splitbrain.org

electronic brain surgery since 2001

Agenda Watch Face for Android Wear

Of course the first thing I had to do to my new watch is customize it. Over the weekend I learned how to build my own watch face in WatchMaker1). The result is shown here:

Most of the information is only shown in active mode (pictured left). I went for a white background because I assume it will be much better to read in outside. Thanks to the ugly Berlin Winter weather I had no way to test that hypothesis though ;-). Dimmed mode (pictured right) uses a black background of course and fewer info.

Most important to me besides the current time are my upcoming agenda items. The watch face shows them in two ways. One is a simple list of the next three appointments. The other is a representation of their length on the border of the watch.

Getting these border graphs right was the hardest part. Since appointments happen on a 24 hour day, but the circle only represents 12 hours, I had to come up with some logic to decide when there's space for the next afternoon appointment even though it's still before twelve. Took a while, but now seems to work just fine2).

Another problem I encountered in dimmed mode. I wanted to have the border graphs in dimmed mode, too. It worked just fine in Watchmaker, but once on the actual device I noticed the watch being off-center and cutting pixels. A reddit post later I found the reason: an Anti-Burn Screensaver mechanism in Android Wear.

The watch face compensates for that behavior by moving the graphs a few pixels towards the center when the display is dimmed.

The watch face is available for download from Watchmaker or FaceRepo.

Tags:
smartwatch, watchmaker, watchface, android, wear
Similar posts:
1)
Good info is linked from this reddit post
2)
thanks Theresa, for helping me with the math :-)