Transcription
Your Apple Watch comes loaded with a lot of amazing features. And since WWDC is just around the corner, that's when we see the first glance of what we expect to find in the new Watch OS 12 operating system. And so, in today's video, I'm going to go ahead and go through tips and tricks, also troubleshoot problems, as well as my personal favorite features that's available on the current Apple Watches that's available in the market. So, so long as your watch is on watch OS 11, feel free to follow these as most of these are pretty much compatible on other Apple Watch models, not just the Apple Watch Ultra. And of course, timestamps to everything will be in the description down below for your pleasure. Let's begin.
And let's start off with the ability to quickly switch from one watch face to the other automatically by just doing like a simple swipe instead. You see, by default, this used to be an enabled feature. Then Apple took it away and then they readdit it and then most people don't know that you could reenable it. So, by simply just going into your Apple Watch settings, pardon my massive list of apps. I do use a lot of apps on my watch. There we go. In the settings tab, go down until you find clock right here, and just make sure you enable swipe to switch watch face. And now, by simply just moving your finger like down here, it'll give you the ability to quickly switch between one watch face to the other. It just takes a while to get used to, but once you have this feature enabled, you'll then realize it's really easy to switch from one watch face to the other.
Additionally, I had a previous video that was uploaded that featured the new focus mode ability in the thumbnail, but I didn't cover it because I thought everybody knew about it. You see, by going into your focus mode right in here, and you scroll down, you'll see there's the new Apple Intelligence Reduce interruptions. You can enable it from here and they will actually illuminate this cool animated icon right here or new animation I should say of the new focus mode. And then if you look at your paired phone, you'll notice in control center your phone is also in the reduced focus mode right here depending how you have it all set up. And this basically will just use Apple intelligent to decide what's a notification that you should receive and what's not a primary notification. If it's like your spouse or something like that getting a hold of you, saying it's a mercy, you'll still receive a notification. If not, you won't receive it. if it's just something like a spam email address that just got emailed to you.
Now, if you ever find yourself hiking, one of the best features is by holding on the power button on your Apple Watch, regardless if it's the Apple Watch Ultra or regular series or the SE Apple Watch, enable backtracking right here. This will utilize the built-in GPS compass and basically keep track of the path. So, when you're ready to come back, all you need to do is just follow the line and it'll take you directly on the path you took to get back safely. So, when you're ready to backtrack, you simply just tap here and then select retrace path. And all you need to do is just follow the line and you'll make it back to the campsite where you first started.
Now, I have seen some comments and some users reporting that their backtracking isn't working for them. You are going to need to go on your iPhone and go into your settings. And then in settings, just go into privacy and security right in here and tap on location services. And then scroll down till you find compass right here, this black icon. And just make sure you have while using the app as well as precise location enabled. And then next thing you got to do is what I like to do is just exit out here and just search up system services. Click on it and go all the way to the very bottom. This bottom one enabled. Make sure it's turned on. It will require Face ID and just have it turned on. This will record all your previous logs and locations you've been going to. So, this is what you need to enable to have backtracking work. Because if I go ahead and turn it off and then just confirm and we go back to the watch and I activate tracking, you'll get this message on your watch saying that it cannot do it unless you change that setting, but it doesn't specify the exact setting. But now you know exactly what to do.
Now, if you like to know how to use your Apple Watch built-in microphone to automatically identify songs that you're just So, let's say you walk into a store, music is playing, your smart stack will identify that and automatically recognize the song that's playing. So, if I play music from a phone that's not paired to the Apple Watch and I hit play, if I go on the very bottom, it will automatically pop up saying that it's recognized music from Shazam. And when you click on it, it's able to listen to the song that's playing. It will automatically identify. And just like that, it recognized the track that's playing. And here, you can just select it. It will launch the actual app. It identified the song. And here, you can actually launch it to your Apple Music and then decide to add it to your playlist if you like. If this feature isn't working for you, you may need to go to your settings and actually enable this. So, by going into your Apple Watch settings, in the settings, scroll down to privacy, privacy and security right here. Click on it and then scroll down to microphone and then scroll down to music detection. And this is where you can decide to enable that or disable it if you don't like it.
Additionally, if you're playing music through your Apple Watch, you know, rotating digital crown will bring up Smart Stacks, but you'll find your media control right here. But since right now we are using a third party app, if I want to take the paired iPhone and do something like watch a YouTube video, hit play. Launch Smart Stack. Our music media control is also located right here. Or you could decide to increase the audio, decrease it, of course, pause and play. You know, the norm.
Then real quick, if you've been enjoying this video so far, if you could take two seconds to hit that like button, like, that would be truly appreciated because I like to keep my videos sponsor free from integrated ads because I don't know about you, but they're kind of annoying, especially when they're integrated in the video and you really can't skip it. So, instead of wasting like a minute or two of your time, if you could just take two seconds to hit that like button and like, really appreciate those and support the channel to be continued sponsored by you guys to viewers, not brands. And yes, I did get a haircut during the making of this video. Let's carry on.
But my favorite feature about the Smart Stack is the fact that the Smart Stack is fully customizable. You see, if you scroll all the way to the very bottom, this is the feature I get the most value out of as you could pin three of your favorite apps right here. So, by simply clicking on it, you could launch the workout app. So, by simply long holding and scrolling down, you could remove an app you don't want. You could pin it to the top if you wanted to be default on top instead of all the way to the very bottom. And then tap the plus. And here you have a variety of different apps shortcuts as well as some complications you see earlier. You can actually decide to attach. So if you select ECG, select the ECG app. And now you see right here, if we could quickly launch that app right there in the smart stack. Think of this as a better version than the uh actual watch face complication as you could just give yourself more additional shortcuts and have memorized.
Now, other things you can find in here is live actions. So, if you have like a pickup order or somewhere where you have to pick up on your live activity lock page on your phone, you'll be able to see the stats right here. So, if you do like a Domino's order as an example or a pickup order at Best Buy, you'll also see the track progress right here on your screen. And in the smart stack again, if we go ahead and enter a wiggle mode and we tap the plus icon, you can also find check-ins in here as well where you can check in with your friend to let them know you arrived safely to your destination and then just tap on the contact of interest, locate them on your contact list, and then you have a faster way to quickly check in on them whenever you go to the gym, arrive at school, or arrive at a friend's house.
But if you don't want the smart stack to automatically adjust throughout your habits, you can permanently fix the smart stack. Or you can decide on adding your favorite widgets apps. And then when you click on app, it will show you their widgets that they support. And yes, it does support thirdparty apps too, like just press record as you have a quicker way to start recording. Just like that. You could definitely get a lot of amazing usage out of the Smart Stack if you know how to use it. But as I was saying earlier, if you like to manually have all these icons fixed instead of automatically adjusting from the Siri algorithm, you can always just go into your settings in the main setting page, just scroll down to Smart Stack, click on Smart Stack, and where it says widget suggestions, this is where you could disable it. So it will now stay fixed to the preference we originally left it. Nothing's going to move around. The only thing that will be adjusted is the now playing. But you can always again just long hold on the icon. Rearrange it by just simply pinning it and it'll say to the top. You just can't like click and drag them. Unfortunately, it just does it by pin.
Additional tools that the smart stack can deliver is weather information. You see, if we scroll down, like right now, if there was like a weather advice for me earlier, but it will adapt to the current weather conditions in case you're on the weather watch for a storm or something like that, your smart stack will be able to update that as well right there. Additionally, calendar reminders will also be able to pop up on your smart stack displaying to you like your next meeting time and etc.
Then, when it comes to thirdparty app support, there's a handful of some very impressive ones such as Things. This app is a onetime purchase, but the beauty about this app, as soon as you add it to be a part of your Smart Stack, this will basically allow you to display your to-do list as well as any upcoming tasks. And if you're looking for a third party weather app that's not the native one from Apple, there's also Carrot as well. It is a onetime purchase, but this is another great substitute for another widget that could be supported on Smart Stack and will show you basically quick summaries of the current weather. And then the overcast earlier if you witnessed allow us to actually have the ability to have a separate media control but to the third party overcast which allows us to listen to our podcast using the internal speakers of our Apple Watch if your Apple Watch supports it while giving you media control right then and there as well. And then flighty is another great third party app that allows you to track realtime flights tracking updates. And then the Nike Run app also supports smart stacks ability as well, which will display your latest run stats.
Additionally, if you don't want these smart stacks to automatically appear on some apps, you can also disable them as well. You see, if we scroll all the way to the very bottom and enter wiggle mode by long pressing one of the widgets, scroll all the way down, you'll see widget suggestions. And here you could disable the automatic widget suggestions based off Siri what Siri believes you want to see first as I was showing you earlier. But if you scroll down, this is where you got disabled individual apps. So you can find more third party apps you may already have installed that support this. So if you don't want drafts to be involved as an example, it'll show you the demonstration layouts on how it may look like. You could disable certain ones if they feature different layouts options or you could also disable it entirely. And that's how you can individually disable some of these or just turn them all off if you like.
So those are all the amazing things that you could do with the Apple Watch Smart Stack. Again, I love using it more than I do when when it comes to my watch face complications, which is why sometimes I do actually end up switching to a much more simple watch face nowadays since the smart stack basically replace it all, especially when it comes to doing workouts, too, because now it actually will take me back to the Smart Stack instead of my Apple Watch face, which is in here. It's where I get all of the best usage out of it. And when I'm done from the gym, this simple watch face is more enough for my needs.
Now, I am currently charging my Apple Watch using the provided USBC charger, and I'm using my iPhone to charge it as simply just plugging it in to your iPhone. So, long as you have a USBC device, you can simply just plug it in and charge your Apple Watch from your iPhone. So, that's pretty cool.
But in terms of notifications from the Apple Watch, most of the time there is no need to get all these notifications that you receive on your phone on your Apple Watch, which is why it's always recommended is to go in some of these pointless notifications that doesn't need to be notified on your Apple Watch and just turn them off entirely. But instead of going through these one by one, a faster method would be to launch the Apple Watch app on your iPhone and go into your notification tab and go down to each app and just take the second and go through some of these apps that you do not need to receive those notifications from your iPhone like my Amazon Alexa. I don't need this, don't need that. Really, the only important notifications I want to be receiving on my Apple Watch would be like my home notifications for like my smart security. Maybe authentication for security purposes, but everything else I really don't care. Maybe banky would be something that would be considered as well as like the find my in case you leave your devices behind. So, it's always good to go back and look at some of these apps so it's not mirroring the unwanted notifications, but all your important stuff like your messages and stuff like that will appear automatically on your Apple Watch.
And another thing you could do if you go on your Apple Watch settings, a new update that they recently added can be located in settings and then scroll down in the sound and heaptic tab ringtones as now you have a variety of different ringtones to select from. So you can change your ringtones as well as your text tone, new mail and calendar alerts sound to other things.
Now, now the next thing, surprisingly, to this very day, a lot of people don't know about this, but whenever you launch control center, this little phone icon with the audio waves, you know, if you tap once, it'll play sound on your iPhone, but if you long hold, it would actually flash your device. As crazy it may sound, there's still a handful of people that don't know about this trick. And you can also do this exact same thing on the iPhone as well. You see, if we launch control center, move this out, you can find a icon of the Apple Watch, which will allow you to play sound to locate your Apple Watch in case you misplace it somewhere. And you'll be able to find it by simply adding a new control to your widget page. And if you scroll down, you'll find it under the watch app right here, pin my watch. But even if you're still having a hard time locating your Apple Watch, the heart rate sensor, you could cause it to flash like you can with your iPhone by simply launching the Find My app on your iPhone. Go on your devices and look for your Apple Watch and then just tap play sound. And you can see it's flashing and playing sound utilizing the heart rate sensor LED lights. And once you find it, you can just tap dismiss.
Now, another overlooked thing is still in the control center because all the way at the very bottom, you could actually tap and remove some of these icons that you don't need, as well as rearrange them to your own personal preference.
Now, the latest generation Apple watches, by default, they now have 64 GB of internal storage. And just like your iPhone, you can just find this in the settings and then go in general and about to visually verify that you do have the 64 GB model, which is a lot of storage, which is why I recommend storing your playlist, your podcast, as well as offload maps on your Apple Watch. If you like to offload maps, it's as easy as just quickly launching the Map app on your iPhone and then go into maps. And what you want to do is tap on your profile picture and then select offline maps. And you can tap download a new map which will take you to this page where you can enter a location and use the square to like make it bigger or smaller. And then just hit download and it'll give you the exact measurement of the storage it will take up. But once you tap done, allow it to offload and then enable sync with Apple Watch. So now every time when you dock your Apple Watch every night, that offload map that we've created will be saved on the Apple Watch. And then in addition to that, back on the iPhone, if you tap on library, this is where you go in and create some offload routes, guides, places, as well as pin. So in routes, you can literally create a new route, all custom, and it'll also be stored offline on the Apple Watch this way as well.
And then as for offloading playlist and stuff, music, podcasts, in the Apple Watch app, just scroll down to the app for your music or podcast. You can automatically enable save your recent music to be offloaded or you can tap the plus icon and go on your playlist and manually just add them just like that. And it'll give you the progress right there. You could do this on playlist, artists, albums, made for you, and etc. And the same method will apply for like podcast apps as well. Well, as you can see, they're automatically offloading.
Having music offloaded on the Apple Watch, you could also play sound now, so long as you have an Ultra 2 or a Series 10, you are able to play music utilizing the internal speakers on your Apple Watch by simply just launching the app, like the Apple Music app. Select your playlist. Now, it's playing music for my iPhone. Select right here. Select AirPlay. You can select the Apple Watch and then the audio is playing through the speakers for my Apple Watch. Just like that. Keep in mind this only works if the Apple Watch is not being charged. Why it wasn't working for us earlier. But that's how you can manually select between different devices.
Now, with these latest generation Apple watches, if you need to exchange contact information, it's as easy as simply just tapping your watch to another iPhone or another Apple Watch, and you'll each immediately just transfer your contact information just like that. And you can control what you want it to show, too. If you just want your email or your phone number to show or both, you can also do a very similar thing with completing money transactions thanks to Apple Tap to Cash. You can now just double tap the power button on the side of your Apple Watch and just go down and select the payment method of choice. Go down and tap on cash to cash. Tap the cash, I mean, and just add the number amount. Hit continue and double tap to confirm. And now you simply just tap another device. Could be an iPhone or another Apple Watch. A cool animation will appear and you just simply complete a transaction just like that. I've used this quite a bit already and it comes out to be really helpful.
Then when it comes to gesture controls, a double tap on the digital crown will obviously bring up your app switcher. A double tap on the power button will bring up your Apple Pay. A single tap on the power button will bring up your control center and a long hold on top. Regardless if you're on the homepage or not, you'll always have access to your notifications. And if an app is ever acting funny, a long hold on the power button and a long hold on a digital crown will force close the app. So next time when you open it, it will start from fresh.
Now, if you like to quickly turn off your always on display, of course, the best method of doing this is just by simply launching control center and look for theater mode. By enabling theater mode when you cover your wrist, your Apple Watch is still on, but all your notifications are going to be silent. And your always on display is disabled. And of course, you use digital crown to quickly take a quick peek and rotate it back down. Ideal to use in theaters, of course. But with theater mode activated, if you activate the flashlight, it will default to red because red is the color that's typically used to retain your night vision in a dark room.
Now, with every Apple Watch, if you launch the camera app, you can launch the viewfinder of your iPhone. But the way people have been utilizing this lately is they've been treating this more like a quick baby monitor, as you can have your iPhone in a different room and monitor it all right there on your wrist. So, that's a nice little tip you could do with it is camera. And if your hands are full, a two-finger tap on the screen 2:35 p.m. will cause the Apple Watch to verbally read out loud the time. And if you're using the Mickey Mouse or Minnie Mouse watch faces, those characters will tell you the time in their character voice as well.
But when it comes to nifty reminders or nifty tools, if you need to set a timer, you could just say 25 minutes, 5 minutes without actually saying set a time as Siri is able to understand what you mean. So I could do something like this. Five minutes and the five minute timer counting down just start it like that. Other cool useful things you can do with Siri is you can ask it to flip a coin. Flip a coin tails. Extremely useful when you have to decide on something quick and you can literally just tell your friend heads or tail. And then when it comes to choosing workouts, again, when you select a workout, this 3se secondond timer can be bypassed by simply tapping on screen once. And then after a minute, you could tap the plus icon to select the next workout to have it all under one log.
And there you guys have it. That is all the cool things you can do on the latest generation Apple Watch, so long as you're on the latest version of Watch OS 11. Let me know which one of these features was your personal favorite. And in case we did miss one, feel free to comment down below for the rest of us. Now, if you wish to watch more, check out this video over there where I go through my favorite iPad apps that I will consider them to be essential apps for any iPad user. And the video down there are my favorite apps, but for the Apple Watch, including that app row of complications I was able to add on my Apple Watch Ultra, in case you were curious, right down there. And yes, I'll also include the Apple Watch band that was featured in today's video in the description as well if you plan on picking one up for your Apple Watch Ultra.