone to have bluetooth running all day. This was back when batteries were not so large as they are now and bluetooth was a bit of a battery hog. Of course, this was the dumb-phone era too, and I was accustomed to charging my phone twice a week! Charging it every day was too much of a hassle so I soon went back to logging on with the keyboard. I charge my phone every day anyways now, so it would be zero trouble to use wake-on-bluetooth again, but the novelty isn't there and logging in via keyboard is easy so I haven't bothered.
This tap-your-phone stuff is similar, except less convenient. You actually have to take your phone out of your pocket and then tap on it, as opposed to just walking up to your computer and having it unlock automatically. In fact, this is probably slower than logging in via keyboard, depending on how fast a draw you are.
The big breakthrough here is that Bluetooth LE uses a totally negligible amount of power (such that many devices can run for years on a CR2032 button cell).
Also, you don't need to take your phone out of your pocket to tap it (it doesn't have to touch the computer, just any moderately firm object, such as a knuckle through a pants pocket).
I like this!
Btw some of us have slow internet connections. The video was buffering and stuff I couldn't watch it without manually loading it up separately.
I can't get it to work? Are there minimum requirements for the mac end? I'm using the last 17" mac they made.
More apps and devices seem to be using wireless proximity as some kind of authenticator, along with the assumption that a specific received signal strength confirms the user's intent to perform some action. However, such systems seem to be quite prone to a simple attack consisting of a battery-powered bidirectional amplifier connected a pair of highly directional antennas. Simply point one antenna toward the user's phone and the other antenna toward the user's computer, and you can fool the computer into thinking the user's phone is closer than it really is.
The trick is in opening the app and knocking. The knock releases the advertisement. Similarly, in other use cases, geofencing from the phone means the phone has to think it's nearby to release the signal. Not saying it can't happen, but that's a lot of work. Easier to just hack the device, prompt the user with a fake pin-pad or login screen, or do social engineering and/or gain physical access.
By the way, this attack is much more successful in reverse, for listening to and replaying keycard transactions. I was shocked to discover how little materials would be needed to make a decent amplified antenna.
Yeah, don't use this. You lose key encryption (done at lock screen by osx) and DMA prevention, which were rather nice security features that the default OSX sleep mode provides.
Personally, I think you should already have your downloads sorted by date, not alphabetically. No matter what the file is called, you can always just assume it's the first/last file in your downloads. I agree the filename should be changed though: latest.zip seems like something you send your friends to give a proof of concept.
The first thing I always do on a new mac is change the downloads folder on the dock to sort by date added. It makes further customization and downloads much easier.
I don't really care for the product, but that is a great video. Love the music selection, the editing, wording, concept, everything really. Great execution.
This is pretty cool and its nice that you can knock your phone to unlock while in your pocket but it means if I leave my phone at my desk to charge anyone can unlock my computer, which is a no-go.
I wish someone would just hurry up and implement unlocking of your mac via touchid(I have no idea if its technically possible to use touchid for other apps then apples).
I find this... useful. But I'm not sure why. I spent the $3.99, and it sort of feels like a novelty app... but I can see myself actually using it for it's intended purpose, so.. is it really a novelty at that point?
2. It seems the app changed something in the system settings, so that now, when I lock the screen, it goes off. Before, it started to show the screen saver. How to undo this?
3. You should have provided answers to my questions in your FAQ section, really.
It's a good example of practical skeueomorphism but I don't want simplicity to get to my desktop. I want it to be as complex as possible so I know that its ME and ME ALONE accessing my desktop.
Have Apple loosen their restrictions on background services? This is neither VoIP, music or navigation. Any ideas how they slipped this through the approval process?
Have purchased but cannot do anything, iPhone is waiting for Macbook and Macbook is waiting for iPhone, cycling bluetooth doesn't help (iPhone 5 and Macbook Air 2012)
doesn't work for me - I've installed & opened Knock on both Mavericks & iOS7 & Bluetooth (which, to be fair, is through a Belkin USB stick) & the PC doesn't recognize the iPhone, simply telling me to install it from the App Store. I love th concept so would be grateful for a fix...
Bluetooth Low Energy. Unlike old bluetooth, this new service shuts down all the time to save power. In fact, apple recommends geofencing any bluetooth beacons you know will stay put, so it only starts scanning for nearby devices over bluetooth once you're within a certain radius. In this case, the app only looks for devices when you launch the app, though if you were willing to put up with a delay, you could do so on-knock. Haven't looked at the app yet. One more alternative: it could send the message and have your mac constantly looking for messages when locked. Third alternative, it pairs in the background and only once iOS notices the new device does it start actively opening communication channels. Apparently connect times are a few ms? http://www.connectblue.com/technologies/bluetooth-low-energy...
The iPhone 5S M7 coprocessor can be used all the time in background without draining the battery.
[quote]
The new M7 coprocessor is like a sidekick to the A7 chip. It’s designed specifically to measure motion data from the accelerometer, gyroscope, and compass — a task that would normally fall to the A7 chip. But M7 is much more efficient at it. Now fitness apps that track physical activity can access that data from the M7 coprocessor without constantly engaging the A7 chip. So they require less battery power.
M7 knows when you’re walking, running, or even driving. For example, Maps switches from driving to walking turn-by-turn navigation if, say, you park and continue on foot. And if your phone hasn’t moved for a while, like when you’re asleep, M7 reduces network pinging to spare your battery.
[/quote]
It does but most of the implementations I have tried (Including multiple PAID ones in the app store) don't work well at all. I would settle for locking when I walk away then tap to unlock when I get back.
one question - does this use the real Mac login screen or some less-secure alternative? a lot of similar apps I've seen used the latter which is a dealbreaker from a security POV, & it would be great if Knock differs in this respect
This is exactly DH0 [1]. I will therefore take the high ground and respond with DH1, "Of course you would say that, you're an anonymous internet troll. Crawl back into your cave."
I'd have bought it already if not for my MacBookPro not supporting "low power bluetooth".
The sales pitch admittedly has nothing to do with the technology - yet that's practically the point! There's no specs to sell, no user interface to demo beyond a "knock knock" so simple you don't even have to take the phone out of your pocket. There's almost nothing to sell, yet what there is has value ($4, ok); how do you sell that? A just-a-guy in casual attire in a simple & slightly non-sequitur space works just fine. Simple product, presumably easy development, first-mover advantage (this thing will have a thousand duplicates overnight), near-zero ad production cost.
As for complaints about security: this is like the iOS fingerprint reader...it's not for serious security against serious attackers, it's about just locking your front door while making it easy for you to get in.
The point of these things was most likely a marketing strategy, and one that will likely be effective. I bought it. Not because of the jeans. Not because of the vintage storage space. Because it's a good product.
I wouldn't have bought it if there wasn't a decent presentation of the functionality. And that is there.
Please stop making a big deal about how you don't like hipster beards.
It really makes HN look like pretentious douchebags instead of intelligent thinkers.
It makes HN people look like the have no understanding of marketing.
If you're going to criticize the marketing, do it from a metrics perspective, rather than being exactly what you're claiming to hate by telling people to stop being hipsters - arrogant.
Let people be who they are. Measure them by their output and their product, and the effectiveness of their decisions. Not on whether or not they conform to your taste/style.
I get it - if you have design critiques, it makes sense to share those. If you have marketing critiques, it makes sense to share those (like: "If you market this to hipsters, you will not get the hipster-hating crowd to buy"). If you have a personal soap box of despise for another person's tastes, please do not bring it here.