David Smith writes about changes to WatchKit Apple launched yesterday with the fifth beta of iOS 8.2:

In all my design work for my WatchKit apps the question that I keep asking is: How will this make my app more convenient to use? If I don’t have a good answer for that then I’m likely heading down the wrong path.

Watch apps shouldn’t try and be full blown apps, replicating the full functionality of their big-brother iPhone apps. Instead they should be sleek, svelte companions that take advantage of their immediate availability to their user. This leads me to the problem I’m so glad Apple has addressed. The tap distance required for the user to perform any action.

This, I hope, is how developers of the iPhone apps I use every day are thinking about Apple Watch. Making Watch apps that emphasize quick interactions in a natural and direct way instead of cramming iPhone apps into a small display.

This morning, Todoist announced an Apple Watch version of their app. Joe Rossignol writes:

Todoist aims to bring its popular to-do app for iPhone and iPad to the wrist with a simplistic Apple Watch app that will provide task management at a glance. When paired with an iPhone, the app will enable users to view their upcoming tasks and categories, reply to comments, and schedule or mark complete tasks. Todoist tells us that the video below is missing the task filter view, but plans to add the feature soon.

The past few weeks in the tech news cycle have been full of intriguing, but ultimately useless, examples of Apple Watch “concepts”. This is an actual WatchKit app coming soon to Apple Watch.

I’m excited because Todoist is my task management service of choice, and the ability to quickly mark a task as completed or defer it from my wrist could be interesting. The app looks standard – as I suspect most initial Apple Watch apps will be like – but make sure to hit the source link for a short demo video.

Also: considering Todoist’s integration with IFTTT and Zapier, how cool would it be to trigger automated workflows from an Apple Watch?

I missed this update to the Apple Watch website when Apple refreshed it last week (via TUAW). The Watch microsite has been updated with more details for timekeeping and fitness features, revealing more details about customizable complications, watch faces, fitness and activity tracking, and more.

Timekeeping:

Many watches include a few specialized functions — known in watchmaking as complications — that go beyond telling the time. But Apple Watch comes with a full range that can be added to most faces. Some complications are traditional, such as moon phases or sunrises and sunsets. And some are unique to Apple Watch, like stock quotes, weather reports, your next calendar event, and a daily activity tracker. When you tap a complication, Apple Watch opens the corresponding app.

New Ways to Connect:

Use the built-in speaker and microphone for quick chats, or seamlessly transfer calls to your iPhone for longer conversations. To mute an incoming call, just cover Apple Watch with your hand.

Health and Fitness:

Apple Watch shows your daily activity at a glance. To see your progress and trends over longer periods of time, there’s Fitness, an Apple Watch companion app on your iPhone. You can view your activity history, workouts, and achievements by the day, week, or month. And the Fitness app can share your activity and workout data with the Health app on your iPhone, where it can be accessed by your favorite third-party health and fitness apps.

You can read our original overview of the Apple Watch here.

Following the release of WatchKit earlier this week, I’ve been reading through the documentation and listened to what developers had to say about it. Here’s my original roundup of links and tweets. Below, other interesting reads from around the web.

Serenity Caldwell has an excellent overview of Apple’s announcements at iMore:

Tapping and swiping continue to be the primary way of interacting with all iOS apps, Apple Watch included. The watch has a few new swipe gestures, including a left edge swipe (to return to the previous screen) and a swipe up from the bottom (which activates Glances). Pinch-to-zoom and other multi-finger gestures don’t exist on the Apple Watch; instead, you’re presumably expected to use the device’s Digital Crown to zoom in and out. There’s also Force Touch, a long-press action that activates the menu or important contextual buttons within an app.

John Gruber compares WatchKit to the iPhone in 2007:

In a sense, this is like 2007 all over again. The native APIs almost certainly aren’t finished, and battery life is a huge concern. But with the Watch, Apple is ahead of where they were with the iPhone.

MG Siegler notes that the Apple Watch will be highly dependent on the iPhone:

To that end, the Apple Watch is more of a “widget watch” — that is, it displays content which are less like apps and more like the widgets found in the notifications drop-down on iOS devices. (And yes, they require iPhone apps as a base.) And that shows the importance of iOS 8, which first introduced these widgets to third-party developers. For the first couple months of iOS 8, these widgets were pretty clunky. It’s only now that developers are starting to smooth out the kinks and make these widgets more useful and performant. And this will clearly be key for the Apple Watch as well.

Craig Hockenberry posted a technical overview of the new developer technologies in WatchKit with plenty of good advice:

Once you have the PDF to give you an idea of the physical size, you can then start to see how your design works at that scale. Thibaut has already made the world’s ugliest watch and it’s doing important information design work. Here it is showing a simulated scroll view and exploring glance interactions.

These physical interactions with your designs are incredibly important at this point. Wondering why the scroll indicator only appears in the upper-right corner while you scroll your view? I was until I realized that’s where the digital crown is physically located.

In his thoughts on WatchKit, Nick Heer takes a look at the new Apple font, San Francisco:

San Francisco Text — that’s the one for smaller text sizess — has similar metrics to Helvetica Neue. Not the same, but if you squint a little, kind of close enough, and closer still to the metrics of Lucida Grande. Perhaps this is eventually the new UI font for all Apple interfaces. It certainly would be more of a distinct signature face than Helvetica, and it would be more legible, too.

And last, some early mockups of third-party Apple Watch apps.

Since WatchKit arrived yesterday it has been all hands on deck building @UseHours for the Apple Watch. Super fun! pic.twitter.com/5z19YtLvHt

— Jeremy Olson (@jerols) November 19, 2014

#Workflow #WatchKit pic.twitter.com/bqckw5AVDv

— Ari Weinstein (@AriX) November 20, 2014

Catch a sneak peek of Wunderlist for #AppleWatch http://t.co/agxNCyPNWO pic.twitter.com/LzchMTgC4z

— Wunderlist (@Wunderlist) September 22, 2014

David Smith comments on today’s launch of WatchKit for developers:

Apple took a clever approach to handling the extremely constrained power environment of the Watch (at least initially). To start with 3rd Party apps will run in a split mode. The Watch itself handling the UI parts of the app with an iPhone based app extension doing all the heavy lifting and computation. This is architected in such a way as to enhance interactivity (it isn’t just a streamed movie) while still keeping the Watch components very lightweight.

As he notes, Apple enabled more than he was expecting for this first release.

What’s impressive after reading some documentation and thoughts from developers today is the technology that’s powering WatchKit remote apps – Extensions. Initially, many of us assumed that extensibility in iOS 8 would just be about sharing files between apps, but it’s turning out to much more.

With a press release, Apple just announced the availability of WatchKit, a set of tools that will allow developers to extend their apps to the Apple Watch before the device’s release. WatchKit is available alongside a new iOS 8.2 beta for registered iOS developers.

“Apple Watch is our most personal device ever, and WatchKit provides the incredible iOS developer community with the tools they need to create exciting new experiences right on your wrist,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “With the iOS 8.2 beta SDK, developers can now start using WatchKit to create breakthrough new apps, Glances and actionable notifications designed for the innovative Apple Watch interface and work with new technologies such as Force Touch, Digital Crown and Taptic Engine.”

In the press release, Apple included quotes from ESPN, Instagram, and American Airlines, which are already building apps and features for the Apple Watch.

“Apple Watch allows us to make the Instagram experience even more intimate and in the moment,” says Kevin Systrom, co-founder and CEO of Instagram. “With actionable notifications you can see and instantly like a photo or react with an emoji. The Instagram news and watch list allows you to see your friends’ latest photos, follow new accounts and get a real-time view of your likes and comments.”

Apple also launched a WatchKit website and confirmed that developers will be able to create “fully native apps for Apple Watch” later next year.

The WatchKit website includes design guidelines, programming guides, templates, and more. As explained by Apple, WatchKit apps consist of an iPhone app extension and other assets loaded directly on the Apple Watch, and developers will be able to start building Glances and actionable notifications with WatchKit and the iOS 8.2 beta today.

Read more

Vogue has published an in-depth profile of Jony Ive today, revealing details of Ive’s friendship with Marc Newson, his passion for handcrafted objects, and the design process of the Apple Watch.

From the article:

Five years later, a disenchanted Ive was about to leave when Jobs returned to reboot the then-floundering Apple, which happened, by most analyses, when Jobs enabled Ive. By Ive’s account, the two hit it off immediately. “It was literally the meeting showing him what we’d worked on,” Ive says, “and we just clicked.” Ive talks about feeling a little apart, like Jobs. “When you feel that the way you interpret the world is fairly idiosyncratic, you can feel somewhat ostracized and lonely”—big laugh here—“and I think that we both perceived the world in the same way.”

And U2’s Bono on Ive and Newson:

“They’re a bit like non-identical twins separated at birth,” jokes Bono. They finish each other’s sentences. “They finish each other’s food,” adds Bono. “The kind of emotional and physical attraction people develop with Apple products shouldn’t really be possible, but take a look around you.” Friends marvel as Ive shifts from the guy cracking jokes to the solemn Sir Jonathan Ive. “Jony is deadly serious,” says Bono, who first met Ive when Jobs dispatched him to an Irish pub to salvage a U2–Apple iPod promotion. “He is also serious fun to be around. When you go out for a pint with Jony, it’s kind of like going for a pint with the future, which is cool except you know he’s not telling you what they’ve really got planned.”

According to the article, Vogue was given a private demo of the Apple Watch weeks ahead of the product’s announcement. Yesterday, Apple organized a special event at the Colette boutique in Paris that marked the public debut of the Apple Watch.