The Bee Blog
Thoughts on design and craft, plus practical guides for our apps. New writing, a little at a time.
Yes, you can read actual books — not just audiobooks — on an Apple Watch. Here's what Apple supports natively, which third-party apps do the job, how to get an EPUB or PDF onto your wrist, and what wrist reading is honestly like.
Nine apps put books and documents on your wrist, and they do three genuinely different jobs. A comparison with verified prices, ratings and update dates — including where our own app loses.
Fitting an A4 page on a watch means shrinking 11pt type to 1.7pt, and zooming back in leaves you reading a fortieth of the page through a keyhole. The arithmetic rules out showing the page — so the words have to leave it. What that costs, and what it takes.
Yes — provided the book is stored on the watch rather than streamed from your phone. Here's the difference, a 30-second test to check which kind of app you have, and the one step that always needs the iPhone.
watchOS has no built-in PDF support, but there are two very different ways to get one onto your wrist — viewing the page, or reading the text. Here's which you want, which apps do each, and why PDFs break in ways EPUBs don't.
How we shrank a comfortable reading experience down to a 45mm screen without losing the calm — the constraints, the type choices, and the tricks that made it feel effortless.
Streaming won, but the case for owning your music never really went away. A look at why BeeTunes bets on offline-first playback — and who it's for.
A practical, no-nonsense plan for learning Morse code from scratch using short daily sessions — the method we built into BeeMorse and use ourselves.
What happens between tapping a photo and reading a poem back? A friendly tour of how Pictopoem uses on-device cues and AI to turn an image into a few lines worth keeping.
Why an independent studio chooses to build small, single-purpose apps in an age of do-everything platforms — and what "crafted with care" actually means in practice.
