of which device you did them on: if your last update was on your phone, thats the information youll see on your Watch.

Things now supports multiple watches and Scribble, so you can use that
instead of having to dictate into the app (although you can still dictate if you prefer). You can make Today the default destination for new items that
you add from your watch, and you can also clear dates to put items in the Anytime list instead of having them attached to particular days.

One thing that hasnt changed is the excellent interface: its simple in list form but when you press on an item it expands to give you all the information you need. Its perfectly judged and enables you to get things done with the minimum of fuss. Watchsmith (Image credit: Cross Forward Consulting, LLC) Watchsmith Free with in-app purchases

If youve ever wished your Apple Watch would show different complications at different times of day, youre going to love Watchsmith. It enables you to create complications for different kinds of watch faces and have your watch change them at the times you specify. Put the Watchsmith complication in the appropriate part of the face and it will do its thing automatically.

Watchsmith has complications for weather, calendar, astronomy, tides,
activity and so on; some options require an in-app purchase but there are plenty of free ones. Simply choose the one you want, customize its appearance and then set its time so for example you might have a complication display the weather until youre due at work, your calendar during office hours, and the astronomy complications after dark.

The complications here are Watchsmiths own, not third party ones so while
you can display the weather at this time and the calendar at that time, you cant use Dark Sky for the former and Fantastical for the latter. But the supplied complications work well and while some of them look pretty horrible at first you can easily adjust the font and colors (where appropriate) to
suit your taste. HomeCam for HomeKit (Image credit: Sunya Limited) HomeCam
for HomeKit $4.99/4.99/AU$7.99

We last looked at HomeCam for HomeKit in 2018 and liked what we saw. But the app has now been rebuilt from the ground up to give us HomeCam version 2, a version that not only makes it look and feel fresher but that introduces some key new features.

One of the best new features is Auto Cycle, which wasnt previously available on iOS: it enables you to set up an automatic camera cycle that moves from
cam to cam for continuous monitoring of property or sleeping children. Theres much better support for HomeKit accessories and improved Siri Shortcuts, a revamped Today widget that can show two cameras at once, and improved Data Layers to support more sensor types.

The main iPhone app is very powerful, enabling you to use not just cameras
but other HomeKit devices such as connected heating or air conditioning devices. That enables you to combine data with the live camera feed, for example by monitoring the temperature of a babys room as well as watching
them sleep and then remotely adjusting the heater or aircon.

The Watch component is much simpler, displaying a live feed from your chosen camera and enabling you to use your Apple Watch speaker and microphone as an intercom (provided of course that your camera has a mic and speaker itself). Think of it as a useful accessory for the times when for whatever reason you cant pick up your phone. Kanbann (Image credit: Atadore) Kanbann Free /
in-app purchases

If youre a fan of the Trello collaboration platform, Kanbann ensures youre never far away from your favorite boards and if Trello has been imposed on you by management, it means work can follow you wherever you may roam. Sour jokes aside, its handy to have Trello on your wrist if youre using it to keep track of to-dos or travel plans.

Kanbann is an unofficial Trello app that enables you to create new cards,
move existing ones, comment, check off to-do lists, and create new ones. And once youve logged in you dont need to have your phone handy if you have a Wi-Fi or cellular connection on your Apple Watch.

The app also supports Siri Shortcuts, so for example you can say Hey Siri, create a note top secret world domination plan in Kanbann and your Watch will do your bidding. Or at least it will after a little bit of setting up, which thankfully you only need to do the first time you run the app.

The core app is free and enables you to read all the boards you have access to, but you can only comment on or make changes to your personal boards. To gain comment and edit access to all the boards available to you youll need to unlock the Premium upgrade, which is $2.99/2.99/AU$4.49 at the time of writing. Hive (Image credit: Centrica Hive Limited) Hive Free

Smart home tech wouldnt be smart home tech without an Apple Watch app, and
our wrist is slowly filling up with apps to control our lights, our heating and our various digital assistants. Hive is one of the better ones, assuming of course that you have Hives technology in your home.

The Watch component acts as a virtual control for your Hive hardware,
enabling you to give the heating a boost or turn the lights down in your
home. Its very convenient and works across the Hive range, so you can use it for your smart plugs or colored lights as well as your heating.

The bigger iPhone app is packed with useful features including Hive Actions,
a kind of If This Then That for Hive hardware including its motion and door sensors: you tell it what to look for and what to do when it happens, so for example you might get the lights to switch on if a sensor detects movement after dark or turn the lights off and the heating down when you close your bedroom door at night. It also enables you to create shortcuts that you can then access from your Watch. As smart home apps go, this is definitely one of the smartest. Noted (Image credit: Digital Workroom Ltd) Noted Free/In-app purchases

The App Store is hardly short of note-taking apps, but Noted thinks differently. Where other apps are text-first Noted takes an audio-first approach: its all about the recording. The app enables you to record a
speaker or speakers and add timestamps, tags and notes to the appropriate parts of the recording. Its particularly nice on iPhone where its clean, uncluttered interface is a really nice place to spend time in.

The Watch version isnt quite so pretty but its just as clean. You can use it to record directly onto your watch, to listen later and to add quick timestamps when the speaker says something interesting. Those tags are then carried across to your iPhone where you can start adding text, photos or illustrations before exporting as PDF, as audio or as plain text. The app syncs with iOS devices and your Mac too.

Its a very, very good app thats particularly useful for students and anyone who spends a lot of time in meetings: its friendly, fast and exceptionally easy to use. The free version is very limited, though you can store just
five notes so youll need a subscription. Thats currently $2.49/1.29/AU$1.99
a month or $23.99/11.99/AU$18.99 a year. Roku (Image credit: Roku Inc) Roku Free

If youre a fan of the Roku media player, Roku TVs or Roku streaming sticks, then youll be delighted to discover that theres now an Apple Watch app to match the iPhone one.

The Roku Apple Watch app looks just like the iPhone version albeit on a much smaller display, and you can use touch or voice to control your device. Voice control is only available in certain territories, though, so right now it
only works in the US, UK and Canada. It even enables you to find a missing remote by getting it to chime until you work out where it is.

The Watch app focuses on three things: voice control, channel switching and remote control, and it works very well for each of those things. For everything else theres the iPhone app, which enables you to search for particular titles, actors or directors, to stream video directly to your device and to take advantage of private listening, which enables you to
listen to the audio on your headphones without playing it to everybody else
in the room.

That latter feature is hardware-dependent, so its worth checking the compatibility notes to make sure it will work with what youve got. HomeRun
for HomeKit (Image credit: Sunya Limited) HomeRun for HomeKit $2.99/2.99/AU$4.49

Weve covered HomeRun before: its an excellent and customizable HomeKit controller for your smart home thats designed to make it as easy as possible to control all your stuff both manually and by creating daily routines that make certain things happen at certain times.

It uses a simple and flexible grid-based layout where you can put all your icons just-so, enabling you to access the scenes or features you need with
the minimum of effort, and its as easy to customize as it is to use.

HomeRun is by far the best HomeKit controller you can get for your Apple Watch, and over the course of 2019 it has got better and better: a recent update made it possible to add time-based complications so youd see different options at different times of the day, and the latest update improves the customization options for your complications and adds the full set of Simpaticon icons.

That means you now have more than 4,460 icons to choose from, enabling you to create a customized smart home controller thats tailored to your exact requirements. The only downside is that it doesnt work on the
first-generation Apple Watch, and you wont be able to run it if you havent upgraded to watchOS 6. Productive Habit Tracker (Image credit: Apalon Apps) Productive Habit Tracker Free (in-app purchases)

Productive is an alternative to the popular Streaks app, and like Streaks its designed to help you get things done by establishing regular habits.

Those habits might be to make time for reading or to keep yourself hydrated, to do your morning workout or to strike items off your to-do list. The app enables you to create and track chains of habits, so for example you might want to remind yourself to drink water 8 times a day or meditate 3 times a week.

Where many apps like this are designed with workplace productivity in mind and Productive can handle that stuff just fine the emphasis here is more on your whole life: the marketing images prefer to show tasks such as reading a good book and going out for a nice meal rather than hard-charging corporate ladder-climbing.

The app has been designed with simplicity and ease of use in mind, and that extends to the Apple Watch companion too. The Watch app enables you to see what tasks you want to achieve today, reminds you when its time to do them, and enables you to either mark a task complete or skip that particular instance.

The data then goes back to the iPhone app, which pulls the stats together to let you see how well youre doing and compare your achievements to your intentions. Google Keep Google Keep Free

You may remember in 2017, when Google pulled its various Apple Watch apps.
But now, it seems Google is back in the wristy business. This month the
Google Keep app was updated with a new feature: support for the Apple Watch.

Google Keep is essentially Apples Reminders for people who prefer Googles way of doing things, and like Reminders it uses the cloud to sync with desktop
and online versions of the app. You can use it to create, edit and share
notes and to-do lists, to include photos and audio in notes and in a clever touch, to record voice memos and have Google automatically turn those memos into editable, searchable text.

That feature is included in the Apple Watch app, but you cant use your Watch to edit existing notes although you can create new ones either via your voice, via scribbling or by entering emoji. You can also archive or
prioritize notes by using Force Touch.

The app keeps things simple by showing you the ten most recent notes, and while you can do dictation theres no Siri integration. There isnt a Watch
face complication either. Heres hoping that Google adds such features in
later versions assuming, of course, it doesnt decide to stop supporting the Apple Watch in the future. OmniFocus 3 OmniFocus 3 Free (in app purchases)

The Omni Group is well-known and well-loved for its productivity apps, and version 3 of OmniFocus is available not just for iPhone and iPad but for the Apple Watch too. Its an extraordinarily useful project and task management app, but while its very powerful its also very easy to use.

It also manages to pack a lot of information into the screen of your Apple Watch with good use of icons, numbers and bulleted lists. You can display a quick overview as a complication in the Utility Watch face, or call up the
app directly to get an instant picture of what you need to care about now and in the immediate future.

The standard and pro versions of the app are free trials, and you can then unlock Standard for $39.99/38.99/AU$62.99. That gives you almost everything OmniFocus can do, but if you want to add customization options you can go Pro for $59.99/$54.99/AU$89.99 (if you go for Standard first and want to upgrade later, thats $19.99/19.99/AU$30.99).

The customization enables you to create custom filters to create a custom perspective on your project, and you can reorder the Todays Forecast to give you the information you want exactly as you want it. Calendars 5 Calendars 5 $6.99/6.99/AU$10.99

You may know Readdle already: its the developer behind the superb Spark email app, as well as the popular and useful PDF Expert . Calendars 5 has been around for a while, but the Apple Watch support only arrived in December
2018. As weve come to expect from Readdle apps its well-designed and useful without unnecessary gimmicks or eye candy.

The app works as a Watch face complication and as a dedicated app. It also supports Siri, so you can ask it to tell you what youve got scheduled or create a new item with just your voice. The app works with both iCloud and Google calendars for easy syncing, and it works both online and offline.

The iPhone app is great too, with natural language input and support for the kinds of things you need a calendar app to do such as complex recurring
events (for example, a class that runs every Tuesday, Friday and Sunday), custom alerts and event invitations.

The app also includes a good task manager that enables you to track and clear your various to-do and task lists. Its good on the iPad, too, where it takes full advantage of the big screen to give you a birds-eye view of your week or month. Fantastical 2 Fantastical 2 $2.99/2.99/AU$4.49

Getting Fantastical 2 up and running on your watch can be time consuming, but its worth it: one of the very best iPhone calendar apps around develops even more powers when you add its app to your watch.

You can also add it as a complication, which means youll see details of your schedule right there in the watch face.

To actually make it work youll need to install Fantastical to your watch and then open the iPhone app, not the Apple Watch one. This is where you specify what information should be sent to the watch, and the options are extensive.

You can choose from events, calendars, reminders and lists, include a map of the event location, show end times and specify how reminders should appear, and you can even specify what should happen if you tap on the Fantastical 2 complication on your watch face.

Its that kind of thought and attention to detail that makes us love the app
so much.

The best thing about Fantastical 2, though, is that it understands you. Force Touch the app, tap on Add Event and Siri starts listening.

It knows what you mean by lunch with Dave, automatically putting the appointment at 12 noon, and it knows that if you say to-do get dinner on the way home youre adding an item to a to-do list. Siris voice recognition performs brilliantly when its limited to such a specific set of instructions. SimpleCommands SimpleCommands Free

This is an intriguing one. SimpleCommands enables you to connect your Apple Watch to various other devices LIFX lights, TP-link switches, Wink doors, Nest thermometers, Netatmo home automation and so on and soon, services such as Spotify, Lyft, IFTTT, Todoist and Twitter.

Once youve established a connection, you can then control that connection via your iPhone or Watch (you need to set them up in the iPhone app first). Your Watch then becomes what the developer calls a listener.

All you then need to do to make something happen is tell the listener what to do. The main benefit is that to paraphrase Radiohead, everythings in its
right place: whether its your aircon or your lighting system, its all done from a single app on your wrist.

Brilliant, right? Well, potentially. The list of coming soon connections is longer than the list of currently supported ones, and early adopters say its
a bit flaky: were still in version one-point-something territory, so you should expect bugs.

But if youre fed up having to use different apps to control every different digital thing in your life, this could be the thing to make your digital life much more comfortable. IFTTT IFTTT Free

If This Then That, IFTTT for short, may be one of the most useful things on the internet. As the name suggests, it enables you to create scenarios where if this happens, it does that. And the that can include all kinds of things, with a selection of connectors for software and hardware alike.

For example, you can automatically change your thermostat based on the
weather forecast, or send someone a message when youre near the shops, or backup your photo collection to a cloud storage site at a particular time or when a particular event occurs. Its absolutely brilliant, and the main iPhone app enables you control more than 600 different apps as well as smart home devices such as Hue lights and Nest thermostats.

As youd expect the Watch app doesnt do everything. What it does do is provide quick access to IFTTT functions youve already installed or created on your phone, so for example you might post a quick tweet or turn your smart lights on or off.

That simplicity is no bad thing, because of course the whole ethos of IFTTT
is to reduce the amount of effort you use to communicate with your various bits of technology. 1Password 1Password $3.99/3.49/AU$5.99 monthly subscription

A reliable and secure password manager is a must-have in these days of security breaches and hacks, and 1Password is one of the best. And it turns out that its also one of the best password managers you can use on your Apple Watch.

Our favorite apps dont just port entire iPhone apps across. They think about what youre actually likely to need on your wrist, and do that instead. In the case of 1Password that means you choose the pieces of information you want available on your Watch, so for example you might want details of a few logins, one credit card and a couple of notes, or perhaps the PIN codes for everyday locks.

If youve ever frantically scrolled through an iPhone app or contacts list to try and find the PIN for a bank card you dont use very often, the appeal should be obvious.

Where 1Password gets particularly clever is in its support for team and
family accounts, so you can share sets of information with everybody who
needs it. And if a site you use has been compromised, 1Password will alert
you to change your password. Its great stuff, and comes with a glowing recommendation from Apple. Drafts Drafts $5.99/5.99/AU$9.99

On the face of it, and by face we mean Apple Watch face, Drafts doesnt seem
to offer much for six quidbucks: it enables you to dictate text and save it for later. But it turns out that it does an awful lot...it just does it in a really simple way.

On the iPhone, Drafts is designed to make it easy to capture ideas, thoughts, to-dos or anything else.

It has an email-style interface for easy navigation and it enables you to
send your Drafts to a whole bunch of other apps and services: email, message, apps in your Share sheet, social media and so on.

It supports Markdown for easy formatting, and it hooks into the iMessage app to provide stored snippets of text and/or emoji for instant replies.

Bringing Drafts to the Watch makes it even faster. Tap on the microphone icon to capture and it does just that - but it also enables you to add to existing drafts using either your voice or the Scribble input, which means its brilliant for those moments when you think of something really clever to
write or something youd missed from your to-do list. Its the kind of app
youll quickly learn to love. Hours Hours Free / in-app purchases

Many of us need to track the time we spend on specific tasks, but the team behind Hours rightly point out the three big pitfalls of time tracking: we forget to start tracking in the first place, forget to stop when we change tasks, or just forget to stop the timer(s) altogether. Hours hopes to address that by making it really, really easy to start and stop and switch.

The iPhone app is a very beautiful thing, with a visual timeline that makes
it easy to see what youve been up to. The Watch interface is much simpler,
but just as effective: you can see the list of tasks with a timer icon for each, and if you tap on a task you can add a verbal note as well as starting or stopping the timer.

Theres a Complication for instant access, and the app will prompt you from time to time to see if you want to keep the selected timer running.

The standard version is free and ideal for self-employed or freelance types, but the $7.99/5.99/AU$12.99 upgrade to Pro adds multi-device synchronization, web access, reporting and data visualizations, team creation and management, and online backup, which means its a great team tool too. Just Press Record Just Press Record $4.99/4.99/AU$7.99

One of the most useful things about the Apple Watch is that it enables you to do things without having to take your phone out of your pocket or bag. Just Press Record brings that handiness to voice recording, enabling you to
capture bright ideas, rambling monologues or memos when youre out and about.

The interface is just a big red button with a picture of a microphone on it, and as you might expect you tap it to start recording. The phone app can transcribe your recording to turn it into text - which means your recordings become searchable by keyword - and it recognises formatting commands such as new paragraph and comma.

To use it is to feel like youre living in the future: we remember when dictation and transcription required a powerful PC and endless patience, and now you get much better results with a watch. Isnt technology brilliant?

In addition to its recording and transcription features, the app syncs automatically via iCloud, so you can access it on all your devices -
including macOS, for which theres a separate app - and it uses the Watchs own local storage so that you can record even if your phone isnt currently connected. Evernote Evernote Free + IAPs

Organize your life better with Evernote, the brilliant note-taking app which saves photos, text, recipes, bookmarks, voice notes and more. On Apple Watch you can set reminders and check off tasks easily enough.

You can dictate new notes for those brilliant ideas you mustn't forget just
by tapping the Plus button or Force Touching the screen. The Watch app can search existing notes using voice though this wasn't as reliable as I'd have liked. Even so, if you're an Evernote fan it brings an extra level of convenience. OneNote OneNote Free

If theres one thing the App Store isnt short of, its note-taking apps. But
its worth taking a look at OneNote, especially if you work across a range of Mac and PC devices, because as it syncs via Microsofts cloud, its a very good cross-platform app with particularly well-designed iPhone, iPad and Mac apps to organize pretty much everything.

We use it for shopping lists, to-do lists, random scribbled ideas in the wee small hours and anything else we think we might need to refer to later, and unlike some rival cross-platform services its completely free. Microsoft
hopes youll like it so much youll embrace Office, which is available for a very low price as part of a premium OneDrive plan.

Microsoft has become rather good at keeping its Watch apps simple, and
OneNote is no exception: tap the cross icon to dictate a new note, or tap a notebook or note to see its contents.

And thats pretty much all it does - and thats all it needs to do, because any watch screen is poorly suited to complex tasks. Wed much rather have speed
and simplicity than any ill-conceived bells and whistles. Deliveries Deliveries $4.99/4.99/AU$7.99

Is there anything more annoying than missing a delivery of something youre really excited about? Yes: theres missing a delivery of something that you really need to have in a hurry. Deliveries can help ensure that neither of those things happen to you.

It supports stacks of services including UPS, FedEx, US Postal Service, DHL, TNT, Canada Post, City Link and Royal Mail, can track packages, can add delivery dates to your calendar and can record past deliveries in case you need to refer to them later.

Its unnecessary for the odd package, but its useful if you do a lot of online shopping or if youre in the middle of a project, such as furnishing a flat.

On the Watch the app acts as a ready reminder of whats in and whats incoming, so for example itll show you if an item has just been delivered as well as
the ETA of any other outstanding deliveries.

Theres a Complication too, which works particularly well on the Utility watch face and shows you the most recent delivery. If you have the macOS version of the app too you can automatically sync between Mac and mobile via iCloud or the developers own cloud sync service. Best Apple Watch apps for email, chat and messaging Microsoft Outlook Image credit: Microsoft (Image credit: Microsoft) Microsoft Outlook Free / in-app purchases

Microsoft makes some lovely iOS and Apple Watch apps, and this is one of
them: it brings the power of Office apps together with Siri Shortcuts, enabling you to ask when your next meeting is or tell the team youre running late. The Apple Watch app has been re-engineered to make it incredibly fast (the iPhone app is faster too), and its a great way to access email on the go if youre in a Microsoft-based environment.

In addition to improving things under the hood, Microsoft has also made some visual improvements. It has been updated to take advantage of the Complications available on the Apple Watch 4, so if you use the Infograph or Infograph Modular watch faces you can now configure a Complication to show
the next event in your Outlook calendar.

As with other iOS Office apps, Outlook is freemium: the app itself is free
but it really needs an Office 365 Home or Office 365 Personal subscription to be truly useful. Theyre currently $9.99/8.99/AU$13.99 and $6.99/6.49/AU$9.99
a month respectively as in-app purchases, but you can save a bit of money if you buy them directly from Microsoft instead. FlickType Keyboard FlickType Keyboard Free / In-app purchases

FlickType wants to make your Apple Watch text input faster and more accessible, promising up to three times faster input than using dictation or Scribble handwriting recognition. It uses the standard QWERTY layout but can read your letters aloud, enabling you to type eyes-free, which is
particularly useful for blind or partially sighted users.

The app uses an algorithm to try and guess what youre trying to write based
on the pattern of your taps so it should get the right result even if you make a typo or two. If it does get things wrong or your typos are too hard to comprehend you can edit with a quick flick of the finger. The app also supports emoji and text shortcuts for even faster input. And it is very, very fast, with impressive accuracy.

In an interesting reversal of the usual pricing model, the Apple Watch
version of FlickType is free but if you want to use the app on your iPhone
or iPad youll need to subscribe. Thats presumably because Apple doesnt let third-party keyboard apps replace the default Scribble service, so the app isnt quite as flexible on your wrist as it is on your phone: you have to copy your text from FlickType into the app youre using. Telegram Telegram
Messenger Free

Oh, the drama: Telegram 5 initially dropped its Apple Watch companion app,
but now its back! Back! BACK!

The reason for this is that Telegram 5 has been rebuilt from the ground up to make it faster and more efficient; the Watch update simply wasnt ready in time.

Telegram is a secure instant messaging service that works on iPhone, iPad and once again, Apple Watch. It enables you to group chat with up to 30,000 people, which is more than enough for most of us, and unlike other messaging services its really good at sharing things like documents, zip files and
other useful things.

Its both free and ad-free, and if youre worried about privacy you can take part in Secret Chats where messages self-destruct after a specified time. As with all private apps that doesnt stop somebody taking a screenshot, taking a photo or duplicating content in some other way, but the end-to-end encryption does mean you can be confident that others arent listening in.

Telegrams main selling point is its efficiency. Its designed to do its job with the minimum amount of data transfer necessary, something thats important in places with poor network coverage or for people with metered data connections, and its also designed to operate with the minimum load on your battery. Tweetbot 4 Tweetbot 4 $4.99/4.99/AU$7.99

If you arent already familiar with Tweetbot 4, its the best Mac and iOS Twitter client bar none. This is why it can charge $4.99/4.99/AU$7.99 for an iOS app and people gladly pay it, and its worth checking out on the Apple Watch too.

Tweetbot doesnt unleash the Twitter firehose onto your wrist - we cant think of anything guaranteed to kill your battery more quickly - but it does give you exactly the information you need when you arent looking at your phone.

The developers have rightly assumed that if you have your phone to hand you wont be using the watch instead, so theyve concentrated on making an app for when you cant or dont want to pull your phone out of your pocket or purse.
And thats clever.

Its Activity pane shows you whats happening in your feed, so if somebodys followed you or replied to you or tweeted you then youll see it in Activity. Tapping on the item opens the appropriate tweet or user page, and with tweets youll see icons for a quick reply, a retweet or a like.

If you push into the screen using Force Touch you get an offer to create a
new tweet, and both it and the reply option use Siri for dictation, because on-watch typing would be frankly horrible - and you can dictate a direct message or follow/unfollow accounts from the app too. Spark Spark Free

Theres no shortage of apps promising to make email fun again, and Spark is
one of our favorites: on our Mac and on our iPhone it does a superb job of showing us what we want and hiding what we dont.

The Apple Watch app is as well thought-out as its siblings, with the ability to use Messages-style quick replies as well as emoji and dictation. Its quite possible to reply to most everyday emails without reaching for your iPhone, although the option to Handoff is there if a message is too long to bother scrolling through on your wrist.

The main selling point for Spark is its Smart Inbox, which groups messages from multiple accounts into personal, notification and newsletter categories. It then displays how many unread messages you have for each category in the Watch apps home screen.

You can pin messages for quick access, and you can snooze them to hide them for a specified period of time. We find ourselves using that last one a lot: messages we cant process properly on our wris
--- D'Bridge 4
* Origin: Physics (1337:3/125)