Learn from the iOS and Mac community’s top designers and personalities right in the heart of San Francisco.

I love being in San Francisco during Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference: It’s a great way to catch up with friends and other awesome folks in the community, and there are always so many interesting events outside of Moscone West that make it possible.

It’s one of the big reasons I’m thrilled to say I’ll be presenting at Layers, Jessie Char and Elaine Pow’s new conference centered around iOS and Mac design.

It’s such a smart move to have a design-focused conference during the relatively developer-focused WWDC — the Apple community has lots of events built around development and the lifestyle of the community, but there are very few events focused solely on design. This gives iOS and Mac designers a great event to attend while their developer co-workers are over in Moscone, and from what Jessie’s told me so far about her plans for Layers, I couldn’t be more excited about it. Good location, delicious snacks, and oh man, the people.

In partnership with Adobe, Jessie and Elaine have lined up an all-star crew to host, speak, and entertain during Layers. This includes Susan Kare, who designed the original Macintosh icons; Adam Lisagor, who’s made just about every great video for a third-party iOS app; Christa and Neven Mrgan, designers from Rogue Amoeba and Panic, respectively; longtime community members Merlin Mann and Scott Simpson, who also happen to do a monthly nerdy standup show called Three Ring Binder together… There are too many great people to list, so you’ll just have to go to the website and look at them all.

The conference runs June 8-10 at Bespoke on Market Street in San Francisco; you can check out more information and pick up tickets on the official Layers website.

If you’re in the middle of a workout with Apple Watch and something comes up, you can easily pause it.

For most of us, our workouts are timed and we want the data our Apple Watch collects to be as accurate as possible. But what happens if we get a phone call, or something urgent comes up that interrupts the middle of a workout? If you’re using the built-in Workout app, pausing your workout is just as easy as completing it. Here’s how!

How to quickly pause a workout on Apple Watch

1. Press firmly on the screen of your Apple Watch during your workout.
2. Tap on Pause.
3. You can confirm your workout is paused by looking in the upper left hand corner.
4. When you’re ready to resume your workout, press firmly on the screen again.
5. Tap on Resume.

Avengers: Age of Ultron opens tomorrow in the US. It has been three long years since we’ve seen Marvel’s squad of superheroes team up against a common foe, and fans are hyped! What better way get even more hyped before the film (or keep the hype going after it ends) than a game featuring not only all of the Avengers, but also loads more Marvel characters all teaming up to save the world?

Today Netmarble released just such a game on mobile: Marvel Future Fight. The game lets players collect and build up a team of good and bad guys from the Marvel movies and comics and then put them to work stopping an interdimensional threat. Most excitingly, Marvel Future Fight actually looks and plays really well – it’s practically a successor to the Marvel Ultimate Alliance series.

Heroes and villains team up against a common threat

Marvel Future Fight features a story penned by Peter David, co-creator of Spider-Man 2099 and a prolific comics author. The narrative comes to life between levels through pictures of characters talking to each other – not the most exciting way to tell a story. And yet, the writing is actually quite clever! David nails the banter and humor we expect our heroes to rely on when the chips are down, and even jokes about the robotic villain Ultron’s origin having been changed in the latest Avengers movie.

The premise revolves around a mysterious apocalypse that has all but destroyed the future world. To save humankind from disaster, a dying Nick Fury sends the female robot Jocasta back in time to warn the Avengers. She must help them – and the player – build a team of heroes and villains strong enough to stop the dimension-hopping villains and save the world!

Heroes on a mission

Players start out with a team of three popular Avengers: Iron Man, Captain America (my fave), and Black Widow. You’ll take these heroes (and eventually others) out on a sprawling main campaign consisting of nine chapters, each with multiple missions to play through. Being a free to play game, it costs energy to go on these missions – you know the drill.

Once in battle, you have the choice of two control schemes: 1-Touch or Pad. The 1-Touch style lets you tap anywhere on screen to move there, and tap enemies to attack them. Pad adds a virtual stick on the left and an attack button on the right. Both styles have on-screen buttons for each character’s special moves, like Captain America’s shield throw and Hawkeye’s arrow barrage. I prefer the Pad style.

Running through short levels and pounding on bad guys proves quite fun. You can switch between your trio of heroes at any time. Each mission culminates in a boss, the first of which is (naturally) Ultron. You’ll want to call in Striker (helper) characters to help deal with these stronger foes.

Collect them all

At launch, Marvel Future Fight has over 30 characters to collect, including the standard movie Avengers, Spider-Man and some of his friends and enemies, Thor’s foes Loki and Malekith, and many more. You can unlock a character by finding a sufficient number of ”Biometrics” for that character. These can be won from completing missions or by spending premium currency on Dimensions Chests, which award random prizes.

Marvel Future Fight has many of the trappings of the free to play format, such as the annoying energy mechanic. And eventually the missions start to get pretty hard, which will necessitate either some grinding or the purchase of premium currency.

Still, the game looks great, with faithful renditions of movie costumes for the characters who appear in films and comic costumes for those who haven’t. The familiar action-RPG gameplay and strong writing help make Future Fight a fight worth having for Marvel fans.

• Free – Download Now

ABI Research has taken apart the Apple Watch’s S1 computer-on-a-chip.

Let’s get this out of the way — it’s going to be really hard to properly identify what Apple’s doing withe S1 due to the amount of custom silicon they’re doing these days, but it’s still interesting to see the educated guesses that are surfacing about the heart of the Apple Watch. This time it’s ABI Research, and what they found was surprisingly similar to the iPhone and iPad:

”The design is an obvious variation from Apple’s smartphones, with many high-end functions / chips included that normally would not be found in a simple watch,” comments Jim Mielke, VP Engineering at ABI Research and head of the TeardownIQ group.

Unlike Apple’s custom A8 chip, which combines the CPU, GPU, and RAM onto a single die, the S1 packs in an entire computer system into a single, sealed package. These include the Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and NFC radios and the 8GB of on-board storage.

Source: ABI Research

If you have an Apple Watch, the Activity app lets you track activities and view your progress both on the Watch and your iPhone.

Looking for more fitness data than the Workout and Activity apps on your Apple Watch can provide? Look no further than your iPhone: All the data you collect on your watch will automatically be synced with a companion Activity app on your smartphone. This is where you can view further information on your daily movement goals and activities, as well as workout summaries and any achievements you’ve earned along the way. Follow along and we’ll show you how!

How to view daily progress and workouts with the Activity app for iPhone

1. Launch the Activity app on your iPhone.
2. Tap on the History tab to view a detailed breakdown of your activity, including workouts.
3. Tap on the Month view in the top left corner to easily tab through weeks and months.
4. Tap on any day and scroll up or down to view all recorded data from the Watch’s Activity and Workout apps.

How to view your achievements with the Activity app for iPhone

1. Launch the Activity app on your iPhone.
2. Tap on the Achievements tab to view all the awards you’ve earned so far.
3. Tap on any achievement to see what you did — or still have to do — in order to earn it.