Anyone can make watchfaces for the Gear S2 now with the Gear Watch Designer
Samsung has unveiled the Gear Watch Designer which is one of the most complex pieces of software coming from the South Korean giant so far. The app is currently available for the Windows and Mac operating systems and it simplifies the creation of watchfaces for the Gear S2 so that it doesn’t require any coding skills. Basically, you can create individual elements using design tools, and the bit that’s most exciting is that you can just jump right in as the app doesn’t have a steep learning curve.
Gear Watch Designer lets you adjust the conditional line of each component, an example being that you can show a sunny background image during a certain time interval like 06:00 – 17:59 and display a moon background in the remaining time span. You can work out other conditions as well and Samsung provides a lot of tools for playing around with this feature, for instance, you can create conditions based on battery life, pedometer and more. Another neat feature of the Gear Watch Designer is the ability to create your own animation using a PNG sequence and then use it as a watchface component which is pretty neat.
The Gear Watch Designer is a very complex tool for developers and it truly gives power to the watch enthusiasts who can now make their own watchfaces effortlessly, but the app has a set of system requirements that need to be fulfilled first:
- Microsoft Windows® 7 or later (32- or 64-bit), Apple Mac OS® X 10.8(Mountain Lion) 64-bit or later
- At least dual-core 2 GHz of CPU
- At least 2 GB of RAM memory
- At least 1 GB of free disk space
- JRE (Java Runtime Environment) 1.8 or later.
- 1280×1024 resolution (higher resolution recommended)
The future of Samsung’s smartwatches is pretty bright given the patents they’ve been submitting and this is going to be a good year for the Gear S2 as Samsung Pay is going to make its way to the device.
