Let’s run through some of the more complicated watch faces on the Apple Watch and talk about what they’re used for and how you can use them. First, let’s talk about the astronomy watch face. Tapping on the watch face will zoom out to show the entire earth. And you can scroll the Digital Crown to move either forward and back in time, showing which parts of the world are day or night. Additionally, you can actually use your finger to scroll around in the earth to view other locations. The same thing, of course, applies to the moon, but you can also do a solar system option, which you can use to find the position of the planets at any date instead.
Next, we have the chronograph watch face, which seems like a pretty standard watch face at first, but you might be a little confused because the second hand isn’t moving. That’s because what you think is the secondhand isn’t actually the second hand. Rather, the dial at the bottom there shows your second. Effectively, the chronograph watch face is a stop watch. You can tap the stopwatch button at the top right to start it. You can tap the white bottom at the bottom when it’s running to add an extra lap. And then when you’re done, you can simply press the red button to stop it and then press the white button to go back.
Next we have the GMT watch phase, which is one of my favorites. It’s actually a pretty traditional watch face. You’ll see you have minute hand, our hand, and then a second hand, then it’s moving. But you notice that there is a fourth hand here, the outer ring of this watch face actually depicts a different time zone than the one you’re in. You can see here I have it set to cuppertino. That last red hand shows the current time in there in a 24 hour format. So you can see there’s a little after three PM the outer ring will also be two colors depicting the day and night cycle in that location. You can change the time zone being shown by the outer ring just by tapping the watch face and then using your digital crown to scroll through many different time zones, you’ll see as you do so, it’ll actually rotate that outer ring accordingly. You can also choose one just for your current location and that current location will be situated in between adjacent time zones.
Next is the lunar watch face, which shows the relationship between the date and time and the phases of the moon. You can see that it has a pretty standard clock face in the center, but below that it has the current date and you can use the Digital crown after you tap on it to move either forward or back in time to see how that affects the actual moon. You can choose which calendar you wanted to show as well. You can see that was the Chinese lunar calendar, but you can also scroll down to either Hebrew or Islamic.
Very popular one is the solar dial watch face. As you can see, you have your primary time in the middle, and you can choose between analog or digital. And around that is a 24 hour dial showing the location of the sun. And that sun also points toward whatever hour it is. You can see that it’s currently 6:34, and that is pointing toward about 30 minutes past 18, which corresponds to that time. You can also tap on it to enter kind of a time shift mode, much like the other watch faces. And then you can scroll at the digital Crown to see how that light and the position will change as time goes on. More interestingly, you’ll see little dots along it to show you different phases of the day. And if you stop scrolling nearby, it’ll actually shift to show that one was solar Noon. You can move it further back and it will show that this one is the sunrise and that took place at 6:16 or about 12 hours and 17 minutes ago.
A bit simpler way to show that similar information is with the Solar Graph watch face, which has a graph of the position of the sun as well as just a standard digital time. Tapping on it will allow you to scroll forward and back in time, much like the solar dial. And you can see it’ll also do a similar snapping where it’ll show you what the time was at that sunset, or let’s say this one, which is dusk. And then you have the world time watch face, which could look a little bit intimidating. In the center, you have a standard dial, which is an analog face, but you can also choose between digital if you want. That is surrounded by 24 different time zones. The one that you’re currently in is marked by the little orange arrow at the 6 o’clock position, tapping the global, actually center it at the North Pole, showing you where each of those time zones align on the actual globe. As you can see, you can also tell where it is day and where it is night. And you can easily see around the edge with those numbers what the hour is at each of those time zones in a 24 hour format or any of these watch faces useful to you or you gonna stick with whatever watch face you’re using currently?