A weird question (or two) about the Apple Watch…

[Saturn007]

Put this one into the ranks of the strangest questions asked about the Watch:

Is there any Watch face that doesn't show the time?

Or, is there any way of displaying an app's screen or other screen in place of the time or Watch face?

Often, when I’m writing, exercising, or stargazing, I do NOT want to know time it is. The date would be OK.

A related question would be:

Is there any BLANK Watch face upon which one can add whichever complications they wish to, including whether to display the date or time?

Whatever happened to that wicked cool Astronomy Watch face that permitted time changes and seeing the planets' positions change? I believe the more general feature was called “Time Travel”…

 

[Night Spring]

The Astronomy face is still there, it's never gone away. Not sure why you are having trouble finding it. Where are you looking?

As for not wanting to see the time, you could set the watch to not turn on when you raise your wrist, so you don't see the time unless you tap the watch. Personally, I find that watch faces with just the hands and no numbers help me ignore the time because I'm bad at telling the time from just the hand positions. ;p

I believe there's a setting that makes the watch show the last app you opened instead of a watch face, but I don't know if you can use that to never show a face.

And I agree with you it'd be nice if we could have a "watch face" where we could use the time spot for another complication, because I'm constantly wanting to squeeze in another complication, and having that extra complication would be better than having the time -- if I wanted to see time, I could swipe to a face that showed time.

 

[Mr.Blacky]

Just don't look on your watch, if you don't want to know what time it is. ?

 

[waw74]

you can turn off the always on display, meaning you'd need to raise your wrist, tap the display or turn the crown to see the time. (you can disable raise to wake also)

there's also theater mode which does pretty much the same thing, it turns off always on, and raise to wake, and it also puts it in silent mode, (you'll still get taps for alerts) you can either tap the display or turn the crown to see the time or look at an alert. The advantage of theater mode is being able to swap in and out of "normal" mode pretty easily with a tap in control center on the watch, as opposed to changing multiple settings.

with do not disturb and the new focus options on the phone, you can configure which people or apps can alert you when you're in writing mode. .
when you do get alerts, you'll probably see the time if you check them.

you can also set theater mode using shortcuts and automations, if you were to make a "writing mode" focus on your phone, you could have it automatically turn on theater mode on the watch when you enabled that focus.

 

[Saturn007]

Appreciate the input and ideas!

Top bad there isn't a blank canvas option — to put whatever you want there and customize to your heart's delight.

Don't have a watch — yet. Sounds like the Astronomy face is still there, but I thought it lost features.

As to the related, disappearing Time Travel feature,

“Time Travel, a rarely-used Apple Watch feature, is going the way of the dodo bird—not because it sucked but over low usage.”​

”I’m kinda bummed because I used this feature all the time to see upcoming events, reminders, meetings and other schedules, to see if it’s going to rain on my commute home and what not.​

You could even put a watch face sporting flight times, date and battery level, and Time Travel could estimate how much battery you’d have left, say, two hours from now.”​

https://www.idownloadblog.com/2018/08/20/apple-watch-time-travel-watchos-5/

But he did report

” Astronomy: The Earth rotation could be controlled through Time Travel​

​

Animation control in the Solar and Astronomy watch face will remain present in the public release of watchOS 5: turning the Digital Crown will still animates these faces as you scrub through time. Some third-party apps supported Time Travel with custom complications.”​

And, this

https://www.reddit.com/r/AppleWatch/comments/aed3hj

​

​

Response: “Yeah, you have to do it as a face customization now. So you force press and tap “customize” at the bottom.​

Not as convenient, but you can now have complications. So it’s a trade off.”​

​

 

[Night Spring]

Watch OS5! We are on OS8 now! You are talking about changes that are ancient history. I'd quite forgotten that you used to be able to swap among Earth, Moon and Solar System in the Astronomy face. I now have all 3 faces set on my watch, and swipe sideways when I want to switch. It probably takes the same amount of time as the old way -- if you are doing a single swipe, it's a little faster, two swipes is a bit more effort. I never thought that change was a big deal.

As for Time Travel, I only ever used it with the Astronomy and Solar faces, which still have it. (Solar is now part of the Astronomy face, btw.) I never knew it worked with any other faces. Perhaps because Apple didn't turn it on by default, so I never knew that was possible. Would I have used it had I known? Hard to tell. For weather, just a tap on a weather complication takes you to a view that shows the predictions for the next 24 hours. Come to think of it, it's probably faster that way to see the weather 12 hours from now, than to scroll the crown until you are 12 hours ahead. Calendar -- tap a complication for the calendar app, then scroll through the list of events in your calendar. Apart from the initial tap, it's the same effort -- scrolling until you see the event you are looking for. In other words, Time Travel was a cool effect, but not that practical, and likely not used by many.

 

[Saturn007]

Glad to hear that the new approach works well.

Ancient history?! LOL! Just a couple of years back, and only a couple of OSs…. But in tech time, I guess that's the Mesozoic Era!

 

[Night Spring]

Ancient history?! LOL! Just a couple of years back, and only a couple of OSs…. But in tech time, I guess that's the Mesozoic Era!

Well, yeah, tech moves fast! *g*

More to the point, when you use it everyday, you just don't dwell on how things were three years ago. I honestly had forgotten that the Astronomy face used to be a single face with different views -- I vaguely remembered that something changed a few OS back, but I couldn't remember precisely what changed. So in that sense, it feels like ancient history to me.