{"id":707,"date":"2020-09-23T21:46:37","date_gmt":"2020-09-23T20:46:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sebcharrot.com\/blog\/?p=707"},"modified":"2020-09-23T21:49:34","modified_gmt":"2020-09-23T20:49:34","slug":"my-first-3-garmin-watch-faces","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.sebcharrot.com\/blog\/my-first-3-garmin-watch-faces\/","title":{"rendered":"My First 3 Garmin Watch Faces"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

About a year ago I bought a Garmin Forerunner 245<\/a> to take my run-tracking to the next level. In almost every respect it’s left my previous Fitbit in the dust (cough… sleep tracking). And means I can run a race without needing to carry a phone. Lovely stuff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the things I found most intriguing about a Garmin device was the prospect of being able to build my own watch-faces using the Connect IQ SDK<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was fairly straightforward to put an initial app together using Garmin’s own language Monkey C<\/a> — a name I can only assume was coined for the corollary “Monkey do” pun — and a bit harder to master. Maybe I’ll go into more depth of the hows in a future post, but for now I just wanted to share the results of my messing around over the course of a few evenings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eye See You<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"App<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Link here<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For some reason the first thought that occurred to me when staring at my big spherical watch was: what if it was staring back? Throw in some creative license, and possibly some delayed wish-fulfillment from when I was 13, and I ended up hooked on the idea of having Sauron’s all-seeing eye on my wrist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The key here was creating a graphic that would meet the devices’ ridiculously small memory. Cue a lot of posterising, playing with values, compression, and I had something I was happy enough with. Though it left me envious of the Apple Watch’s rich display.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyway, turned out alright for a first go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
Download ‘eye see you’<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Eye Spy<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"App<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Link here<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Are we seeing a theme here? In what perhaps is an obvious logical leap, I started asking myself questions like, “What if the eye could blink?” and “What if the eye didn’t belong to an immortal evil force?”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that’s how we came to Eye Spy, a regular eyeball on your arm. This was a simpler affair since the only graphic was a much smaller iris, and I didn’t have to worry too much about clarity or recognisability as long as it just generally looked good. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At this point I started to add more features. I was quite happy with the battery, since it was completely constructed from shape vectors. I also started to figure out how to share common logic between my watch faces using Monkey Barrels<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
download ‘eye spy’<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Vinyl<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"App<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Link here<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next on my list was something quite different, but again inspired by riffing on the circular form factor. I thought it would be pretty funky to have a vinyl record spinning in the watch, with the relevant info (date, time) on the record label itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This one involved no image resources whatsoever — I built the entire UI programmatically with shapes. This involved some trial-and-error to work out a good amount of spacing for the highlights, and a little bit of maths to plot the arcs correctly — especially since Garmin watches come in all sorts of sizes and at all sorts of resolutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By this point I was getting much more comfortable with the language and framework. And this has by far been the most popular watchface on the store — much to my surprise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
download ‘vinyl’<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Summary<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I have many more ideas for enhancements to these watch faces, and many more ideas for new watch faces besides, it’s just a case of finding the time. In any case this has been an enjoyable exercise, even if in the end I settled on wearing a picture of my son’s face instead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

About a year ago I bought a Garmin Forerunner 245 to take my run-tracking to the next level. In almost every respect it’s left my previous Fitbit in the dust (cough… sleep tracking). And means I can run a race without needing to carry a phone. Lovely stuff. One of the things I found most… Read More »My First 3 Garmin Watch Faces<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[199,197,198,200],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sebcharrot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/707"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sebcharrot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sebcharrot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebcharrot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebcharrot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=707"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebcharrot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/707\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":715,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebcharrot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/707\/revisions\/715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sebcharrot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebcharrot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebcharrot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}