Swift Development for the Apple Watch

Chapter 3. Glances

The iPhone is usually stashed away (either in a bag or pocket), and because it’s not a wearable device, it’s not always within easy reach. With the Apple Watch, however, users are able to find out information by simply looking at their wrists: your app can show a screen that users can look at quickly. This screen is called a glance.

Glances show supplemental information that is related to the content that your app provides. Not all apps need to have a glance, but having a screen of content that shows just the most important information that your user cares about can be a tremendous benefit.

In this chapter, you’ll learn what glances are used for, how to design a glance, and how to add a glance to your WatchKit application.

Working with Glances

A glance is just a single screen of content. Glances do not show any scrolling content, which means that you need to be very considerate of the most important information your user will care about; for example, if you’re making a news application for the watch, you won’t be able to fit the entire content of a news article, or even multiple headlines. Instead, you’ll have to select the single most important headline that the user is likely to care about, and display only that.

Apps only get a single glance screen. You can’t create more than one screen, because it’s being shown alongside the glances from all of the other apps that the user has on his watch.

It’s important to show information very clearly. The user is going ...