Horizon Zero Dawn Full Review

I spend a lot of time with Horizon zero dawn during the last few weeks. you may have missed my official review a week ago, so go check that out, however pointless to say, I liked most of the game pretty a bit. when i am getting early copies of sprawling games like this, I’m able to play all the way via them and teach treasured classes to individuals who are just starting out, lessons I desire I knew when I started out. For a few games it’s hard to try this (how a whole lot recommendation can i without 

adoubt deliver about getting through a call of responsibility marketing campaign?) but for Horizon zero sunrise? I in reality had to cut some factors to pare this down to 10 vital gadgets. There is a lot of critical, beneficial stuff in here I promise. without similarly ado, after waiting two weeks to post this on release day, here are 10 matters I desire I knew when I commenced Horizon 0 sunrise. 1. there's an infinite speedy journey Backpack One aspect you’ll word early on about Horizon zero dawn is that weirdly, the sport’s fast travel machine is consumable based totally, like we’re again within the days of Diablo city Portal scrolls.

this is uncomfortable, as you need to make picks approximately while it’s “really worth it” or now not to use a fast journey p.c. or whether you need to simply walk, however lo and behold, 12 hours into the game, i found that there’s an object that lets you speedy tour infinitely like several normal open-global game. I don’t recognise if this object appears from the very start, however communicate to any everyday vendor and it have to be at the bottom of the materials list. the game never tells you this item exists, I didn’t even see it in a tool tip, and you need to dig deep into the shop to discover it It’s extraordinarily easy to change for as it just fees a fox skin and some meat, and also you must seek it out as quickly as viable so you now not should stress about speedy tour for the rest of the sport. I don’t know why this mechanic was even in the game inside the first region, because it’s just greater obnoxious than whatever, but at the least there’s an answer. 2. discover ways to discover fitness vegetation quicker speaking of obnoxious, we speedy arrive on the worst aspect of the sport: the fitness system. There’s no life regeneration, so you ought to are trying to find out precise flora inside the wild to fill a “medication” bar so as to heal you on the fly without using up consumable health potions.

this would be all properly and right, besides the bar fills very slowly, requiring five-to-six flowers to refill most of the time, and the problem is that there are a group of different sorts of flora accessible, elemental-based flowers which can be used to craft other potions. I spent the primary half of the sport strolling up to every plant icon I noticed, only to be upset while half of the time it wasn’t fitness at all. subsequently I discovered that fitness vegetation, for the maximum part, are taller and red. So in case you see taller, crimson flora, that is going to be a health plant. There are shorter purple plant life that are a few kind of fire root, and now not health. And there’s one fitness plant that is short and blue in wintry regions, but for the most component, in maximum areas, tall and crimson is the price ticket. I don’t recognize why the rattling fitness flowers couldn’t have simply had a green icon or some thing, but with any luck this allows your hunt a bit bit. 3. Reload for immediate health Regen right here’s one greater fitness tip because that’s how screwed up this machine is. you will suppose that the sport would will let you regenerate fitness in a few simpler way, like whenever you rested/stored at a campfire, however no. in case you quick save or manual save at a campfire, you don’t get any fitness again.

I wasted quite a few flora restoration myself up after a struggle, however I realized I didn’t need to do this because of an oversight in the sport. when you’re hurt, surely walk or fast tour to a campfire and store. Then start again from inner menu, and you'll spawn  on that spot with complete health. This manner, you don’t ought to use any of your gathered medication plant life or potions, and may save them for destiny battles. that is, of path, stupid, because it’s the precise equal effect as if campfires virtually healed you, however this is the workaround you have to use in the interim. I have no idea in the event that they’ll ever exchange it, however hopefully a person at Guerilla reads this and realizes how dumb it's far. four. the sport definitely Opens Up With The Tinker Perk There are some obvious perks you should look into, like all the damage upgrades for stealth hits, vital hits and everyday spear swings, but I’m telling you, the satisfactory perk in the game is the Tinker perk,

the only that lets you switch inside and out changes for your guns and armor, in place of setting them and losing them in case you want to put in a brand new one. This lets in for a big range of construct range in a way that simply isn’t feasible with out the perk, as if you’re like me, you may hesitate committing everlasting slots to some thing you would possibly lose later. however with the Tinker perk, you can craft your construct to each conflict because of how regularly you’re capable of exchange matters. Say you’re fighting a Thunder jaw, one of the maximum powerful monsters in the sport. well, you may slot withstand surprise mods into your armor, then socket your warfare Bow complete of Freeze mods which the Thunder jaw is vulnerable to. Or if you’re preventing a group of bow-wielding humans, construct a few resist Ranged armor and deliver your bow all fire mods so that you can set all of them ablaze instantly. when you start getting the Very uncommon mods later in the sport, you may create some in reality remarkable load outs which could agree to any situation you locate yourself in. the street to get to Tinker is a little hard and requires a number of talent points, however it’s truely the most thrilling, useful perk in the game.

five. some Perks you could keep away from completely maximum abilties in Horizon zero sunrise are well worth getting in some unspecified time in the future, and ending the game at stage 46, I had nearly all of them, however some you can keep away from altogether due to the fact they simply just are not that beneficial in any respect. I in no way, ever saw an opportunity to apply the perk that helps you to shoot whilst balanced on a rope. not as soon as. For as stealthy as i used to be, I in no way appeared to need the “quiet dash” perk. I commonly improve “less expensive ammo crafting” in most games, but Horizon overloads you with so many materials i was truely looking to use more to make area in my stock through the usage of craftables. extended hacking time for machines sounds useful, but it lasts decently lengthy as is, and without a doubt, there are usually higher approaches at some stage in conflict to use. improved scavenging from machines just gives you those vain substances containers, and you'll have a zillion mods and objects, manner more than you may use, even with out the ones perks. That’s why it’s also needless to get the disarm traps ability, although it is on the route to Tinker.

I in no way once assassinated a person from beneath a ledge, so that perk is vain, however overdue in the sport, it's miles well worth it to get the perk underneath that, which helps you to stealth kill elites. quickly, a few extra beneficial ones are all the ones that come up with increased concentration time/faster reload pace in concentration. The a couple of arrow ones aren’t super however they stack elemental consequences faster so that’s useful.

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android wear 2.0 , A complete Guide

Android wear 2.0 a Revolution

We want to redefine what it means to be a great, useful, smartwatch. And we want to enable you, developers, to build great experiences for it, for users. And so to talk about what's new in Android Wear, we're going to reflect back a little bit on the things that we've learned over the last two years since Android Wear came out. 

 When Android Wear first came out, it was very much tethered to the phone. And this was a great solution two years ago. When Wi-Fi and cellular seemed far out for us. But in listening to users and listening to developers, they have higher expectations for a smartwatch. They want the watch to be able to do stuff on its own. And so with Android Wear 2.0, we're introducing the concept of untethered experiences.

Stand Alone Concept in Cloud

 Where the watch can talk to the cloud, your cloud, over cellular and Wi-Fi. And of course, Bluetooth to the handset is still great for many things. It's about adding and evolving the platform. Second-- so we call this concept standalone.

So second, Android Wear has been about personal expression from the beginning. We have over 100 physical designs that you can buy, and we have over 4,000 watch faces on the Play Store. And so when it comes to watching faces, we believe that you should be able to choose what you want to be your watch face. But we want more than that. And users wanted more than that. They want utility and personal expression. And so we're evolving the watch face with Android Wear 2.0 to put glanceable information and action right on your watch face. So this is the new Android Wear 2.0 watch faces. And Android Wear has always been great at quick replies about messages that are coming your way from people that you care about. But we heard from people that they wanted a lot more than that. They wanted conversations. They wanted to be able to express themselves in a multitude of ways, and have those conversations live on over their watch over the course of the day. So we call this Messaging, making messaging great.

And we're going to talk about that as well. And finally, Android Wear launched with Activity Tracking. Google Fit does a great job of keeping track of your walking, your running, your biking, in the background. But we heard from people and developers that they want to do more than that. They wanted activity tracking with insight. And so with this example, this thing that I've done this morning, which is nervously eating a little too much breakfast. DAN KOULOMZIN: Whoops.

BRETT LIDER: And a fitness app can say, well, you know, you did that. And you can get back on track towards your fitness goals by doing the following. So this is helping users with insight that's meaningful. So we talk about this as building great fitness experiences for Android Wear. And together, these are Android Wear 2.0. So we're launching a developer preview. We want your feedback. And we're going to go into detail on all of these topics. So fitness, messaging, the watch face, standalone apps, and we've got a new user interface for both the system UI and apps, to tie it all together. And so to start, we're going to give a tour of that new user interface. And let's roll the video, please.

So here I am. I'm starting out on my watch face. And this is an Android Wear 1.0-style watch face. It's got the time, it's got the date, but not a lot else that helps me get through my day. So with a simple left-to-right swipe on my watch face, a sideways swipe, I'm going to zoom out to the watch face picker.  Any second now.  Here we go.

So just like that, I'm zoomed out to the watch face picker. And if I keep sliding to the left, I'm actually on my next watch face. And I've selected Elements Analog. The Elements Analog is a watch face that we built to show off the capabilities of the new watch face API. So I've already customized it with four different things that help me. And let's say I wanted to change one of these. I wanted to change this calorie tracker over to something else. So I'm just going to do a sideways swipe, tap on the gear icon at the bottom, and I'm editing the settings for this watch face. So I tap on Complications, the left-hand dial. And Lifesum is a partner that we've worked with-- and they help me track things like how much water I've drunk through the day.

So let's tap on that, and set that as my complication. So with a few swipes and taps, I've made my watch face more my own. And it looks like I'm a little behind on drinking water, and I'll get to that as soon as I get off the stage. So that's a watch face we've built.

But what can third parties do? So let's check out a third party watch face. So again, a left sideways swipe gets me over to my next watch face.  And here's Ranger from Zuhanden.

And Ranger's got a unique aesthetic. Shannen's magnificent at making Ranger sing on its own. And so we wanted to give watch face developers the power to style these bits of data, that we call complications, exactly the way they want to. So Shannen's got its color scheme, its type face.

And as a user, I can also customize the watch face to have different complications on various watch faces to suit the various aspects of what I need from my watch. And Dan is going to tell us a lot more about this. So now let's go check out how to add other favorite watch faces to my watch.

So I swipe over to the right, and I browse my watch face drawer. And so I just tap on Elements Digital here, and I've added it to my favorites. So cool. I've got four favorite watch faces.

But you know, this 1.0 style one, this one that doesn't have actual information on it, I'm going to get rid of it. So all I have to do is toss it up. It's gone. So Elements is my watch face now.

 Primary Navigation Concept in Android 2.0

I want to cover another important aspect of Android Wear 2.0, which is a primary navigational concept of how to get the user back to the watch face. And so from anywhere on Android Wear, all you have to do is hit the hardware button on the side of the device. So let's say I scroll to the bottom of my watch face figure

Here, and nothing's resonating for me. So I decide to go back. I hit the hardware button on the side, and I'll go back to my list of favorites. And I hit the hardware button on the side one more time, and I'll be back at the watch face.

So hardware button equals back. And now let's check out Quick Settings So Quick Settings is the place where you can quickly get your watch to do what you want to do, kind of at the system level. So all you do is drag down from the top of the watch.

And we've made Quick Settings a lot more compact and put all the actions that you want right in one place. And we've especially gone deep on brightness controls. So if you tap on the little brightness control here on the left, you get up and down paddles. And as you start interacting with them,

We give you a live preview of what that brightness control is going to do to your currently selected watch face. It's pretty gratifying in person. So I hit the hardware button to go back. And I'll hit the hardware button to go back again, and I'm back on the watch face.

So let's check out app launching. That's something we also wanted to make better in Android Wear 2.0. So from the watch face, again I hit the hardware button, and that will open the App Launcher.

And let's we'll go back hitting the hardware button again, and go into it again. And you can see that it comes out from where the hardware button is on the side of the device. And it has this nice, circular reveal. And of course, the App Launcher itself

Takes advantage of the fact that it's on a circular watch and it weighs itself out accordingly. And we've made managed to make the App Launcher have more icons on it. And you can tap anywhere to launch an app. So here I've scrolled down to Strava, and I can tap it,

And it zooms into Strava. And when I'm done recording my hike or my ride, I can hit the hardware button to go back, and I'm back in the launcher. And I hit the hardware button to go back one more time, and I'm back on the watch face.

 And let's say I want to launch Strava again. So how could I do that? I just go to the App Launcher and Strava's right at the top. So we keep track of the apps that the user launches the most and put them right

At the top of the launcher. OK. So let's get into the bread and butter of Android Wear, which is notifications-- and especially messaging from people that you care about. So if my watch was in its always-on mode,

Telling me the time and showing me the data in my complications, let's say I got a message from a colleague. What would that experience be like? So here's the always-on mode, and I'm going to get a message from Krystal.

 So Krystal's message takes over my watch face in the ambient mode for a few seconds, and if I don't interact with it, it goes away. And then later, maybe when I'm done talking to all of you, I would wake up the watch face.

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And Krystal's avatar and the app that she sent that message from would come up and visit the watch face. And now if I scroll up, her avatar will reenter on top of the notification card for this conversation. So yeah, let's reply to Krystal here.

So I've got this conversational detail view on the notification. If I tap on Reply, I can do voice reply, emoji, quick reply-- but let's use the qwerty keyboard. And with a few taps, P and R gets me

the word I want-- "lovely." G gets me "good." S gets me "so." And it's predicted "far." And so with like four or five taps, I've got the sentence I want, and I'm done.

And with the new notification API in Android Wear, my message has been appended to the conversation. And Krystal's already replied, to keep this conversation long-lived. And Dan's going to talk a lot more about that. So I'll hit the hardware button to go back.

I'm back in the card stream. And now I can scroll and check out the rest of my notifications. So here's one from Alexandra. And then here's one from Google Fit. And you can see, as I'm scrolling

I'm getting a scroll bar on the side with a thumb that tells me exactly where I am in the card stream. Helps me orient myself. Tells me how many notifications I have. So I hit the hardware button to go back,

Get taken right back to the watch face. And that's the tour of the new system UI. Let's go back to the slides and check out how this relates to app patterns. So material design for apps is something we're introducing with Android Wear 2.0.

And we're really excited what this will do for app developers. So with Android Wear 1.0, we had the concept of users navigating a relatively big two-dimensional space. Users could scroll down. They could scroll up.

They could scroll left. They could scroll right. They had a lot of power. But we found that just a little too often, users would get a little confused-- where should I go next to get more content, to get more action?

So we've doubled down on the concept of a vertical layout where users start out anchored at the top, so they always know exactly where to go to get more-- it's to scroll down. And this is reinforced, of course, in the system UI, where you start on the watch face and scroll down for notifications. And you start in the App Launcher, and you scroll down through your apps. So we think that consistency from system UI all the way through apps will really help users navigate Android Wear even more quickly, And get the most out of your app. So we'll look at this in a little more detail. We've got these classic isomorphic drawings that we in the Material Design team love to make. So your app is mostly this content view-- the main piece of information or action that your app is responsible for. And what you can do, if you need to add actions that the user needs to take, you can add a wearable action drawer to the bottom. And when the user reaches the bottom of the content view, or changes scroll directions, this component can peek into view. And if you have a more complicated app that has multiple views that are necessary to render in it, you can add a wearable Navigation Drawer to the top of the app that peeks in when the user reaches the top.

So the main benefit of this is that the relatively small screen of a Wear device is maximized by having the content be front and center. And then actions are available just off the screen, and navigation is available just off the screen. So let's take a look at this from the end user's point of view. So here's a user scrolling down in an app and they reach the bottom and the drawer's right there for them to grab. And we'll loop that around again. So they scroll down, they either change scroll direction or reach the bottom and the drawers there. And there's a primary action there that they could have tapped if that's what they wanted. But if they want to explore more actions, they just drag that drawer up. Let's look at the Navigation Drawer.

And we'll wait for this animation to come around, one more time. And so here's the user at the top of their app. And they drag down for their Navigation Drawer, and they can change views. We'll watch this one more time for clarity.

They drag down, they're in their Navigation Drawer, and they can change views. So now that we've talked about layout and functionality let's talk a little bit about aesthetics. Android Wear 1.0 apps have taken their design cues from handset-- which generally means bright white apps. And we think this is great, but we want to make something that's specific for wearables. And that means that we're recommending that all apps develop a dark color palette. There are two big benefits for this.

One is that OLED displays are very powerful on Android Wear devices, and they're very popular. And OLED displays consume a lot less power when they're set to emit less light. So if you have less light emitting.

You'll save the user power. The other main benefit is social appropriateness. There's just a lot of contexts where emitting a lot of light is just not good design. So if you're watching a movie in the evening, or out at a restaurant at night, you don't want your watch throwing off a lot of light. And we'll make this easy for you, developers, to adopt. All you have to do is tell us your primary app color, and we can compute all the other shades that you need for your app.

And this works more than like the purple-y apps out there; it works for all of the apps on the rainbow. And yeah, don't forget the Android Wear apps are real apps. They have access to the entire Android SDK. And the Android Wear apps are even more powerful.

Than the actual normal Android apps, in that, they have always-on capabilities. So what this means that, if I've got visitors from out of town that like their Marmite, and I go to the store to shop for it, and I bring that up on my wrist.

 And I'm wandering the store and my short term memory is not great, so I just forget what I was shopping for. But my watch goes into the always-on mode, and it reminds me what I'm shopping for. It's great for to-do lists; it's great for fitness apps. Take advantage of always-on.

And to talk, oh yes-- to wrap up on system UI material design, we've got a new watch face picker, a new app launcher, a new notification stream, a new navigation model, material design patterns for wearables. We want to hear what you have to think about all of this.

And I'm going to turn it over to Dan for more about standalone apps. DAN KOULOMZIN: Thanks, Brett. [APPLAUSE]  All right.

So standalone apps, as Bret mentioned before, we think that the independence of the watch is going to be key for experiences in Android Wear 2.0. So that's going to let a user slap on their watch and go for a run.

 They can count their steps. They can track their progress. And they can stream music, all without having to bring their phones, so they get faster times. And this is also really going to dramatically change the developer experience that you guys have. And that's because we're going to be able to bring a more Android-y development experience when it comes to cloud and data, authentication, notifications, and distribution. So for cloud and data, here's how it used to work.

If the watch needed some data from the cloud, it would start with a request to the phone. And then the phone would get the data from the cloud, download it, put it back in the wearable data layer, take it over to the watch, and then the watch could then display it.

Well, with standalone apps, you'll be able to use the network connection directly on the watch. So you'll be able to use HTTP, TCP, UDP, whatever you want. And you don't have to worry about whether that device has a Wi-Fi or cellular radio because no matter what, we'll still be able to, if we need to, proxy the network from the phone. And so you'll be able to take all the development patterns that you know of Android phone and tablet development, use all the libraries like Volley, and you'll maybe even be able to reuse some code from your phone and tablet apps right on the watch. And of course, you'll still want to use the best practices you've learned from writing phone and tablet apps. And I just want to call attention to two. One is, don't grab data that you're not going to use.

One mistake we see sometimes is people get images that are way larger than their screen. Well, there's no sense in downloading data you're not going to show the user. So just in general, avoid that. It'll hurt latency and battery life. Also, I want to talk a little bit about Doze and Doze Light. So those are coming to Android Wear 2.0. They're important ways that we manage the battery life of the watch. And so you want to play nice with those. They are responsible for minimizing the wake ups which are really battery impacting. And so you can schedule jobs using job scheduler-- this is our recommended practice. You'll be able to schedule those jobs on the basis of time, whether or not you need a connection to the Internet, or whether or not you need power for long running tasks or things like that. And so this is really great already for things like downloading the weather from the cloud, and showing that to users. But if you want to do more maybe privacy sensitive things, then you want to worry about authentication. And so with Android Wear 2.0 for standalone apps, the watch will be managing its authentication. We have several patterns available that you can look at. There are patterns that-- all the patterns balance developer time, user experience, and flexibility

 regarding what platform is running on the phone. I'm not going to go into all the nitty gritty. There are tons more information available at the Standalone talk later today and online, so do check that out. So on to notifications. So notifications have always been the lifeblood of Android Wear. And the magic of the experience comes from them being the same experience regarding the notification between the watch and the phone. So if you get a notification from an app, it appears in both places. If you take action on either of those places, it's reflected in the other. And of course, if you dismiss from one place, it's gone from the other as well. And that has been achieved in the past with notification bridging. And that's still definitely an option for you. But now that you've got the network, you may want to manage notifications directly from your standalone app. So you can, by the way, use Firebase Cloud Messaging, formally known as GCM, Google Cloud Messaging, to actually have the server wake up your watch and then the watch can notify the user. So now that you're able to generate notifications directly from the watch, you may want to shut off notification bridging. And there's an API for that.

And also we have some patterns on helping to keep that replicated experience so that interactions seem to happen in both places.  So now onto distribution. So this is a big change in Android Wear 2.0.

It used to be that to ship watch software; you would embed it in your phone APK. And it's been unnecessary stuff for users to download. And it, of course, affects disk space. And now in Android Wear 2.0, watches can download and install apps directly from the Play Store.

And not only does this fix the problem of growing phone APKs, but it also makes it possible to ship apps to watches without having to worry about what operating system is running on the paired phone. So you'll be able to reach a lot more users. And so yeah, it's great news.

[APPLAUSE] So standalone is a really big change. Not only does it let users interact with their devices in more ways, but it's also a huge change for developers. So now you can just do so much more on the watch itself, and we're excited to see what happens now with you guys were taking advantage of this. All right, on to watch faces. Now watch faces have always been a key part of Android Wear. From the very start, we had always-on watch faces, so the watch is always ready to tell you the time.

And you developers ran with our watch face APIs, and now there are thousands of watch faces available on the Play Store. They let users customize how their watches look-- super important, considering this is something we wear.

 And then the interactivity APIs that we added last year made the watch face a tool. So it's not just for showing data, it's for interaction as well. And so we wanted to take that and bring it to all of the apps that run on Android Wear. So imagine if all of the apps could participate on the watch face, show information, and then generate those user experiences. So we're adding this complications API in Android Wear 2.0.

So the term "complications" comes from traditional watchmaking, and it refers to any informative element on the watch face that's not just telling you the time. So on traditional watch faces, this can tell you the day of the week, or the day of the month, when your alarm's going to go off, or maybe the phases of the moon. BRETT LIDER: Phases of the moon. Super important to have that. DAN KOULOMZIN: Yeah. If you're a werewolf hunter, very important.

And we think for smartwatches, they should be able to do smartwatch-y things, these complications. So they should tell you smartwatch type of data, like how many steps you've taken, how many calories maybe you've eaten, if you have incoming messages. And of course, they should also react to touch. So touching that notification should drive me to an experience where I can then act on it. And so the complications API is an API for data providers and watch face developers.

And it lets the two work together to provide both form and function to the watch face. And there's no need for them to know anything about each other in advance-- no biz dev deals to sign for data or anything like that. So for data providers, this is a big deal.

It's going to let you get your interactions, and your data, on a lot more watch faces. In fact, you'll be able to have your data rendered by top fashion brands and other experts making beautiful watch faces. And of course, you can drive users back to your applications by when they touch the complications because you assign a pending intent that gets sent when they do that. So Lifesum has been able to add some complications to watch faces that can do things like track Brett's drinks of water, let him know how he's doing with his goals. And you get back to Lifesum to blob all that.

And watch face developers are going to be able to concentrate on making really beautiful watch faces, and they don't have to acquire a ton of experience with fitness or messaging in order to provide that functionality to users.

So here's how it works. Android Wear X is a broker, so the two never really talk directly to each other. It starts when it decides it needs to have a complication drawn. It sends an update request to the data provider.

The data provider gets that request, it fills out this complication data object and sends it back to Android Wear. Android Wear then forwards it onto the watch face, which then can draw it with whatever aesthetic it wants, because it owns the entire drawing part of that.

And the way they coordinate on the general idea of the presentation is the type that's on that complication data. So there are lots of different types for lots of different use cases. I'm going to walk through just a few of them.

So if you want to show the day of the month, how many messages you have, or maybe the temperature outside, you can use the short text type. It's just a little bit of text, and maybe an icon. If you can go even simpler, then maybe you want to use the icon type.

This just shows a picture. So, for example, it might tell me it's sunny outside if I see the sun. And of course, since these complications receive touches, they can also be used as just icons, so the user knows it's like a launcher back to your app.

And there's also a range value type. Think of this as a value between a minimum and a maximum-- maybe a percentage, how many of my daily calories I've eaten, or how much gas is in my car. And there are lots more examples. You can read about them online or you can talk to us in the sandbox later. And so if you're a data provider, you want to be thinking about all the different kinds of data that you have that you can show users. And you want to think about what action they can take when they touch those complications.

And if you're a watch face developer, you want to think about how you can make these things really beautiful for users. So I want to show you a few examples from our partner, two.

There are three examples. In this first one, they've taken an existing watch face, so they already shipped, and they've upgraded it to use complications. You can see they've added it into the left and the right there.

They found some space to their existing face, and add them. And it fits right in. And I think it's pretty nice. This next example is a new watch face that they've written to take advantage of the complication API.

And you can see that it makes obvious reference to mechanical watch faces. And of course, it has that classic-looking dial complication. So if you want that classic look on your watch, this is a great choice.

This last one takes a lot more creative liberty with data visualization. It's using the background and the color of the background-- the texture and color of the background-- to render some data. So if they were to hook this up to a range value type,

then maybe as it gets warmer outside, the watch face gets redder. BRETT LIDER: Our watches were red all day yesterday. DAN KOULOMZIN: Yeah, our watches were red all day yesterday. And I think my face may have gotten redder in the sun too. All right.

So Watch Faces 2.0-- it's a nice, it's a huge change actually, to the way watch faces are going to be as user experiences and as developer experiences on Android Wear 2.0. I think it's going to unlock some great form and function for the watch face.

 All right, let's get on to messaging. So Android Wear has always been a great platform for receiving and replying to messages. We want to make that experience last longer and make it more conversational.

So you could get back to messages as you go through your day. So we started by looking at what we have today, and I just want to walk you through what we saw. So here I've gotten a message from my friend Jim. We've been chatting about my friend Charles's new dog.

And he's asking, what's the name? So I'm going to swipe over. I'm going to touch reply, and I'll speak my reply. The dog's name is Brooklyn, which is a pretty cute name for a dog. And then I get this nice checkmark that tells me that the message has been sent, and I feel great. And then I realize, actually, my friend with the dog, Charles, is looking for a dog walker. So I'd like to tell Jim, hey, maybe this would be awesome for you.

And so I go back to the stream and look for that card, and it's gone. And this is actually because the messaging app has marked the conversation as reading because it acted on it, and it's withdrawn the notification. So now I have to hassle to get back to my friend.

So let's see what we've done now in Android Wear 2.0. You can see that there's a big visual change. And we've added-- I just want to draw your eye to this icon at the bottom. That's an in-line action, in this case, it's a reply action.

And it's super easy for users to discover. It's right there on the card. And when they touch that, they're going to get to this new remote input UI. As you can see, we're offering choices now on the input method that you pick to talk or to respond.

And voice is still there in case you're on the go or don't have your hands available. But we also now have touch-based input methods. And it's an entire input method framework. So our creative partner, TouchPal has made this nice new watch face.

And you'll be able to make watch faces. And when users download and install them, they'll be ready to go for when users want to type. And so now I've sent my message. I see it appear right on the card, and the card doesn't go away.

And this happens for two reasons. The first is we're using the new messaging style for notifications that's been added in Android N, and it's also on Android Wear 2.0. And that's going to allow the UI to take that reply and just put it right on the card.

It knows where to put it, because of the clearly defined semantics of the message. And also we're asking developers not to retract messages until they know that the user has dismissed them. And we think that that's going to create that longer running conversational experience.

And in general, notifications on Wear 2.0 are going to be a lot more as they are on phones and tablets. On a phone or a tablet, you have this expectation that if you swipe down on a shade and you touch a notification, you get to an experience that, for the app that submitted the notification, You get to a part of that app where you can then act on whatever you've seen. And we want that to work the same for Android Wear. So we're asking developers to set the Content Intent to drive users back to your carefully crafted experiences.

Now if you're using notification bridging, what happens? So in this case, there isn't an app on the watch. But we have a solution. So we decided to make a greatly expanded notification experience, and this works for all notifications. When you touch a notification, you launch into it.

And it kind of stands in for the app. And for messaging, especially, we're able to present an experience that's a lot like with the best of what we see in messaging apps. So because of all the data you add in your messaging style for the notification, we can show you conversation history. Your messages come in the right place. And we've also added a smart replies API that lets Android Wear insert contextually appropriate possible replies. And it does that using the machine learning

Model right on the device. And of course, as you use your conversational apps more, they show up on the launcher in the recent section, so they're easy to get back to. And the new complications will allow users to add shortcuts to conversations and people they care about right on the watch face. So my partner is just one touch away.  So messaging just got a lot more conversational. We now have in-line actions that are easily discover able and easy to use.

We have in-line replies, so messages show up right in the right place. We have content intents that launch apps, and of course, expanded notifications that stand in for those apps when they're not there. The App Launcher is much faster to get back to conversational apps. And saved conversations-- you can save your conversations and put them right on the watch face so you can get back to them easily. All right. Back over to Brett for hearing about the Fit Platform on Android Wear. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]  BRETT LIDER: So as we've heard from users and developers, users want more from their wearable experiences regarding helping them reach their fitness goals. And developers wanted more out of the Fit platform regarding being able to help users. So we've heard that feedback, and we have a bunch of stuff to talk about in the fitness platform. So we're doing three things in 2016-- real-time data update notifications, so that you can drive contextual notifications and experiences for users; real-time gym activity recognition, so that untapped experience of being in the gym can get a lot better with a wearable fitness app; and the one I'm excited about, a magical one, which is real-time walking, running, and bicycling recognition. So let's talk about these. So real-time data update notifications allow you to set a pending intent to get updates on any of these data types in the Fit platform. Concretely, it means that an app like Lifesum can look for when I've stopped a fitness activity, like the walk I went on this morning. And it can say, hey, you should have a glass of water, based on the length of that activity. Or if I did a long bike ride, it might say, you should have two or three glasses of water.

And call back to our earlier experience, if I have overeaten a little bit, and log that in an app, another app can look at that and say, hey to get back on track, maybe eat a little less or do a little bit of a workout. So these kind of real-time, contextually-driven notifications are just a lot more possible

 in Android Wear 2.0. And we're looking forward to what you do with them. Second, is that we're working on an API for launching later this year, that recognizes the actions that people are doing in the gym. So that means that bicep curl, deadlifts, push-ups, squats can all be recognized in real time. And then you can build fitness experiences around that for people's gym time. The third is recognizing outdoor activities such as walking, running, and cycling. This means that the user, just by wearing their wearable and starting a run, the app that they want to launch when they start that activity will just launch and support that activity. So for me, that's Strava. And I can't wait to use this so that I don't have to fiddle with my watch to launch an app to support my run. We're really excited about this one. So that's all the fitness stuff for Android Wear 2.0. And then just, in summary, we've made a lot of improvements across the entire platform-- fitness, messaging, the watch face, standalone apps, and a new user interface and app patterns to tie it all together.

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Amazon Underground App

I introduce you to the Amazon App Store, Amazon Underground App, and Amazon Coins. And how using them can save you some serious cash. First, we need to get the Amazon App Store installed on your Amazon device.

 If you own an Amazon Fire Device already, then you've got it pre-installed. You can skip this first step. This is what's going to unlock all the savings. First, you'll want to head into the security area of your device settings and enable the unknown sources so that the Amazon App Store can run. Then, go to Amazon.com/Underground. This is where you'll find the download that installs the Amazon Underground App. From there, open up the app and log in with your Amazon account. Or, create a new one if you don't already have one. You'll need to have a method of payment associated with your Amazon account to make any purchases.

 The Amazon Underground App serves two purposes. First, it's a combination of the regular Amazon shopping app and the Amazon App Store. So, you can buy whatever it is that you would typically buy on Amazon, and have it delivered to your home, but you can also buy apps and games, and download them directly to your device. This is where Amazon coins come in. But before we get to that, let me show you how you can start saving money right now with the second Amazon Underground feature. The Amazon Underground App offers a bunch of actually free content. And it's just that. It's free. As indicated on the badging on the top left hand of the app icon themselves. Now, these aren't just the normal free apps that you'll typically find. In fact, these are over $10,000 worth of paid apps, Games, and in-app items that you can simply download for free by using the Amazon Underground App instead of the Google Play store, where you would have to pay for these things. This includes things like unlimited free lives, levels, game upgrades, and even movies and TV shows, all for free. Now that I've saved you some cash by showing you how to get paid content for free let's talk about saving money on games and apps that aren't part of the free program by using Amazon Coins. If you're unfamiliar, Amazon Coins are a virtual currency that can be used to buy apps, games, and in-game items from the Amazon App Store. The math is pretty simple since 100 Coins are worth $1, making it each coin worth a penny. Here you can see how the pricing shakes out.

The cool part though is that you can buy Amazon Coins for less than their worth. Here's what I mean. Right now, you can buy 500 Amazon Coins, which is $5 worth, for $4.75, a savings of 5%. But the more you buy, the more you save.

So, if you're someone who regularly spends money on mobile games and apps, you can see how buying Amazon Coins and using those to make your purchases can save you some serious cash. But, it gets even better.

You see, Amazon also runs promotions regularly where you can get coins back on specific purchases. And one such event is taking place from July 7th through 9th during the Game of War: Fire Age Super Wonder In-Game Competition. If you're someone who likes real-time strategy games that pit a team of players against each other in a fight for supremacy, then Game of War should be right up your alley. The Super Wonder even goes around the clock, offering real-time communication, strategy, and even in-game chat for planning your attacks.
   READ ABOUT HORIZON ZERO DAWN CLICK HERE To coincide with the Super Wonder Event, Amazon is offering a 15% coins-back promotion allowing you to save on in-game items and purchases. And that means you get even more coins for your money. Now, the 15% coins back promotion applies regardless of how you spend the money.

So, whether you buy with a credit card, a gift card, or even with Amazon Coins, you get 15% of the value spent back in Amazon Coins. But the real savings happens when you buy your Amazon Coins upfront at a discount, use those coins to buy the in-game items for Game of War,

And then get 15% of the coins that you're spending and that you've already saved at the 25% on in the first place, back into your Amazon Coins account. That's a win all around.
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