First unofficial Apple Watch dials from third parties are a fact

For the first time, it has been possible to create its own dials for the Apple Watch Digital Technology , which are displayed full-screen on the watch. Programmer Steve Troughton-Smith used SpriteKit to make his own dial.

Experimenting with SpriteKit dials. Very easy to do, "writes Troughton-Smith. You have to set watchOS so that the most recent app is shown when the watch goes out of sleep. To do this, create a SpriteKit app, according to the developer. He also immediately made some Hermès-like dials, but admits that there are also some hooks and eyes. 

Apple probably does not allow dials due to copyright issues. For example, Apple once ran into problems by copying the traditional Swiss station clock in the Clock app. Apple later took a license toget rid of all legal problems. Strikingly enough, there is the standard Apple Watch-turners no Swiss station clock.

For developer Troughton-Smith it was mainly to demonstrate the feasibility. With the code template SpriteKitWatchFace he also offers others the possibility to start using the dials yourself. 

There are some limitations. For example, these dials are full-screen apps that you can not choose from the normal settings of the Apple Watch . You also can not set complications . Yet it is good that the first step has been taken.

Criticism of Apple's dials

The past few days there has been a lot of discussion in developer circles about the dials that Apple supplies itself. The well-known developer Marco Arment, for example, criticizes the new Infograaf dial, which in his view is very unclear.


Arment sees two shortcomings:

• The complications in the middle provide less contrast between the back plate and the hands, making it difficult to see where the hands are.
• It also takes too much effort from your brain to recognize the time.

If you look at the dials of traditional watch brands, they have a number of features that you do not see at Apple. The markings for 12, 3, 6 and 9 are much more prominent with traditional watch brands than with Apple. The hour markers are much larger than the minute markers. 

And the hour hand touches the hour mark. At Apple, that is not the case, even with the other dials. The developer of Pedometer ++ has now come up with a solution to make the Infograaf dial more readable : by displaying the complications in low contrast: