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Apple's watchOS4 - The One Thing You Missed That Watch Owners Will Love

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David Phelan

I’ll be reporting on all the new features that have just gone into the developers’ beta of watchOS 4 here soon, ahead of the software's release in the fall, but first, here’s what I think is the neatest change, and the one that’s gone scarcely noted.

It’s the way you navigate the Watch – so it’s pretty darn important.

If you’re an Apple Watch wearer, you’ll know that the operating software has been through quite a few changes. From the first time around, when a dial of your favourite dozen contacts appeared when you pressed the side button, to the current set-up where the same button launches a dock of your favourite Watch apps.

That was certainly an improvement, because very few of the Watch wearers I’ve met ever used the side button for that, so it sort of became the Apple Pay button by default (tap it twice and your credit card appears on screen so you can pay with consummate convenience).

And that new dock was not just an improvement in plain navigation terms, though it was certainly that, too. It meant that Apple was able to address the way the Watch worked, to significantly speed up its performance. It did this by putting your most-used apps in a place where they could be held in a ready-to-go, regularly-updated state. This meant it got round the one major flaw in the first Watch: the lag between pressing an app icon and it launching.

This improvement was one that worked on every version of the Watch, by the way, not just the current second-generation models.

And now, in the beta version of watchOS 4 that I’ve seen in detail, things have been redesigned to work much better still.

First of all, there’s the direction of travel. Which may not sound much, but, oh boy, you just wait. Currently, the dock reveals a series of mini-screens which swipe from left to right, but in the new OS the same collection of apps appears and these now scroll vertically.

In watchOS 4 you can scroll the list either by swiping the display or rolling the Digital Crown up and down. You could zoom through the apps using the Crown before but it felt counter-intuitive to make a vertical movement while the screen responded horizontally.

Then there’s the apps galaxy, you know, that glob of circular app icons which fill the Watch display and gets busier every time you download a Watch-compatible app. That galaxy is cleverly done, but as the spread grows it becomes harder to find the very one you need.

Add to the fact that these shortcuts are icon-only with no caption (unlike iOS) and things get more complicated. Especially if you have a bunch of sleep monitoring apps on your Watch: dear sleep app developer, any chance you could design a Watch shortcut that isn’t a crescent moon on a dark bluish background?

Sleep monitoring is likely to be a growth area for app developers now Apple has bought Beddit. This may well lead to Apple tweaking its software to measure sleep better. Which in turn is something that other developers will want to get in on.

Anyway, the key improvement here is the addition to the galaxy of another way to browse. Force touch the circular app shortcuts and you’re given the option to choose Grid View or List view. Then you can scroll up and down the alphabetical list by swiping or using that Digital Crown again. Your choice is sticky: next time you press the Crown it’ll take you to your preferred view.

There’s no search box at the top of the list, which would have been nice. Maybe that could be added.

After all, the genius of software updates on phones, tablets and smartwatches is that your gizmo gets better with age, not worse. This fall, Apple Watch users can expect a serious upgrade.

 

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