I had a pain point with my watch, so I built something to address it.

A watch should do one thing well, and today it doesn't: help me avoid missing my next meeting/event. That's it. Fashion and decoration are secondary. Even knowing what time it is is secondary. The original reason for a watch is to get to the next thing on time.

And this wasn't really possible before smartwatches, since you couldn't connect the calendar. But now you can. Android Wear solved this a long time ago. For some reason, on Apple Watch I can't find a good native first-party or third-party option that simply shows the next few items on your screen.

There's a one-line version built in, and I found a few third-party apps with a 3-line calendar. But most of them either ask you to pay, make you sign in, harvest your data, or trick you into some in-app purchase. I understand developers need to eat — so do I. But it's one thing to be transparent about it, and another to hide it.

I'm sick and tired of that nonsense, so I built it myself — open source, Apache 2.0, completely free. No ads, no upsell, no nudges, no in-app purchase or subscription, nothing. You can audit the code yourself.

It's a watchOS complication (accessoryRectangular) that reads from EventKit, and it now also ships iOS/iPad home + lock-screen widgets and a Mac widget (one universal app across platforms). Localized into 21 languages.

See it here: https://threelinecal.apps.zzn.im/ and source code https://github.com/xinbenlv/three-line-calendar