Innholdsfortegnelse for The Apple Watch Book Vol. 2 i The Apple Watch Book

The new update to your Apple Watch’s operating system, watchOS 3, is packed full of new features that effectively make your smartwatch feel like a whole new device. The headline feature is undoubtedly that watchOS 3 makes your Apple Watch seven – that’s right, seven – times faster than the previous operating system allowed. That is obviously a huge improvement on what we’ve experienced before, and it’s all because your most-used apps can now be launched instantly, having been kept updated while running in the background. Accessing your most-used apps and common settings is going to be easier thanks to the new Dock layout and Control Centre features. You will notice a huge difference, as watchOS 3 also looks different, with a range of fresh new faces and quicker ways…

There are lots of different weather apps for iOS, from those that just give you a quick overview of the forecast, to those that render in beautiful detail images that paint a picture of exactly what the weather is forecast to be like in your precise location at any given time in the near future. Weather apps tell you the temperature, the wind speed, whether or not it will rain, and whether you need to wear a sun hat or not. Presenting all of that information on a smartphone screen is challenging enough; squeezing it onto the screen on an Apple Watch is bordering on miraculous. No surprise then that the Weather app isn’t going to give you up-to-the-minute, detailed information on whether you’ll need a brolly when you…

The Stopwatch app is, of course, not one that will grab all of the headlines, but it performs a function that will come in handy time and time again. Apple has used the available screen space well, and produced an interface that is incredibly easy to use, and may surprise you with its intuitive nature. We will offer a couple of tutorials that will explain what you can do with the app, and also dig down in to the detail so that you can see what goes on beneath the pleasing surface. The app is so well designed that it looks like a normal stopwatch at first glance, but it is not until you start to interact with it that the full range of features becomes apparent. Apple has cleverly…

When Siri was initially introduced to the iPhone, it was seen as a bit of a gimmick. It made mistakes, it was unable to fully understand everyone, and it took people time to get used to leaving the keyboard alone. But over time it has become a very effective tool. Its voice recognition is near impeccable, even when you are talking fluidly, and it’s able to pick up on various accents. It can handle complex and simple questions as well as a range of commands. What’s more, with the release of watchOS 3 Siri has only become even more intelligent. The small screen of the Apple Watch means using a keyboard is fiddly, so it is important that Siri is up to the task of being a perfect substitute. It…

Twitter is one of the most popular and influential social media networks in the world. With over 300 million active users, including many high-profile figures and celebrities, Twitter is your window to the world. Through simple and concise 140 character tweets, you can engage with family, friends and fans alike from your computer, mobile device and now even your Apple Watch. As long as you are logged in to the Twitter app on your paired iPhone, you can download the free app for Apple Watch from the App Store and start using most of the features you know and love from the full mobile app on your Watch. As well as seeing recent tweets and top trends, the Twitter app for Apple Watch lets you send tweets and reply to…

Evernote is one of the most popular note-taking apps around. Whether you use it to collect recipes, store up handy gardening tips or make to-do lists, it soon becomes indispensable. One of its best and most useful features is the ability to grab snippets of web pages and store them as notes, to which you add tags or annotate with your own notes. You can create multiple notebooks, share them with friends or colleagues, and even chat with your team members. Importantly, Evernote syncs all your notes with its servers (and across your devices), so whether you use it in a web browser, on a computer, or on a mobile device, you will always have access to all your data. Although Evernote is free, there are premium options that add…

Even when you live in a city for a long time, moving around it can often be a challenge. With so many people in places like London and San Francisco, it’s easy to get lost in the hustle and bustle, get confused by train and bus times, or just miss important appointments because of traffic and other delays. Of course, if you’re not a local, then the whole thing can be even more confusing and difficult – working out which platform you need, or when your approaching your stop, or even just working out the fastest method of getting from A to B – it’s all a challenge when you’re surrounded by so many people, cars and noise. If you’re anything like us, then you probably could use a handy…

There are hundreds of travel sites on the web, but none strikes fear into the heart of hoteliers and restaurant owners quite like TripAdvisor. It’s the most well-known and most widely consulted travel site there is, and unless you live on Mars, it’s more than likely that your local takeaway, pub and B&B are listed. They’ve probably also attracted some reviews, the cause of that fear, and though the star ratings might be best taken with a pinch of the restaurant’s salt, the text of those reviews is often well worth reading. Reading the reviews is only one of the things you can do on the Trip Advisor Watch app. Perhaps the best feature is the way it uses the iPhone’s location sensors to figure out where you are, find…

Use your Apple Watch to keep your Mac computer safe with Near Lock. The free app turns your iOS device or Apple Watch into a personal key for your Mac, allowing you to lock and unlock it based on your location. Whether you have a MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, iMac or Mac Pro, you’ll want to keep it and its contents safe. With Near Lock, you can set at what distance your Mac automatically locks or unlocks, ensuring that when you’re away from your computer, no one else can use it. You don’t have to just rely on your proximity to the Mac either – you can manually lock it from your iPhone or Watch too. Near Lock on Apple Watch provides an additional level of security as you can…

Finding yourself in a place you don’t know, without the means to find the nearest cash machine, bank, or even corner shop is a thing of the past now thanks to smartphones. There are lots of apps that will help you find whatever it is you need to find with the minimum of fuss. One of the best, and one which has an accompanying Watch app, is Find Near Me. Find Near Me uses your iPhone’s GPS sensor to identify your location. It has a number of preset ‘keywords’ such as ATM, bank and bar which allow you to find the establishments that are closest to you just by tapping the keyword. You can also add your own keywords to the list. When it displays results, Find Near Me shows…

Peak – Brain Training is designed to give your brain a workout. Playing its memory, creativity and problemsolving games will reveal your cognitive strengths and weaknesses and could also improve brain performance. While Peak for Apple Watch features just three games, compared to over 30 in the iPhone version, it retains the latter’s colourful graphics and addictive gameplay. Encouraging healthy brain training habits through short, regular cognitive workouts, Peak challenges you to reach new goals and attain higher scores, which makes exercising your brain a lot of fun. Peak games are designed with the help of experts in neuroscience, cognitive science and education to help ensure they offer a challenging, beneficial and most importantly, fun experience. With a host of sensors including a heart rate monitor, the Apple Watch is…

Many devices over the years have promised to change your life. However, only a few really have, from the washing machine to the freezer to the infrastructure that gave us the internet. Apple is rather adept at making lifechanging devices, though, and today it is hard to think back to the time before the iPhone was released and it is also difficult to contemplate life without a tablet – something the iPad made incredibly popular. The Apple Watch joins these two iDevices in its potential to be revolutionary. Used right, it can make a major difference to so many areas of your life. One of the first things you’ll notice once you strap the Watch to your wrist and start using it every day is that is soon feels like…

As you will have no doubt noticed, the Apple Watch does not have a camera of its own. Instead, it has an preinstalled app called Camera Remote which is intended for use with an iPhone. It allows people to use the Watch as a remote shutter release, offering a live preview of the iPhone camera from your wrist and providing the necessary tools to take one-off or timed shots that can then be reviewed. The beauty of this is that you can set up the iPhone in any position you like and then take a step back. Since the Watch depends so much on the iPhone’s camera, it gets around the problem that would undoubtedly be caused by inserting a top-level lens into such a small piece of hardware. It…

Apple has gradually overhauled its photo editing and sharing apps across iOS and the Mac OS over the last couple of years. And while the process has been met with resistance and caused controversy – not least because of the loss of Aperture, Apple’s professional photo management tool – it’s easy to understand why it made the move. For one thing, Photos is consistent across all platforms – iOS, Mac OS, and watchOS too. No matter which device you use, the app is the same and works in more or less the same way – platform limitations permitting. And if you use iCloud to sync your photos, you’ll be able to see the same pictures and the same albums on all your devices. The Apple Watch is more limited than…

Timers were once the classic feature used to demonstrate the simplicity and cleverness of Siri when it was launched, and the function works just as well on the Apple Watch. Chances are that when you need to set up a timer, your hands may be full, such as when cooking, but with the Watch you have the ability to simply speak and set one up straight away. You can also set up new timers using gestures and through tapping the screen so every method is immediately ready to use. The feature works in a standalone way, and thus setting a timer on the Watch will not create one on your iPhone, but this actually makes perfect sense, because you will likely have your Watch with you all of the time,…

Built from the ground up for iPhone, iPad and now Apple Watch, Keynote is a powerful presentation app. Keynote gives you the tools to create professionalquality presentations using a range of media, from text and images to videos. As one of the Apple’s first-party productivity apps, Keynote integrates well with Pages and Numbers. If you’re more familiar with Microsoft Office applications, you can think of Keynote as Apple’s version of PowerPoint. Keynote for Apple Watch lets you control your presentation remotely. Start, pause and transition between slides with a tap of your Watch. Although you can’t create or edit presentations on the Watch, it works well as a remote control for your mobile or desktop presentations. Using Keynote, your Watch has the ability to save time and actually improve your…

Facebook doesn’t actually have an Apple Watch app. The social media giant doesn’t believe that the smartwatch has enough screen real estate to provide a good user experience. It hasn’t done Twitter any harm, but Facebook’s news feed can look messy at the best of times, so we can actually see their point. However, Facebook has created an Apple Watch app for its Messenger feature, and just like other messaging services, the app works perfectly on the smaller screen. As well as allowing you to view your ten most recent Facebook Messenger conversations, this app will let you respond to messages. You can of course do this in a variety of ways, from a simple ‘thumbs-up’, to stickers, to voice clips. Everything works very nicely, and navigating with the Digital…

Wunderlist is a hugely popular listmaking and productivity app. It allows you to create multiple lists of tasks and set due dates and reminders for each task. Lists can be shared with other users, and, best of all, they are immediately synced with all the devices on which you use Wunderlist. Create a list on a Mac, and it’s immediately available on the iPhone app – no waiting around. One of the reasons Wunderlist is so popular is that it looks great and on some platforms allows you to choose from beautiful photos to use as a background. The Watch app doesn’t support that, but it does look great, thanks to the way it uses the shape of the Watch screen. Unlike most list apps, Wunderlist organises lists in a…

From banking to storing important files in the cloud, much of our day-to-day business now takes place primarily online, so internet security is of the utmost importance to protecting our data and ensuring that no aspects are leaked into the wrong hands. There are thousands of great apps available through the App Store that provide internet security, but one we would certainly recommend is LastPass. This app lets you store all of your passwords, login details and auto-fill data in your own secure vault and sign in using Touch ID. The service can also generate new, super-strong passwords to foil hackers. Through the app’s intuitive iPhone interface, you can add sites and login details, provide auto-fill data for quick online form filling, and compile secure notes containing a whole host…

Once upon a time, if you went abroad and wanted to engage in basic conversation in the local language, you took a phrase book with you. You might even have taken a few lessons before you left, or decided to rely on remembering what you had learned in school. Those days are long gone; the advent of the smartphone has meant that phrase books and relying on memory are a thing of the past. Babbel for Watch allows you to access basic words in several different languages right from the Watch. Even better, the words you can access are dependent on the location you are at so they change depending on whether your in a bar, restaurant or corner shop. The Watch app includes words from 14 languages. There are…

The iPhone is the most popular camera in the world. Photos taken with it dominate photo sharing sites like Flickr. Unsurprisingly, there are hundreds of apps that allow you to shoot, edit, and share photos. Equally unsurprisingly, some of these apps are available on Apple Watch. One of the best is ProCamera. Like Apple’s own Camera app, ProCamera allows you to use your Watch to preview the image ‘seen’ by your iPhone’s camera and capture that image with a tap of the screen. ProCamera also allows you to remotely control the iPhone camera’s self-timer and burst modes, and you can even set the intervals between shots in Burst mode. Once you’ve taken a shot, you can see the result on the Watch’s screen. Like all remote control camera apps, and…

Lifeline tells an interactive story of interplanetary discovery and survival. Using your iPhone, iPad or Apple Watch, the decisions you make have real consequences on the story and its protagonist, Taylor. You control Taylor via a long distance radio signal as he explores his surroundings following a crash landing on a distant moon. The story unfolds in the form of simple text messages, reminiscent of the Seventies game Zork. As questions and decisions are presented, you have two options – with your decision influencing the story. Creating engaging games for wearable devices presents challenges for developers, not least due to the small screen and hardware limitations. Lifeline by 3 Minute Games offers a unique story-telling experience that’s fun to play. There is also a real-time aspect to Lifeline - which…

Rules! is a fiendishly challenging yet very cute puzzle game that tests your memory and your reflexes. Earning numerous awards, the acclaimed iOS game is available for Apple Watch. If you’re new to Rules! you’ll find the games range of mind-bending, braintraining workout games to be surprisingly addicting. Compared to the full iOS app, Rules! on Apple Watch only lets you play with four tiles as opposed to the full game’s 16. The app’s developer, TheCodingMonkeys, described Rules! for the Apple Watch as a “brain workout minigame” meaning it has been designed to be a smaller, lighter version of the full iOS app. The aim is to tap the blocks in a specific way following certain rules, such as by row or descending order, as quick and accurately as possible…

The saying goes that you should always wait until the second generation of any Apple product before parting with your hard-earned cash. We loved the original Apple Watch, but despite easily being the best smartwatch to that date, it still had a few glaring omissions. Series 2 goes a long way in addressing those shortcomings, packing in a raft of new hardware features that will change the way you use Apple Watch forever. It may look pretty much the same, but it’s all change. Health and fitness is the big selling point of Apple Watch, and Series 2 is no exception. It comes with built-in GPS, meaning you can now head out for a run or cycle and leave your iPhone at home. Apple Watch will still track your every…

The idea of using a small screen to remotely control your music or TV will not be an alien concept. The Remote app on the iPhone has long been giving users the power to control Apple TV and iTunes, so it was a natural progression for this capability to be extended to the Apple Watch. With the fantastic Remote app built in to every Watch out there, it’s now ready to be activated and hooked up. To get going, just tap on it. If your iPhone is already paired with an Apple TV, then you can get straight into the action thanks to Home Sharing, watching movies and television programmes instantly. But even if it’s not paired, a manual setup is easy and only requires a simple code. We’ll show…

We all need alarms and we also often forget just how important they are. The main reason we use them is to wake in the morning, and you may think that the Apple Watch is not best suited to this task because it will usually be charged off your wrist overnight, but it is actually a very capable alarm clock which should never let you down. The Alarms app is exceptionally simple, as you would expect from something designed to only do one thing, but there are enough options to let you manage the week ahead and to save a little time as well. We will guide you through setting up a series of alarms and also show you how you can tweak the settings to fit your needs exactly,…

The World Clock app is actually not a full app, but rather a feature within the Clock app that sits alongside Alarms, the Stopwatch and the Timer. On the Apple Watch, however, it receives the standalone treatment, and can be used at any time to quickly gauge the time in any country around the world. This makes sense, because the Watch works very well for quickly getting information, and there really are few better ways to do this than to simply lift up your wrist and see what you need. The presentation of multiple time zones is surprisingly clear when you consider the relatively small size of the Apple Watch screen, and it highlights what some clever programming can do. Apple, as usual, has obviously taken some time over the…

With more than 70 million photos and videos being shared every day, Instagram is one the world’s largest social media networks. Instagram for Apple Watch is an extension of the iPhone app and gives you access to the latest posts from users you follow, as well as updates about new activity on your account including likes and comments. You can also receive notifications and send quick emoji replies. In order to use Instagram on your Watch, you need to be logged into the Instagram app on your paired iPhone and remain within range of its Bluetooth connection. The app’s user interface has been tailored to be a quick, at-a-glance experience. The result is that you can easily view new posts, messages and updates – however, the trade-off is you can’t…

Skype, one of the world’s most popular VoIP services with 300 million users, is now available for Apple Watch. Skype’s official Watch app is a companion that works with your paired iPhone and features call alerts, messaging and quick replies. With Skype, you can call, message and share with friends and family anywhere in the world. Skype-to-Skype calls are completely free, but if you add Skype credits, you can call mobile phones, access Wi-Fi or send texts. Skype for Apple Watch allows you to receive call notifications, send messages using Siri’s voice-to-text feature as well as use emojis and predefined messages for quick replies. Recent messages show up on the home screen, which means you can quickly check if you have any missed calls. Unfortunately, Skype doesn’t support voice or…

For those looking for a bargain, there are few better apps to try than Groupon. The website and iOS app track the latest deals for local businesses and brings them all into one place, so you can see the deals that appeal to you and claim them quickly. And the same can be said for the Apple Watch app. On the iOS app, you can narrow down the deals that you want, so you only see those that are local to you, or those in a specific city in the country. These deals can be anything from spa days to cheap toilet paper, so you’ll have to search through all of them until you find one you want. Thankfully, the Apple Watch app lists all the deals that are local…

There are a thousand ways to get the news online nowadays, and almost as many sources for each format you can think of. But, in the UK, if you want the definitive record of news events, the chances are that you’ll look to the BBC for it. The BBC has been quick to adapt to and to adopt new technology, as witnessed with their popular iPlayer on-demand service, one of the first services to allow you to watch TV programmes online after they’d been broadcast. The BBC News app for iPhone and iPad is one of the best there is, and the key elements of it are here in the Watch app. There are no video clips, of course, but there are summaries of the key stories in different categories,…

Shazam is one of the world’s most popular music apps. It allows you to see music charts, link to Apple Music or the iTunes Store and play music in Spotify or Connect Radio. You can connect Shazam to your social media accounts and share your favourite music with friends on Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, and Pinterest. Shazam will also find music for you while you’re not using the app and recommend it to you when you are. You can even take photos of posters that feature the Shazam logo with your phone to link to websites and buy concert tickets. However, it is Shazam’s most famous feature that the Watch app is focused on – the ability to recognise a song that it ‘hears’ through a microphone and tell you what…

It might have started out as a place to buy books online, but nowadays you can buy almost anything on Amazon, including groceries. And, as the world’s biggest and most successful online store, you’d expect it to have a Watch app. You might also have expected it to put its years of experience of guiding you to items it thinks you might want to buy to good use in the app, perhaps by displaying those items on the Watch screen when you first launch the app. It doesn’t do that. In fact, when you launch the Amazon Watch app, you only have one option, illustrated by a big orange magnifying glass on screen: to search for items in the store. You can’t even tap a button to view items on…

Trivia Crack allows you to play all your turns from the popular mobile quiz game from your Apple Watch without ever having to use your iPhone. The colourful style, challenging questions and competitive multiplayer make Trivia Crack both educational and loads of fun. Before you start playing, you will need an opponent. You can play against friends or let the game’s matchmaker select a challenger for you. At the heart of Trivia Crack is Willy the Wheel. Give him a spin and see which topic it lands on. You then answer a series of questions based on that category within a time limit. As you and your opponent answer questions, your scores are recorded, with the winner being the player with the most correct answers at the round’s end. Featuring…

For many of us, Saturday afternoons are spent zombified on the sofa in front of the TV transfixed by the football action unfolding throughout the day. So imagine if you had the perfect app to help you stay informed on events on the pitch while doing something more constructive like carrying out your chores? OneFootball is just that app and, coupled with your Apple Watch, provides instant notifications on all of the goals as they fly in the net as well as all of the other key talking points. You can set up your own OneFootball profile through the iPhone app, pledging your allegiance to a particular team, and then through the Apple Watch accompanying app you will be informed when your team is due to kick off and then…