Glance and done for wearables

Besides activity tracking, the other thing smart watches are really useful for is keeping track of notifications. Feel (or hear) an incoming notification, glance to see what it’s about, then get on with what you were doing (or interrupt what you were doing to handle the interrupt). For email, though, I want one additional step. I can usually tell just from the sender, subject, and first couple of lines of a message whether it’s something I want to handle (either immediately or later) or immediately delete. And it’s surprising to me that current watches still often make the latter more difficult than it needs to be.

The Apple Watch is, frankly, bad at supporting fast delete of email messages. If you want to delete a message, you need to scroll all the way to the bottom of the notification to access the option to delete it. Maybe the watchOS developers need to read an entire message to decide whether they should delete it, but I don’t. If they want to keep swiping left to access a Clear option (I’d happily trade it for delete), how about letting me swipe right to delete? Pull down on the message to reveal a delete option? Either would be way faster.

Samsung’s Gear watches provide access to fast delete if it’s available as an action on the notification. So you can quickly delete a Gmail message with two taps: tap on the side to open the menu, then tap delete. But for reasons that escape me, delete is not available as an option for messages received with the built-in email application. Which Samsug provides. So, y’know, they could very easily address the lack. And they should.

Maybe they’re both leaving it as a new feature to call out for future software releases. Here’s hoping.