Google employee shows what to expect from Android Wear notifications

There's plenty we know about Android Wear already: It's Google's software platform for wearables; it's designed to allow you to interact with your phone and with Google Now straight from your wrist; and numerous manufacturers, from HTC to Motorola, have Wear-powered smartwatches coming in the near future. Now there's even more we can glean, thanks to increasing activity at Google's developer hubs. For example, in-house developer advocate Timothy Jordan has just highlighted a few screenshots that reveal the best Wear notifications he's seen so far -- including a slightly panic-inducing warning from a Nest thermostat. (Don't worry, a follow-up message reassures everybody that the smoke is clearing.)

There's also a regular calendar notification on show, a message from a game (Clash of Clans), and what looks to be the playback of a StarShipSofa science fiction podcast. The origin of each notification is identified by an icon in the top right corner, or by a background image. Meanwhile, although these particular examples are all short enough to fit on a single screen, Google has also recently demonstrated how longer notifications can spread over multiple screen using right-to-left swipes. In fact, Mountain View insists that it only requires a tiny bit of code to add this functionality to the notification system of an existing Android smartphone app, which hopefully means it'll be easy for third-party app developers to make their full-length notifications work on Wear.