The Breakroom

xScope and Apple Watch

April 24, 2015

By Craig Hockenberry

We’re happy to announce the availability of free updates for xScope and xScope Mirror with support for Apple’s new watch!

The majority of changes are in the xScope Mirror app running on iOS: any image that you’ve mirrored from your Mac to your iPhone can be transferred to your wrist with a simple tap on the watch’s face. As you’d expect, this feature works great while in design apps like Photoshop or Sketch as well with loose PNG and JPEG assets in your Xcode projects.

When transferring images to the Apple Watch, the xScope Mirror detects different scenarios and adjusts the display accordingly:

  • Layouts that have the same width as the current display, but that are taller, are scrollable using your finger or the digital crown. This makes it easy to test mockups that span several screens.
  • Images that are in the standard icon sizes are automatically masked to a circle and presented on a black background. This makes it a snap to test how your square icon designs look when presented on the home screen or in notifications.
  • Images with transparency are assumed to be menu items and are displayed as such on the watch face. Opaque areas of the image are drawn in black on a white circular background.

But wait, there’s more! We’ve also updated the Mac app with new templates that let you see how your watch icons are going to look in the Apple Watch app on iOS. The Mac app also has all the Help you’ll need to get up and running: check out the Mirror section for all the details.

Finally, we put together a short video that shows how it all fits together along with some tips and tricks. We’ve found these new features to be very helpful with our own design and development work, and really hope that it makes life easier for you, too. Enjoy!