Automatic image creation for WatchKit animated progress bars
Image-based animation is the thing in WatchKit 1.0.
Making them manually is real pain though and there are already multiple ways to create them automatically, from Photoshop scripting to web pages using advanced CSS to some nice iOS hacking.
I feel most at home with iOS thus I did some quick coding few days ago and published WatchRingGenerator. It uses excellent M13ProgressSuite to actually draw the rings.
It’s an iOS app (now at ver 1.1) which I recommended you run in the iPad Air Simulator. It’s very easy to use, you simply set your colors, setup sizes for the two rings and tap one of the Generate buttons.
I recommend to generate .xcassets as using that will get you device independent images, with no need to fuss around with [WKInterfaceDevice currentDevice] and guess which image set you should use.
I hope you find it useful. Shout out to Brian Gilham of WatchKitResources for linking it few days ago. And speaking of Brian – he just released first batch of Chronicons - UI icons specifically made for the watch.
Get it on Github: WatchRingGenerator