clock menu more-arrow no yes mobile

Filed under:

How Long to Cook the Prime Rib? There's an Apple Watch App for That (And a Few Thousand More).

The Apple Watch launched with a plethora of fitness, travel, sports and other apps.

Vjeran Pavic for Re/code

You’ve made your own unboxing video, you’ve Instagramed a photo of your Apple Watch-adorned wrist and you’ve perfected the art of conspicuously glancing at your watch in a way that alerts everyone in the vicinity to the fact that you own an Apple Watch.

Now what?

There are 3,000* or so new Apple Watch apps to choose from. We haven’t had the chance to try them all, but here are a few that piqued our interest — either because they seem to make sense or because we find their whole notion ludicrous.

Video editing from the super-small screen: The 10 for GoPro, iPhone and DJI drone video-sharing app lets you record and share video highlights right from the wrist. Vizzywig Studios’ video takes this simple concept to the extreme. Not only can you control the GoPro 4 camera from your wrist, but you can assemble entire video on the Apple Watch, from selecting video clips, photos and a music track, dictating title and subtitles (using Siri) and sharing.

Location-based recommendations: Apple Watch apps from Yelp and Around Me, as well as those coming from YP and XLabz Technologies’ Find Near Me, use your location to identify nearby restaurants, bars, coffee shops (and other services, such as ATMs and gas stations) using big, easy to tap buttons. Some even provide turn-by-turn directions.

Remote control features: An Apple Keynote app turns the watch into a remote control, allowing you to play, pause or end a slideshow. Other third-party developers bring the same watch-as-remote-control concept to the home and car. Philips offers an app for turning off its Hue lights or setting mood lighting. Carmaker BMW lets you warm or cool the i3 electric car before stepping inside and provides handy location features that help you find your car in the parking garage or flash the headlights remotely.

Get cooking: CondeNast’s Epicurious magazine created an Apple Watch app that serves as a custom cooking timer, telling you how long to cook your steak, vegetables, chicken, pork and seafood without guesswork. The New York Times Cooking app lets you check a recipe’s ingredients as you shop, then follow step-by-step instructions as you cook (hopefully, the watch screen cleans more easily than the pages of a cookbook).

Sports scores: With the Apple Watch, you no longer need to hold your iPhone surreptitiously under the table to check a baseball score. Now, you can discretely glance at your wrist to get updates by professional leagues (MLB and NBA), television networks (ESPN) and others (theScore).

Weather: There will be no shortage of Apple Watch apps designed to answer the question: “What will the weather be like today?”

Best use of the small screen: A&E Networks made its History Here app available for the Apple Watch, which suggests points of interest with historical themes. The Marilyn Monroe Los Angeles tour begins at the hospital where she was born in 1926 and ends at her grave site. Others guide you through Al Capone’s Chicago, Civil War sites in Atlanta and Central Park in New York.

Waste of wrist space: Schwab will provide clients at-a-glance market headlines based on their customized watch lists. So far, so good. However, the watch also allows its clients to initiate equity or options trades via their Apple Watch, which they must complete on their iPhones. We thought the whole point of the watch was to keep the phone in your pocket.

*Post corrected to include the most up-to-date Apple Watch app statistics from Apple.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Sign up for the newsletter Sign up for Vox Recommends

Get curated picks of the best Vox journalism to read, watch, and listen to every week, from our editors.