Rumor had it, Apple was going to add native sleep tracking to Apple Watch. In 2019. That summer, I began work to add sleep data analysis to RECaf, a feature I had wanted since I conceived of the app. The timing seemed right. If Apple were going to be adding sleep tracking to Apple Watch as a first-party feature, I wanted to be right there, ready to take advantage of that sleep data as soon as Apple started its marketing. Scientifically, it’s pretty well established that caffeine has some…

I’m thoroughly enjoying using SwiftUI. But like any new API, there are limitations that can at times be maddening. One issue I ran into while developing the UI for logging custom and favorite items in my RECaf watch app was the lack of any way in SwiftUI to pop back to the root of the navigation stack. Here’s my scenario: You start with a list, showing items for Custom Entry and Favorites. Tap Favorites, and you are pushed to a list of your favorites. Tap one of the…

I have reached the unfortunate conclusion that RECaf’s watch app will not be able to go fully independent this fall with the release of watchOS 6. While you have always been able to log from your wrist using the app or Siri shortcuts, I was hoping folks who didn’t want to keep RECaf installed on their phones would be able to continue using RECaf on their wrist. There are simply too many things that can’t be done on watchOS alone at this point, however. So for now,…

It’s telling that of all the watch faces Apple has shipped since, only the Explorer is anywhere near the same quality of that original batch. All the others are either derivatives of the originals (e.g. Toy Story, Minnie Mouse, Timelapse), obvious examples of engineering over design (Siri, Activity), or complete WTF? (Kaleidoscope). (Me, back in April of this year.) I’m happy to see renewed interest in Apple’s watch face design lately. Awesome as everything else in watchOS 5 is, this year’s face additions didn’t…

While the toolset is inaccessible, its inclusion in watchOS 4.3.1 suggests Apple is at least considering opening that section of NanoTimeKit to outside app makers. Whether a full-featured watch face customization toolset will ship to developers in a future version of watchOS, perhaps watchOS 5, remains unknown. via AppleInsider Man, I hope Apple doesn’t do this. I know, it’s conventional wisdom that third-party watch faces would be the best thing since the Destiny’s Child reunion. But I think it would be a terrible mistake. Designing…