Apple Faces is an interesting project started by Poulos Collective which shares custom wallpapers that you can use on your Apple Watch operating watchOS 2.0. The neat thing about Apple Faces is each one is designed to match a color combination of your watches body and strap.
Hit the source link below and happy customizing.
After a small delay due to a last minute bug, watchOS 2.0 was unleashed to the world on September 21st. The new update brings a bevy of new features which makes the wearable feel like a more complete device and in my opinion unofficially brings it out of beta. I spent a few days with the new OS looking for tricks and tips I could share with you. Here are my findings.
New to watchOS 2.0 is the ability for developers to have their apps install directly on the watch hardware. This allows for apps to run much quicker than before. Previously apps would launch via a paired iPhone's Bluetooth/Wi-Fi connection which offered quite a bit of lag and delay. While the experience isn't perfect with 2.0 it's much better than it was when the watch launched.
Native third party apps are slowly being updated and rolling out into the App Store. One of my current favorites is Dark Sky which also brought along third party complications. More on that later.
Now when you plug your watch in to charge at night you can lay it on its side to activate Nightstand Mode. This allows the watch to act like an alarm clock. The display illuminates when you touch the screen and the digital crown acts as a snooze button for the alarm.
One of the cooler, undocumented features is the way the screen lights up when your alarm is close to going off.
This one is my favorite. By rotating the Digital Crown in either direction you can quickly scroll through your day in Time Travel mode. Rotating the crown will change the time, calendar and even the weather. By pressing the Digital Crown once you will return to the current time.
A small but useful addition to the settings is the ability to change the wake timeframe for the watch screen. Simply go to the watch app on your iPhone and navigate to Settings>General>Wake Screen.
You now have the option to increase the timeout to 70 seconds which is much more preferable.
A bunch of new features and tweaks were added to the Music app in watchOS 2.0. As you would expect Apple added some additional Apple Music features, mainly a shortcut to listen to Beats 1 directly from the watch. You can now "love" your favorite songs from the Now Playing screen. When you're browsing the Music app menu you can now swipe down from the top of the list to reveal a music source selection menu.
watchOS 2.0 includes Activation Lock, a new security feature. Activating your watch requires your iCloud Apple ID and password, so in the event that your Apple Watch is lost or stolen, your information remains safe. This feature behaves in a similar way as the iPhone Activation Lock.
You can now reply to email in various ways. When you receive a new email simply tap on the reply button at the bottom of the message. You are presented with a menu that allows you to dictate a response, send an emoji or use one of the provided, relevant quick replies.
Once developers start rolling them out third party complications are going to be the killer feature of watchOS 2.0. You can now use third party complications to launch quickly into the respective apps. My favorite so far is Dark Sky. The smaller complication changes to a SOON! umbrella when rain will begin shortly and shows the temperature when no rain is imminent. Pressing on the complication launches you directly into the app.
I'm really looking forward to the Fantastical complication to replace the default calendar which should be available in the next few weeks.
watchOS 2.0 brought some new watch faces. All of them involve using photos as your face. My personal favorite is the Photo Album option. You can setup the album you want to sync to the watch by opening the Watch app on your phone and navigating to My Watch>Photos>Synced Album.
Here are the new watch face options:
Tip: As an added bonus you can now use multiple colors when customizing the Modular face including a multi-color activity ring complication and colored battery complication.
This one is pretty useful. You can now use Siri to pull up glances. Even better you can ask Siri to launch glances that are not currently enabled in your settings. Simply invoke Siri and ask to her to "open the <insert glance here>" and it will pop up.
Those are some of the best features from watchOS 2.0. There are plenty of great resources and reviews of watchOS 2.0 around the web. Some of my favorite articles I have read so far come from Macstories and iMore.
If you know of any additional tips and tricks that I may have missed drop them in the comments.
Enjoy watchOS 2.0!
I know what you're saying. Not another Apple Watch review. When it comes to adopting Apple products I dipped my toes into the Apple Watch pool a bit later than I normally would. The watch was announced in September 2014 and found its release in April 2015. I told myself I would not be an early adopter but certain circumstances and life events "forced" me to hop onto the Apple online store and place an order for one.
I've now been using it for two months and wanted to get my thoughts out about the hardware, software and features I use to help integrate it into my life. This won't be a long drawn out review but a breakdown of three of the major elements of the watch: Hardware, Software and Apps.
This is the number one question I get on a daily basis from colleagues and friends. The interesting thing is this is one of the harder pieces of tech to demo to an audience. It's not a device that you can whip out and hand to someone to fiddle with. That's the whole point of the Apple Watch. It's not a device you spend a lot of time on/in/with. It's a complimentary device. The second you take it off it's locked down with a password. You can show off some apps and glances and all the wonderful watch faces that you can customize but the second you turn your wrist outwards to display the watch to an audience the screen shuts off.
I find the best way to explain to someone how the watch works and what its coolest features are is to simply let them try it on and fiddle around with it for a while. This is a lot more of a personal experience than handing someone your phone to test out. I wouldn't say it's on par with Jerry letting Kramer borrow his bathing suit but you get my drift. Strap it on their wrist and start sending them SMS messages, phone calls, emails and let them experience the haptic feedback and the sheer ease in triaging your daily notifications and reminders. The subtle tap on the wrist letting you know you have something to attend to is a lot less jarring than the usual iPhone notification.
As I mentioned the watch is meant to be a complementary device to your phone. Not something you spend hours immersed in. I find myself reaching less for my phone and being much less rude in public every time my phone makes a bleep or bloop. The subtle tap on the wrist alerts you of a message and keeps your incoming alerts private from others around you. I found myself disabling more and more notifications that I would normally get on my iPhone simply because they just proved to be less important than I originally thought. I had not realized just how many apps I had enabled to push me notifications.
The Apple Watch itself is a beautiful piece of technology. I was originally on the fence as I hate large watches mainly due to my tiny wrist. The 38mm and 42mm options sounded nice but when I thought about the rectangular shaped face I figured the watch would look like a monstrosity on me. I decided to take advantage of an Apple Store Try-On Appointment and check it out for myself. To my surprise, not only did the 42mm watch fit comfortably, it didn't look like the oversized watch I thought it would be. It was light, discreet and comfortable while still providing a large enough screen for me to get tasks done. I spent a good 15 minutes trying on various bands and color combinations. There were a few common themes. All the bands were extremely comfortable. The color choices were all tastefully designed and while bright colors are not my cup of tea I could see myself finding a place to wear the blue or white bands.
After wearing the watch for a good 20 minutes I found myself not even realizing it was on my wrist. It's that light of a watch and so comfortable I was immediately sold. Strapping the watch to your wrist has a bit of a learning curve to it as each band has a unique method for clasping to your wrist. After a few days of using the sport band it has become rather easy to attach. Keep this in mind. This is a piece of clothing. The most important thing is that it doesn't make you uncomfortable.
During the try-on appointment the watch was in a demo mode so the ability to mess around with apps and other features was not possible. I could tell from the on screen demo the watch was snappy enough. The watch sports an Apple S1 processor and includes 8GB of storage space. If I could have walked out of the store with a watch on my wrist that day I would have.
Once receiving the watch I was finally able to test out the internal hardware. All built in apps such as the calendar and activity were very responsive and suffered no lag in load times and operation. I found myself being very careful about which third party apps I installed. I recommend opting not to have the watch setup program install all apps at once and choose them one by one. Not all third party apps are functioning well at this point due to the fact they are not installed on the device itself, a feature which is coming with Watch OS 2.0 this fall.
One of the things I was worried about after purchasing the watch was the update cycle for this product. It's not going to follow the same schedule as the iPhone and I don't see myself updating this device like I would an iPhone. I'm guessing most people will be on a similar upgrade cycle like the iPad for this device. That means the internal hardware will need to stay in line with the advancements that are made in the software being developed for the device. I'm pretty impressed with the performance of this device and I suspect I won't upgrade the device for 2-3 years, if I do at all.
Overall the Apple Watch is a gorgeous and comfortable piece of hardware that can be dressed up or dressed down for any occasion. The last thing you want is a wearable that gets in the way and slows you down. The Apple Watch is responsive and its first revision of the hardware does not get in the way of using the device itself and will generally improve your workflow.
It was great to finally get my hands on my watch and dive into Watch OS. After reading all the reviews of the watch this was my biggest fear. I had doubts about actually using apps. If I was going to spend more than a few minutes in an app on the watch I might as well be using it on my phone. That is the line you need to draw when choosing apps to install on the watch. The way I look at it is if I can quickly load the app, pop in and pop out then it's a perfect candidate to be installed.
Watch OS is quite confusing at first. I set out to organize the "honeycomb" style home screen where all the apps reside. I spent a good bit of time putting third party apps to the left of the watch app and stock apps to the right. After getting everything setup and using the watch for 2 months I came to the realization that I rarely go to this screen. I would expect this is the case for most. What I find I do most when I need to access apps is to trigger them with Siri or simply use the glance. I never thought I would be using an Apple device and the apps would be the least important aspect.
The first thing you are going to do is customize the watch face. Let's face it you are going to be looking at the face every time you engage with the watch so you might as well make it perfect. I immediately fell in love with the Modular face as it allowed for the most customization and placed all your important information right on the face. You can change everything from the complications and their locations, color of the text and the number of complications themselves. I find myself changing the color of the face and text all based on the color of shirt I am wearing that day. The calendar stays prominently displayed right in the middle of the face.
Getting around the OS takes some getting used to but just like any new device once you adapt to the subtle changes it all becomes muscle memory. You invoke Siri by holding down the Digital Crown and you pull up your Apple Pay cards by double pressing on the side button. Single pressing the Digital Crown acts as a back button and single pressing the side button pulls up your favorite contacts. I haven't used the Digital Touch feature for sending sketches and heartbeats to friends yet mainly b/c I do not have any friends or family that have a watch yet. The idea to me sounds gimmicky but I assume it's much more of a personal experience when you have someone close to share them with.
The workout app is one of the standout software features of the watch. While it could use more presets (weight lifting, etc...) I find its ease of use and display of important information to be essential. I think the gamification of exercising will entice people who are not normally active or athletic to find exercise more enjoyable thus proving the watch to be an ideal complementary health device. While I was pretty active before owning the watch I find myself pushing even more to fill up all the rings on the activity monitor.
Overall the combination of iOS and Watch OS is a good fit together. The integration of notifications, messages and health have made my life much better and efficient. The performance of the software will only get better over time as Apple makes tweaks and squashes bugs. Watch OS 2.0 is promising some nice improvements, most notably allowing third party apps to be installed directly on the watch itself as well as the support for third party complications.
As I mentioned earlier using apps on the watch can be a real nuisance. Most of the things you do with the watch can be performed quite well with everything that came preinstalled. You really have to ask yourself prior to installing any apps is just how much use you would get out of them by using them on such a small screen. I based my choices on how much time I would need to spend in the app. Anymore than a minute and it makes much more sense to whip out my phone and enjoy the experience of the app on a larger screen. Using this evaluation process I narrowed down my third party app installs to a total of 20.
These are some of my favorite stock apps that came preinstalled with the watch and that I get the most use out of:
The implementation of the stock apps is really great and quite frankly if you never install one third party app you will get everything you need out of the watch. Fact is you do not need a watch version of an app (Tweetbot for example) in order to receive a notification from that app. The built in iOS notification center handles it all. In fact I am still able to interact with a Tweetbot notification by Favoriting or Retweeting right from the watch.
These are some of my favorite third party apps installed on my watch and that I get the most use out of:
Third party apps are in a weird place right now. I give developers credit as they were given limited access to the device itself and needed to develop apps that were not only useful for a watch but also optimized based on the limitations they were given. Watch OS 2.0 is going to introduce native third party apps which will improve the performance greatly. I imagine I will be giving third party apps more of a chance once the update goes live in the fall.
Here is a list of the glances I use to quickly access information on my watch (from left to right):
I try and keep my glance selection to a select handful to prevent congestion on the glance screen. If you enable too many you will find yourself endlessly scrolling through your list which defeats the purpose of the "quick glance". Try and organize them in a scheme that makes the most sense for your use. I organize mine by most used on the left to least on the right and they are categorized as best as possible.
The Apple Watch is not a device you need. It's not something that you will interact with all day like you would a phone. If you are, you are using it wrong. The watch is a complementary device and while most will consider it a pricey "accessory", if used correctly, it can add a whole new aspect to your productivity. I'm in a weird place with the watch. The luster has definitely worn off since day one. I don't find myself obsessing about the device like I would my phone. I'm typically an adopter of every iPhone model but I can't see myself upgrading the watch, if at all.
The Apple Watch adds a level of ease to your life once you get used to its operation. Apple Pay is much quicker on the watch than it is on the phone. Interacting with messages or calls is a treat but more of a novelty for me. Being able to glance at sports scores quickly is a luxury. Here is a breakdown of my likes and dislikes.
The fact of the matter is this. If I forgot to put my watch on in the morning and left for work I wouldn't even consider turning around, heading home and picking it up. My phone on the other hand would instill a small level of panic. The watch is a nonessential device.
That is where I am at with the Apple Watch. Your mileage may vary.
Edited 8/12 - Correction of 32mm to 38mm.
Apple released four new Apple Watch commercials today depicting everyday uses for the Cupertino wearable. I think these videos are great. One of the major problems I find with my watch is trying to explain to people how it fits into my everyday life. You need to remove the expectation that you are wearing a smaller iPhone on your wrist. It's a complimentary device that you are not supposed to think about. Check out the video playlist below.
One of the biggest things I've noticed since using the watch is how little I care about pulling out my phone or even worrying where it is. In the kitchen cooking and the phone is in the bedroom? No worries, call is being answered on my wrist, Dick Tracy style.
You can check out all the Apple Watch commercials and videos on Apple's YouTube channel.
