This is a guest post by Watchface designer Mike Wickens.
Time to get creative, ever wanted to make your own watch face for your Samsung Gear wearable? Today we look at all the mainstream software available for watch face creation. This includes companion applications and natively supported.
Samsung provide two products Gear Watch Designer and Tizen Studio . Arguably the best software for watch face creation is Tizen Studio but requires a level of coding knowledge where Gear Watch Designer will write the code for you. Some of the companion applications offer great customisation interfaces but fall short when making direct calls to the watches hardware for example health data.
There are 1000’s of free/paid watch faces available on the Samsung Galaxy Apps store and other companies have their own stores. Most of the software does provide assets that can be used for example hands, indexes, backgrounds etc. A lot of developers will use other 3rd party products to create their own assets. The Adobe product suite are very popular choice of tools these include Illustrator, After Effects and Photoshop.
Comparison of watch face design apps
We have compared 5 products currently available for watch face creation – Samsung Gear Watch Designer, Facer, Watchmaker, Mr Time Maker and Tizen Studio. The chart below shows their features side-by-side so you can see which one might be more suitable for you:
It’s really your choice of what software you use to create your watch face, the Samsung developer channel has some great videos if you decide to take your creativity one step further and published your design on the Galaxy Apps Store.
There are many resources available to get you started on making your own watch faces, we have provided some links below.
