Apple Announces Native Watch Apps
Today during the World Wide Developers Conference, Apple announced a lot of new updates to the operating systems for their computers, iPhones and Apple Watch. Across the board, the upgrades to all operating systems are some of the best they've been in years, providing users and developers brand new tools and experiences on all of Apple's devices.
Across the board, Siri has been updated to become more of a proactive assistant - for example, when a number that you don't know is calling you, she will search through your emails and text messages to make a suggestion as to who that person might be. Search functionality has been upgraded as well - you can search for things like "pictures I took last July" or "emails from Gary I've ignored."
The iPad received a lot of really cool features - the biggest being multi-tasking by pulling one app up on one side of the screen and another app on the other side. You can also view video in Picture-in-Picture mode, allowing you to have it on while you send an email or text at the same time, or search Safari for something relevant to the video you are watching.
The news that excites us the most, however, is the upgrades to WatchOS with the announcement of WatchOS 2. The new operating system (out later this year) boasts the following features:
- New watch faces, such as Photo Faces or Photo Album Faces that will show you a different picture each time you look at your watch. You can also use Apple's Timelapse Faces, which show a timelapse video of a city at the exact time you are looking at it. Want to see what London looks like at night? Or New York in the middle of rush hour traffic? Timelapse Face will allow you to do just that.
- One of the cool features of the Apple Watch is that you can put different "widgets," called "Complications," on your watch face that show information from the various apps on your device. By glancing at your watch you can easily see the weather, how much battery your watch has left, what date it is, etc. With a new feature called Time Travel, you can use the Digital Crown to scroll forward in time and see how those things will change. You can see what your battery life would be like at 5:00 later this afternoon, or what the weather would be like in four hours.
- Nightstand mode turns your watch into a bed-side clock when you have it plugged in and resting on its side. It turns the Digital Crown into a snooze button and the Friends button into the off switch for your alarm clock.
- Currently, you can only have 12 friends listed when you hit the Friends button on the side of the watch. If you want to add or remove friends, you have to do it on the Apple Watch app on your phone. With the new OS, you can have different friend groups, allowing for more friends, and you can add or remove them directly from the watch itself.
There are a bunch of other features that are being rolled out with WatchOS 2, but the biggest advancement is what is now open to developers. Developers can now run native apps on Apple Watch, and they now have access to the microphone, audio and video playback, Complications for third-party apps, Health Kit, the Taptic Engine and the Digital Crown. But what does this all mean?
Currently, when an app is running on the watch, it is really just mirroring the User Interface from the phone, but all of the app logic (basically everything the app does) is stored on the phone itself. This means that everything the app is doing is coming from the phone, not the watch - causing limited capabilities and very slow loading times.
With the new operating system, developers can now put app logic directly onto the watch itself. This means brand new, stand-alone apps can be created for Apple Watch, and it also means MUCH faster loading times.
Furthermore, by giving developers access to basic functionality of the watch, such as the microphone, the Taptic Engine, etc, this opens up the entire watch for input and output capabilities. It could mean little changes, like instead of having to scroll with your finger you can use the Digital Crown, or it could mean huge changes like seeing which heart rate zone you are in while exercising. Currently, you can only see your average heart rate. That is all going to change.
This is all very exciting. With the release of iOS 9 and WatchOS 2, developers will be able to create more unique and breathtaking experiences for Apple users worldwide. Whole Wheat Creative developers have already downloaded the developer beta and are playing with it as this is being written. We can't wait to show you what we can do with these great tools.
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