Daily Dictionary’s New Watch App Showcases the Latest watchOS Capabilities

Developer Benjamin Mayo released an update this week to his new word of the day app, Daily Dictionary. Version 1.2 adds an Apple Watch app, making it easy and convenient to view each day’s featured word from your wrist.

Daily Dictionary’s Watch app is particularly noteworthy due to its complications for the Series 4’s Infograph faces, and its custom UI for notifications. For complications, you can use a smaller option containing the app’s logo which serves as a launcher, or you can select a larger complication that includes the logo alongside the word of the day itself. If you’d like it to, the larger complication can also display the current date, saving you the need for a separate date complication elsewhere on the face.

One of the ways Daily Dictionary can provide its featured word each day is through a push notification, and if you have the new Watch app installed, you’ll get to see a custom notification UI that reflects the design of the full iOS app. Watch developers can take advantage of APIs that enable crafting more customizable notification interfaces, and Daily Dictionary is a great example of that. Now that the Apple Watch is becoming a more mainstream product, and since one of the Watch’s chief strengths is as a notification conduit, I hope we see lots of apps follow Daily Dictionary’s example in providing more creative Watch notifications.

Daily Dictionary is available on the App Store.