Clockology. Why?
I decided to play around a bit with Clockology and I must say that it has turned into a decent app with lots of content available and a stable experience offered.
Some of the watch faces are very impressive and way ahead of what is available on most other platforms, and they can now act as true watch faces by appearing when you lift your wrist. It is a bit of a hack of course and you are in effect leaving an app running, but it does not do much to the battery performance and it does feel like a whole new experience.
But…
What’s the point? Seriously, it is nice and all that, but I ended up wondering why I was doing it and what the benefits are?
Call me boring, but I couldn’t really see any benefits in the new watch faces and the novelty soon wore off and then it became more than about mere novelty.
I realised that quality will always win out and that a curated selection of faces that really do work is better than hundreds that are just there for the look. It’s a bit like having too many TV channels because you end up watching crap because the experience of finding something good takes too long. And nothing is more crap than having a digital watch face with ‘Rolex’ or ‘Omega’ written on it on a smart watch. That’s just sad.
It also took me back to why I don’t need themes on a smartphone and why I only have one widget in use on my iPhone. Sometimes you just need something to work in the simplest way possible and to not change it too often, and this is effectively the way Apple works with the iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. Everything stays roughly the same with small visual changes and new features, and for many of us that works just fine.