I’ve been wearing the Apple Watch every day during this week at work. These days, I spend most of my work days in the office. There is a feature in the health app that reminds me to stand every hour. This can be both annoying and helpful. I guess it depends on what I might be doing at the time. If I’m deep in concentration, and the vibration on my wrist occurs, thinking I might be getting an important message, only to find out I need to stand up. On the other hand, if I’m starting to get burned out, then it’s good to be reminded to take a breath and walk around a little bit to get the circulation going in my legs again every hour.
I thought I would be taking my heart rate often, but I have found that once the newness wears off, and my heart rate stays relatively the same each time I check it, I have found that I don’t use the app often enough to justify keeping it on my “glances”. If anyone doesn’t know what “glances” are, they are simply a fast way to get to information without needing to launch the app. I’m not sure which takes longer, swiping through all the “glances” I have set up (presently eleven), or just launching the app from the home screen, which takes some getting used to, since all the apps set up on the watch are clumped together in a rather disorganized fashion.
What Apple Watch app do I presently use the most often? Oddly enough, it is the media player. Shown below:
Just to be clear … I’m not into the “Pine Hill Saints” but I happened to be listening to a playlist from my favorite streaming music service “Tidal”. (Look for a Tidal review soon on how I set it up, and why it is my favorite streaming service) Yes the media player controls the app you are streaming from, not just ITunes or what songs I might have downloaded. The Apple Watch app has a mini spectrum analyzer in the top left corner, along with the time the track has played. Under that is the song and artist name and a pause / play click control as well as skip to the next song or to the last song. But the COOLEST feature on this app is that I can control the volume with the scroll wheel on the side of the watch. This little app can be VERY handy when I have my phone in my pocket, streaming to a bluetooth headset. Yes you might say ” I can do that with my bluetooth headset”. How many of you have fumbled with the headset controls that are out of sight and clicked the wrong button? Hmmm?
My second favorite app is checking the weather. I don’t use the standard iPhone weather app, although that is the app Apple chooses to use for it’s watch faces, if you have set the watch face up for that information. Wish I could choose where I get my weather from on the clock face But I digress … I love the Dark Sky weather app and it has a Apple Watch app as well. On the iPhone it has a very cool moving radar map, but it also presents weather in a easier to digest format.
On the Apple Watch app I get the following information for today, with similar information forecasted for the each day of the week.
My third favorite app … which really isn’t an app at all, is to have the ability to launch an app, send a text or make a phone call with Siri on the watch. I can simply raise my wrist and speak into the watch “Hey Siri, text Ralph I am going to be late because i am stuck in traffic”. The watch will launch messages and have your text ready to send with a simple tap on “send”, and off it goes to Ralph. How cool is that? Very useful while driving!
Hope this article is helpful and feel free to share with others.