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Modernizing Faces in watchOS 6
- Thread starter Internet Enzyme
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The noise app is S4 exclusive? Thats interesting. The noise app's complication is the most dynamic complication
It is. They changed both microphone and speaker on the S4, so might not be possible on the older models
SOmething I just noticed in beta 3: California has way more color options and “off white” is now “cream”. These are “canary yellow”. I kind of wish the colors filled full screen rather then being accents but i suppose this is fine
It’s actually way less distracting and easier to discerne information. I’m sure Apple got a lot of criticism for the info-graph face being WAY too busy and hard to read or else they would have kept it as is.
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I have an S3 and I honestly don’t like the look of all the curved complications on S4 mixed with standard ones. Seems like Apple couldn’t figure it all out and it’s now a mishmash. Pre S4 watch faces look much more coherent.
Well, they have kept the face as-is. they just added options. in my opinion these options havent been executed properly. The curved ones do have legibility problems, but I welcome them since they really do have a lot of viability in terms of information density at a glance, however strained and prolonged that glance may be
I thought that too, but meanwhile I returned to the colors.
My battery complication is on bottom left for the last two years and with monochrome setting my eyes are for bit of a millisecond missing and searching the green color. Everytime I look at my watchface. Although I KNOW that battery is bottom left.
My brain is connecting the colors to specific complications very hard:
Waterminder is the blue one
Battery is the green one
and so on.
With monochrome all looks the same. Harder to discerne.
Just my 2 cents.
seems crazy that in watchos 7 absolutely no progress has been made on this front
Apple just doesn't care about the legacy faces anymore. The biggest update you'll get to them is maybe a new colour.
Which is why they need to either drop the legacy faces or update them for the larger watch screen. SO many of them still have the single large complication at the bottom that just makes no sense anymore. Perfect example are the fire, water, vapor faces that still use these old style complications and should be updated to the newer curved style. Makes no sense as those arent even that old either. Barely 2 years ago.Apple just doesn't care about the legacy faces anymore. The biggest update you'll get to them is maybe a new colour.
I have no clue what they have been doing with watchOS over the years.
Seems like they move at a languid, incremental, conservative pace, and yet even so it doesn't feel like a mature platform. There's so much in need of updating: almost all of the system apps are in need of a refresh—Activity (now Fitness), Photos, Calendar, among others—third-party faces still aren't an option, according to devs its still a nascent SDK that's a pain to develop on, and they have all these legacy faces full of crufty old-style complications.
Apple have done some nice stuff this year like the ability for apps to have multiple complications, the redesigned watchface customization screen, sleep tracking, and the surfacing of once hidden force touch items, but I'm pretty sure that iOS 7 was a far more mature OS than watchOS 7 is.
Agreed but in all fairness Watch OS is barely 5 years old. If you think back to iOS 6/7 of 2012 (when it was 5 years old), there were plenty of issues as well.
From a development standpoint they still support the series 3 on Watch OS 7 which means those old style complications are here to stay for at least 1-2 years. At the time they stop supporting the series 3 they will be HOPEFULLY forced to update a lot of the watch faces to look much better since ALL watches sold by that time will have the larger screen of series 4/5/6
So I was curious what the Watch Face UI might look like with neumorphism from macOS Big Sur. Just added more depth to the face and perhaps even dynamic edge shadows based on wrist angle (battery consumption is an issue). So I mocked up a few ideas quick while trying not to move too far from Apple's existing design language.
i like them; I see some German Bauhaus aesthetic in them, whether that was intentional or not. Looks sorta like something from Nomos or Junghans:
Thanks! Good eye, I actually did pull inspiration from the Nomos Autobahn. That’s where I pulled some of the colors on the hands. I made a couple more concepts here if you’d like to see: https://www.zaneliu.com/neu-watchos
They look very elegant.....why can’t Apple do classic looking watch faces, the analog ones we get always seem a bit too cartoon for my liking.
Thank you! I suspect they may prefer the simpler look for clarity and battery conservation. Shadows also likely take more to display cleanly and may look bad if it’s low res. But I would definitely love to see more neumorphism and depth introduced to the watch! Feels like a natural place for it
Digital for me is definitely faster, even if just a fraction faster than analog with markings or numbers. No markings would definitely be noticiably slower to translate than with markings.
This is exactly why I love that you can swipe to multiples. Sometimes I like Mickey telling me the time; sometimes I want a lot of info right there, and other times I want to exercise.
Exactly. You have to translate analog in your brain. May be in the hundredths of seconds, but it's still slower to translate analog than to see digital and instantly know the time.