14 DAY TRIAL // The Thinkapps community has released a bunch of designs trying to envision some of the most popular iPhone apps running on the Apple Watch.
While it’s still too early to tell if the watch is even capable of such versatility, the concepts put forth by these designers look both doable and practical.
Commissioned by buildblog
“We had some of our designers from the Thinkapps community reimagine how popular apps might take form on your wrist,” according to Benji Hyam.
The popular Facebook Messenger was an obvious choice for Thinkapps partner Unity Interactive. Their thinking: “Having speech bubbles displayed on a small size screen turned out not to be a really great idea, so in order to conserve space we decided to display only text.”
The dialog window therefore just comprises a status icon along with the recipient’s name and the conversation flowing to the bottom of the screen. A reply button covers up valuable space. We’re not sure if that’s the way to go, but apparently Unity Interactive does. Text input isn’t demoed.
Apple, for example, sees no problem in putting chat bubbles on the watch’s small display. However, the company’s approach indeed seems to cause valuable screen real estate to be wasted.
Another image depicts how a person would request a car from Uber, and another reveals how someone would answer a call or reply to a message on Skype. The latter shows the most promise for the Apple smartwatch, and the concept closely resembles Apple’s own watch GUI for phone calls.
Apple Watch owners will be able to use the built-in speaker and mic to carry out conversations or transfer the call to their iPhone, their car’s speakerphone, or to a Bluetooth headset. Incoming calls can be silenced by covering the device with your hand.
Twitter would offer a real-time update on latest tweets through a single timeline with options to follow and unfollow people, favorite, and retweet. Other concepts show requesting a Lyft, swiping left and right to like or dislike people on Tinder, and there’s even an animation that shows how YouTube would allow users to browse and play videos on the small display.
Third party
Apple has so far demoed only a few in-house apps, many of which are stripped-down replicas of their iPhone counterparts. It stands as evidence that developing comprehensive experiences for watch users is possible, but the company has yet to deploy a software development kit for programmers to start work on these solutions.
Apple plans to launch the watch in early 2015, which can be anywhere from the 1st of January (which is very unlikely) to the last days of spring.
