BazzaRama

A couple of the things I like about Apple products are the attention to detail and those little things that demonstrate the importance of the customer experience that I discover while using them. Every now and then I come across something that goes beyond what could be considered the minimum necessary effort to deliver a superior experience, bringing whimsy and delight to my use of the product. The Snoopy watch face in watchOS 10 is one of those things.

I remember seeing it as a new face option coming in the new operating system in the WWDC keynote back in June but didn’t give it much thought. We’ve had animated watch faces before with the characters from Toy Story and the Mickey and Minnie Mouse faces. They’ve been around since the original Apple Watch if my memory serves. Due to the limited power in those early watches, the character animations were simple and once you’d seen them there didn’t seem to be much variation. Now that the Apple Watch hardware is more refined and powerful, those limitations seem to have been lifted.

The Snoopy watch face animations are surprisingly complex and varied and continues to bring delight every time I check the time. The animations interact with the hands of the watch, so they change based on what time it is. There seem to be multiple options of animations involving both Snoopy and Woodstock (and several of Woodstock’s friends) for each minute of each hour over the 12 hours of the watch face. It took days, possibly even a week or longer before I saw one of the animations repeat. Now, after using the Snoopy face for several hours every day for most of the last month, I will still occasionally see an animation that I’ve never seen before. Maybe Apple has been adding some with each point upgrade to watchOS 10.

That level of attention to detail and the programming involved are reasons I choose Apple products. When a tech gadget offers productive, life-benefiting features and delightfully entertains in the process, it becomes a joy to use.