This is Technology Bytes, episode 16 for June 25th, 2023.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share my brief insights on an interesting technology.
My name is Joel.
Enjoy, and here we go.
Today’s microcast is another episode stemming from WWDC 2023, and I want to talk about WatchOS 10, the new operating system that will be coming to our watches in the fall.
I didn’t bother to go in and look and see which watches it goes to, but that’s easy information that you can look up.
I just want to talk about my use of it over the past couple weeks and what I think and how I think it operates, and I just want to share that with my listeners.
The first thing that really catches your attention when you go to WatchOS 10 is the function of the buttons on the watch.
They change.
This is not the first time Apple has made changes to how those buttons function, but over time we get used to how they operate, and while this change is fairly big, I am starting to get used to it.
It does take me time because the way I use the buttons on my watch has changed because Apple changed how they function and how they operate.
So, to get to the app list, you just press the crown, and that gets you to two views.
You have your grid view, which is just the blob of apps, but that has changed too.
Now it’s just a list of icons.
It’s a row four, row three, a row four, row three, however many apps you have on your phone and as you scroll through that.
So there’s no scrolling side to side.
You only get one option, and that is to scroll up and down until you get to the app that you want.
I like the blob better.
The other is just to change it into the alphabetical list.
I don’t like that.
It seems boring, but that is also available.
To get to your most recent apps, you now have to double-click the digital crown, and that will get you to the list of apps that you have most recently run or your favorite apps.
You can look at that in a couple of different ways.
Again, you use the scroll wheel in the crown to scroll through those apps.
I think that over time, I’ll talk about SmartStack in a minute, that that most recent app thing will go away as something I do often, but with the current setup and how it looks, I double-press that crown quite a bit to get to my most recent apps that I’ve been using.
So it’s just a different change.
And then Control Center, which you used to get to by just swiping up from the bottom of the phone, is now a single press of the side button.
And that gets you to your Control Center.
All those functions are there to do as you’ve always done, but it does take some getting used to.
Now the slide from the bottom initiates the SmartStack, and I’ll cover that in more detail in a couple minutes.
The other thing you get from the side button is Apple Pay.
So that really hasn’t changed.
That’s a double-press.
I think that’s smart on Apple’s part to not get people confused or looking at that differently.
It probably should stay the same for almost time immemorial or however that you’re supposed to say that.
The other thing you get to is Siri.
So that’s still a long press of the digital crown.
I think that’s the same, although it might’ve been a long press of the side button.
But regardless, to activate Siri, if you’re not using the keywords, you can just hold the crown and that will get you to that function.
And then holding the side button activates the SOS for emergency calling and those kinds of things.
So a bit of a change, takes some getting used to, but the buttons function quite differently in watchOS 10 than previously.
Now I want to talk about the SmartStack for a moment.
So in any watch face that you’re in, it doesn’t matter which one this function is the same.
When you roll your digital crown, you get into what is called the SmartStack.
You can also get to it by swiping up from the bottom.
The first thing it shows you is the date and the analog clock.
So you can see that, although you’re coming from a clock, a watch face that probably had both of those things on it.
That’s just where it starts, but then it’s a SmartStack.
And so the idea is that Apple is on device trying to find what they feel is the most important thing for you to see next.
It might be your next appointment.
It might be weather.
It might be sports news.
I’m not sure, I’m not sure, you know, they’re, they’re making some determination on what that is.
Today, I don’t find it to be super useful because only Apple’s apps work in that SmartStack.
So really none of the third parties have gotten there yet.
And that’s because this is a developer preview.
So I think over time it’ll come and that SmartStack will become more useful.
And then the last thing on the SmartStack is like a secondary widget.
You can have three separate apps right there that you can get to.
That is pretty nice functionality because there are some apps that I don’t use a lot, but I use two or three times a day at specific times.
And so I can put those apps right there, get to them if Apple doesn’t start surfacing those in a SmartStack.
Again, not as useful as I’d like because my third party apps that I use on the watch are not available to that SmartStack yet.
But it’s a pretty interesting concept.
One that I think will take off as the third party apps get to have access to it.
A couple of things that I noticed in using watchOS 10.
One is that there’s lots of scrolling.
You scroll to get to the SmartStack, you open this and you scroll to that, you do this and you scroll to that, you open the list of all your apps and you scroll to that.
It feels like more so than what I remember in the past.
So the use of the digital crown is significantly more, at least in my initial testing or use, because I’m not testing it.
I’ve got it installed.
I’m using it every day.
So the other thing that I noticed is that almost always you have gotten to the bottom of a screen and been able to dismiss something.
So in an Apple Fitness Plus workout, the workout would finish, you’d scroll to the bottom and you’d hit done.
Or you have maybe the breathe app is open.
And so you go through your one minute breathe thing.
And then when that’s finished, it beeps, you scroll the bottom and you say done.
And there’s other apps that do that as well.
And now there is an X in the top left corner.
If you scroll to the bottom, I think it just kind of automates the automatically closes is the way it’s been working for me.
But if you don’t, and that’s a little bit problematic because like when I finish a workout, I like to see some details of that workout.
I obviously can go back and see it anytime I want on my watch, on my phone.
But when I scroll up, I’m used to getting to a done button and then the window just stops.
It doesn’t do anything else.
And now when I scroll, it’ll close and to actually close that informational window, there’s now an X in the top left corner of the watch.
So a bit different.
Not sure exactly if I like it or not, but it is something that I am getting used to.
There’s a few other things on watchOS 10, just some highlights I’ll cover because I don’t use them much.
So, and also I don’t know anyone else in my day-to-day life that has watchOS 10 installed on their watch.
So I can’t even test some of these functions, but Apple is continuing to build into health.
They’ve added things for cycling.
I don’t do cycling.
I have a brother that’s into cycling, but he is not an Apple guy.
He’s an Android guy.
So I won’t be able to ask him how that works.
There’s some additional things to hiking.
The new compass app, I don’t use that, but I just opened it a little bit ago so I could see what it looks like.
It’s actually pretty neat, but they’ve got like the waypoints and map things.
Some of those things might only be available on the Apple watch ultra, but they have trail information.
I have a friend that likes to hike and he’s invited me a time.
And so if that is a continued thing, I might enjoy having that on my watch.
You’ll see how it goes.
Also being able to do a trace back.
So you can actually follow back your path if you feel like you’ve gotten lost and you need a way back.
There’s some pretty cool things there.
Apple fitness plus on the watch continues to work pretty much the same.
It’s kind of interesting because I do a morning walk every morning except for Sunday.
And when I finish that walk, it says, do you want to end the workout or start another one?
And so they have a way to stack workouts back to back.
So if you start out with a walk and then you go into a workout, you can do a walk and then you go into, um, some kind of, uh, exercise workout, maybe weightlifting or something.
You can just stack those up back to back.
I haven’t tried that yet because I have some space in between those workouts.
And I also don’t always use the same workout.
So I’m not exactly sure how that works, but I’ll need to look in that in more detail before I cover aspects of Apple TV plus or, or the Apple TV, I mean, or maybe even through the iPhone new systems.
Um, Apple is continuing to be focused on the mental health of its users.
And I really enjoy that the breathe app.
I really enjoy they’ve added a function there where you can say at this moment, how do I feel and why, or throughout this entire day, this is how I felt and why.
And it’s really just a range of very unpleasant to very pleasant.
And then you can go in and say, what has made you feel that way?
Or what are the other feelings that make you feel that way?
And then what things contribute to that feeling?
And then you can actually put a note to give yourself a little more detail to look at in the future.
I struggled a bit with anxiety.
And so I really have enjoyed the breathe app to help me call myself throughout the day.
And I think that I’m going to enjoy this.
How am I feeling?
Because it lets me record it and know what happened at a given time of a day or throughout a given day.
And to see that history is going to be nice.
I journal.
So maybe that’s something that will has already been there that I could look at, but I think it’s a nice added thing for people and mental health.
A couple other things I’ll touch on really briefly.
Name drop has come to the Apple watch.
So if you want to share contact information with someone, it’s just a matter of holding the phone close to the watch and then being able to share that contact information.
I don’t know anyone that’s running these betas in my everyday life.
So I can’t test that.
Video message playback on the phone.
That’s pretty neat.
The fact that they’ve allowed us to leave video messages.
Now, if we do a FaceTime call and it doesn’t get answered, that’s pretty cool.
Again, lack of people in my life to be able to actually test that.
Medication reminders.
This is a persistent thing because it’s not just a, Hey, it’s time to take this medication.
It’s like, you have to respond to that.
Or it keeps asking you and you may say pestering you, bothering you.
I don’t take any regular medications that are necessary for a schedule.
I take vitamin C.
I take it every morning.
There are days when I forget, but I don’t think I would put that in a medication reminders.
So overall, I kind of liked the new watch interface.
I like some of the things that they’ve done and the visibility of things, the usability of things.
I think there’s been some great improvements.
There are things that I have to get used to.
It’s been fairly stable.
I do have some third-party apps that struggle with the watch operating system at this point.
If you want my advice, I would say don’t put developer beta on anything unless you are a developer.
Don’t be silly like me.
But once the public beta comes out and you are that type of person, I would jump on that in a heartbeat.
So that is my covering of what’s coming in watchOS 10.
You have been listening to the Technology Bytes microcast.
Until next time, continue enjoying your technology.
