Here’s a list of gestures you need to know on the Apple Watch:
- Lift your wrist to show the display: This is probably the easiest of the gestures. Once you’ve put on the watch, simply lift your wrist and you’ll see the display. You’re not gesturing, but you are. Just not on the face of the watch. But many of these are clicking places anyway…
- Click on the crown: Access your your home screen. You can control the home screen like this: Manage Apps On The Apple Watch.
- Double-click on the crown: Go back to your last app.
- Click on the side button: No matter where you are, the side button will take you to your friends list. Customize this list so your top 10 contacts can receive things like, I don’t know, your creepy heartbeat.
- Double-click the side button to open Apple Pay: Clicking the side button opened your address book. But double-clicking opens Apple’s system for paying via NFC: Apple Pay. If you’ve setup Apple Pay, double-click the side button to see an image of your credit card. Move your wrist close to an Apple Pay credit card reader (like at Subway) to pay for all the stuffs. No card, no password, no germs. Just a sandwich hand crafted by the people that brought you Jared. And probably cloned him…
- Hold down the side button: This brings up a screen that let’s you lock, power off or put the battery reserve on on your watch. You can also force-touch the Power Off button to factory reset the watch. Be careful with that one. If you can actually force touch the right place on the button. Good luck with that. It’s like the worlds best drinking game. But sober.
- Press and hold the crown to talk to your best friend, Siri. She’ll start listening while you’re holding the crown. Tell her something, like all about your feelings (wait, you’re not the Green Arrow, you don’t have to constantly talk about those) and then she’ll do whatever you told her (within reason).
- Swipe down to control notifications: By default, you’ll see the watch face when you initially look at your Apple Watch. Swipe down at the main watch face screen to see a list of notifications. This should be easy to get used to as it’s how things work on your iPhone. Click on push notifications to open them, or swipe to clear them.
- Swipe up to access glances: Glances show information from a lot of apps at once. Swipe up from the watch face, to show glances for battery, music, fitness, 3rd party apps, etc. Swipe vertically to scroll between them. The easiest glance is the first, which shows the control center, similar to what’s on your iPhone. Here, throw the watch into Airplane mode, etc. No flashlight. When you hit a glance that needs to communicate with the phone you’ll see the dots that indicate that it’s communicating.
- Force press to access menus and options to otherwise available: Press harder on the screen and on buttons to force-press. Many apps have different options available to a Force Press, such as changing your goals in the Activity app, shuffling through music in the Music app, searching for a location in Maps, and force resetting the device from the restart screen. Many 3rd party apps will have an option and built-in apps are slowly being documented as people find them.
- Put your hand over the face of the watch to silence it: Yup, you’re sitting in a meeting or at a movie and notifications are bugging you. You don’t want to crash the plane. So, silence the watch. The next time you lift your wrist you’ll be back at a display.