Back in November 2021, I got a BangleJS2 hackable smart watch, having backed it on Kickstarter. It’s no Apple Watch, for sure, but it’s much cheaper and you can write your own apps for it really rather easily, in JavaScript. I particularly like the always-on display which is readable in direct light, especially in dark mode, and also has a backlight. It’s built on top of an inexpensive generic smart watch, the Shenzhen Smart Care Technology SMA Q3. You may think the BangleJS2 has a bit of hefty mark-up, but you’re getting a watch modified with new firmware making it easy to program, plus a community of support and a huge range of apps to download.
I said back in November that I wanted to get Susan Kare’s classic 1984 Macintosh font Chicago working on it. Well, I’ve now made a watch face inspired not just by the font, but by her whole design for the original Macintosh Finder desktop. I’m grateful to @peerdavid for helping me improve the code so that the time displayed was more accurate, widgets still run in the background and getting it to work when your watch is in dark mode, which normally looks much better.
Let me know if you have ideas for how to improve it. My ideas include showing seconds when you unlock the watch, some way of including widgets, text dates, and maybe showing some other data when you tap the window.
If you have a BangleJS2, you can download the app here. And if you haven’t got one of the watches yet, you can still run the clock in the emulator and have it on your desktop.
You can also buy a BangleJS right here: https://shop.espruino.com/banglejs2