I’m getting more and more accustomed to have Apple Watch integrate into my daily life, and it’s excellent. I love its subtle taps and fitness tracking, as well as the style of it and the positive attention that brings from people I meet.
The search for great Apple Watch apps continues, and developers are certainly doing amazing things with this little device.
Instapaper
Saving articles to read later is the virtual equivalent to being a pack rat – everything gets saved and nothing gets cleaned out. Although I’ve mostly used Apple’s Reading List for its deep integration with iOS and Safari, more recently I’ve decided to give Instapaper another try, as it’s an app dedicated to saving articles for future reference and not just a subset of Safari and iCloud.
Instapaper for Apple Watch grants full access to saved articles, but not for reading. Instead, the app uses iOS’s voice synthesizer to read out the article, with Apple Watch serving as a remote to select the article, control playback speed, and more.
A solid choice for anyone who reads a lot of online articles, Instapaper is a free download for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch.
Fantastical 2
My favorite calendar app received its Apple Watch treatment this past week, and the results are incredible. Now events and reminders are displayed on the Watch Fantastical-style, and the quality for which Flexibits is known is evident.
Users can add events or reminders with a Force Touch and dictation, which uses Fantastical’s famous natural language processing to intelligently sort the details of your entry. It’s difficult to do the app justice with a mere disruption, so you’ll simply try Fantastical 2 for yourself, and you can get it for $4.99 in the App Store.
Reminders Nano
For some unknown reason, Apple neglected to put its Reminders app on Apple Watch, the one place where it could have been incredibly useful. However, the slack has been picked up with the release of Reminders Nano, an excellent substitute for anyone wanting an Apple-like reminders app for their Watch.
The style and functionality is rather closely inspired by Apple’s own app, but its main purpose of bringing that stock feel to the Apple Watch is where this app particularly excels, as this could easily have been the design Apple would’ve used, had they included Reminders on Apple Watch. You can pick up Reminders Nano in the App Store for $0.99, and be sure to check out our review.
If you would like to see your favorite Apple Watch app featured on App Watch, send me an email telling me about it to timothy@idownloadblog.com or leave a comment below.