Right now there's so many things that frustrate me about the current crop of watch faces, and yet they could all be fixed so easily with a little work to complications.
In the last week or so I've grown to like the chronograph watch face. Access to the stopwatch in a single press has been incredibly useful to me. I think it genuinely looks nice. Yet there's so much more that could be done.
There's a prime empty spot to the left of the watch face, opposite the date. Why not put an optional world/UTC clock or battery dial in there? If someone has no use for it, fine, but it feels like it's a shift away from skeumorphism purely for the sake of shifting; my previous watch (citizen Skyhawk) managed multiple in dial dials just fine. And at the other end of the spectrum, the top dial serves no purpose unless the stopwatch is active. The watch face itself makes good use of the Apple Watch hardware (dynamically changing from hour markers to whatever time scale is chosen for the chronograph) so why can't the top dial be more useful outside of timing, and simply change to mark minutes/longer periods when activated? It does literally nothing until the stopwatch is active and when the stopwatch is active it takes over the entire face anyway so it'd make no difference if it did something else at other times.
Beyond the analog face, the stopwatch function proves a single long complication would fit just as well under the chronograph as the two smaller ones in each corner do.
I'd like to be able to customise the complication at the bottom to be either one long like the utility or two as is the current layout. I actually think that being able to force the complications to be in circles like the colour face might be another improvement; few of them match the aesthetic of the stopwatch and activity rings above, but I'm not sure if that's necessary.
Of course, being able to customise the top and bottom of the watch face could bring tangible benefits to the other analog faces - Mickey could gain an extra complication. moreover, utility and simple would no longer have pros and cons over the other and you could simply chose whichever style of analog face you preferred with the option of having a longer or two small complications below.
Colour, simple and utility could potentially be rolled into one analog face with 3 dial styles and a choice of simple or colour style colour matching circular complications (but with more personalisation comes more complexity, we're definitely talking five or six pages of options here to set up and it may be going too far). But even if they were kept as three discrete faces, it'd be relatively easy to allow crossover between simple and utility in the complication layout.
Speaking of complications, I still think they'd potentially have some use on photo faces but he question is how? For starters they could allow the date to be replaced with a custom complication, and perhaps mirror that also in the top left (small ones, optional for those who want it to remain uncluttered as now).
The final gripe I see is with modular and the lack of seconds. With the time in the top right they've kind of dug a hole for themselves there. One assumes they'll have to rewrite it to allow complication on the left + time as now OR time in hours:minutes:seconds without a top left complication.
Has anyone got any thoughts?
In the last week or so I've grown to like the chronograph watch face. Access to the stopwatch in a single press has been incredibly useful to me. I think it genuinely looks nice. Yet there's so much more that could be done.
There's a prime empty spot to the left of the watch face, opposite the date. Why not put an optional world/UTC clock or battery dial in there? If someone has no use for it, fine, but it feels like it's a shift away from skeumorphism purely for the sake of shifting; my previous watch (citizen Skyhawk) managed multiple in dial dials just fine. And at the other end of the spectrum, the top dial serves no purpose unless the stopwatch is active. The watch face itself makes good use of the Apple Watch hardware (dynamically changing from hour markers to whatever time scale is chosen for the chronograph) so why can't the top dial be more useful outside of timing, and simply change to mark minutes/longer periods when activated? It does literally nothing until the stopwatch is active and when the stopwatch is active it takes over the entire face anyway so it'd make no difference if it did something else at other times.
Beyond the analog face, the stopwatch function proves a single long complication would fit just as well under the chronograph as the two smaller ones in each corner do.
I'd like to be able to customise the complication at the bottom to be either one long like the utility or two as is the current layout. I actually think that being able to force the complications to be in circles like the colour face might be another improvement; few of them match the aesthetic of the stopwatch and activity rings above, but I'm not sure if that's necessary.
Of course, being able to customise the top and bottom of the watch face could bring tangible benefits to the other analog faces - Mickey could gain an extra complication. moreover, utility and simple would no longer have pros and cons over the other and you could simply chose whichever style of analog face you preferred with the option of having a longer or two small complications below.
Colour, simple and utility could potentially be rolled into one analog face with 3 dial styles and a choice of simple or colour style colour matching circular complications (but with more personalisation comes more complexity, we're definitely talking five or six pages of options here to set up and it may be going too far). But even if they were kept as three discrete faces, it'd be relatively easy to allow crossover between simple and utility in the complication layout.
Speaking of complications, I still think they'd potentially have some use on photo faces but he question is how? For starters they could allow the date to be replaced with a custom complication, and perhaps mirror that also in the top left (small ones, optional for those who want it to remain uncluttered as now).
The final gripe I see is with modular and the lack of seconds. With the time in the top right they've kind of dug a hole for themselves there. One assumes they'll have to rewrite it to allow complication on the left + time as now OR time in hours:minutes:seconds without a top left complication.
Has anyone got any thoughts?
