Apple Watch apps - page 4

The best Apple Watch apps you probably haven’t heard of

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Time to download some apps. Photo: Apple

There are already more than 3,000 apps for the Apple Watch, which makes it difficult to find all of the hidden gems. How do you find the best Apple Watch apps?

Luckily, there are plenty of third-party Watch apps that deserve attention, whether they tell you when it’s going to rain or help you get stuff done. Apple is promoting Watch apps heavily in the App Store, and while the big players (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.) are obvious downloads, we’ve been on the lookout for some of the other apps for the Apple Watch you might not know about.

Here are some of the best Apple Watch apps to trick out your wrist.

Apple Watch app lets you call for help during a seizure

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Greg Pabst, who has epilepsy, developed an iOS app for people with seizure disorders to send out emergency alerts. Photo: SeizAlarm
Greg Pabst, who has epilepsy, developed an iOS app for people with seizure disorders to send out emergency alerts. Photo: SeizAlarm

Greg Pabst and his neurologist were trying to get a handle on his adult onset epilepsy when the doctor’s mention of the newly announced Apple Watch gave Pabst an ah-hah moment.

The doctor was discussing tools for Pabst to chart his seizures and send alerts to emergency contacts.

“Then he said, ‘It’s only a matter of time before somebody does that for the Apple Watch,’ ” Pabst, 38, recalled. “Then I thought maybe it should be me.”

Pabst, of Orlando, Fla., and a developer friend quickly went to work creating SeizAlarm, which appeared in the iTunes store for the iPhone last week and is available for the watch, the pre-orders for which begin arriving Friday.

10 super-adorable Apple Watch app icons

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Embrace simplicity, they said. Photo: Apple
Embrace simplicity, they said. Photo: Apple

Crafting a tiny icon for an Apple Watch app is a huge design challenge. Coming up with one that’s truly adorable – even at 80 pixels by 80 pixels – requires something like a graphic design miracle.

Lucky for anyone strapping an Apple Watch on their wrists this Friday, some designers have been working wonders. Behold the cutest Apple Watch app icons in the world!

New Guided Tours show off Apple Watch’s fitness and financial chops

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The Guided Tour videos are a great way to get to know the Apple Watch. Photo: Apple
The Guided Tour videos are a great way to get to know the Apple Watch. Photo: Apple

Three new videos show how Apple Watch will make fitness and banking easier than ever.

The videos are part of Apple’s Guided Tour series of informational clips, which are a must-watch for anybody anxiously awaiting delivery of their Apple Watch. The latest ones show off the Activity, Workout and Apple Pay apps that will soon take up residence on the wrists of Apple smartwatch owners.

Adobe puts design tools on your wrist with trio of Apple Watch apps

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Get your Behance stats at a glance. Photo: Adobe
Get your Behance stats at a glance. Photo: Adobe

Adobe’s Behance, Adobe Color CC, and Creative Cloud apps have all been updated to include Apple Watch support in a move designed to both sell more iOS apps as well as inspire their current customers to get outside of the computer and create.

“That’s because designers get a lot of their best ideas,” writes Adobe’s David Macy, “not while sitting at our desks, but from interacting with and observing the world around us.”

Drafts, iOS’s best note-taking app, will be even better on the Apple Watch

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Drafts is coming to Apple Watch. Photo: Agile Tortoise
Drafts is coming to Apple Watch. Photo: Agile Tortoise

Agile Tortoise’s Drafts is, without a doubt, the single best note-taking app on the iOS App Store. It’s not only the easiest app to jump right into and start typing before you lose your train of thought, it’s the easiest app to export your notes from: It plugs into pretty much everything, from Dropbox to Evernote.

And coming soon? Drafts will plug into the Apple Watch, too.

The best Apple Watch apps for cheating at math and science

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iMathematics puts infinite cheat sheets on your wrist. Photo: Mobixee
iMathematics puts infinite cheat sheets on your wrist. Photo: Mobixee

Cheaters in school these days have it too easy. In my day, we had to program cheat sheets of formulas into our giant graphing calculators. Now that the Apple Watch is coming out, the cat and mouse game between students and teachers is about to change.

Mobixee’s educational suite of Apple Watch apps are giving students a faster/subtler way than ever to find “that formula” when you’re doing tests homework.

By bringing iMathematics, iPhysics, and iChemistry to Apple Watch, you won’t have to pull out your iPhone to search for formulas again. Just whisper a word to Siri like “derivative” and a list of formulas related to the topic will pop up.

Check it out:

First wave of Apple Watch apps lands on iTunes

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Apple Watch isn't being too closely, err, watched. Photo: Apple
Apple Watch apps are ready for your wrist. Photo: Apple

Apple Stores won’t have the Apple Watch on display for a few weeks, but anyone eager to see what the world of wrist apps will offer can already download them to their iPhone.

The first wave of Apple Watch-supported apps started hitting iTunes today, with big names like Target, Evernote, WeChat and Expedia being some of the first out of the gate. You can’t actually use the Apple Watch functionality on the apps yet (unless Tim Cook hooked you up with an early unit), but you can get an early glimpse of how some apps will dramatically change your life.

Here are some of the first Apple Watch apps you can download and their features:

How Yahoo plans to blast your Apple Watch with news

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Will you read the news on Apple Watch? Photo: Apple

Developers are making a mad dash to finish their first Apple Watch apps before the wearable goes on sale in April. Yahoo is among those looking to make a big splash with must-have apps, and when it comes to bringing you the news, the company is hoping you’ll want it in bite-size chunks.

Yahoo’s Nick D’Aloisio sat down with Bloomberg today to talk about how digesting the news is going to change once you slap a tiny Apple Watch screen to your wrist. To bring long-form news to wearers, D’Aloisio says Yahoo Digest will focus on giving you the most salient pieces of a story, accompanied by little visual elements called atoms.

Watch Nick explain the news revolution Yahoo plans to unleash:

Count down to your death with this Apple Watch clock

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Countdown to your date with the Reaper. Photo: Rehabstudio
Countdown to your date with the Reaper. Photo: Rehabstudio

Tim Cook touted Apple Watch’s supreme timekeeping capabilities at last week’s Spring Forward event, but Rehabstudio plans to give wearers a unique look on time — by counting down to their death.

Life Clock is an upcoming Apple Watch app that’s like the reverse of an activity tracker. Rather than giving you a readout of actions you did in the past, Life Clock tracks all the positive and negative actions you take throughout the day to calculate when you’re going to kick the bucket.

Amazon 1-Click shopping is coming to your Apple Watch

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Amazon for Apple Watch is here. Photo: Techcrunch
Amazon, coming soon to your Apple Watch. Photo: TechCrunch

Amazon is in the business of making it as easy as possible to spend money in their online store. It should surprise no one, then, that Amazon is already developing an Apple Watch app, which will let customers search for products and purchase them with a single click, all from a user’s wrist.