2019 Connect IQ Developer Award Winners

Now that the 2019 Connect IQ Developer Summit is over, we are excited to share our winners. This year saw long-standing brands, new competitors, and successful personal developers all contribute great content in their categories. These developers work hard to make sure that Connect IQ has the best content and we at Garmin could not be prouder of our developer community. Congratulations to the winners of our 2019 Connect IQ Developer Awards!

Best New Watch Face – Crystal – Vince Wong

A crystal-clear watch face that adds a sense of function without sacrificing beauty. Sporting customizable colors and multiple languages, Crystal will up that wearable game with a touch of style. Vince is a powerful newcomer to the Connect IQ Developer community, and this watch face is a perfect example as to why. Released part way through last year; Crystal is coming close to breaking the ever elusive 500k download threshold.

Best Wearable Smart App – Your QR ­ – r.485

Make yourself known. Sharing your info from your wrist is as easy as snapping a picture. Your QR creates a custom code to share the info you want. Be high tech; be impressive. The description on this app says it is, “Probably the geekiest way to share your contact information” and we love it! Be sure to check out the whole r.485 ecosystem.

Best Edge App – XERT Workout Player – Baron Biosystems

All your data is working together. The Xert workout player helps you perform at your best by showing you what matters. This comprehensive experience is achieved by communicating directly with your specialized Fitness Signature. Baron Biosystems continues to be a huge player in the Connect IQ ecosystem, stretching the bounds of what is possible in Connect IQ. It’s no surprise that this makes two wins under their belt!

Best Training App – Final Surge – Final Surge Developer Team

Want more control of your workout? Why not build your own? Or better yet, have your coach do it for you. Final Surge offers a collaborative platform for athletes, coaches, teams, and clubs. Download your workouts straight to your device. It’s clear that the Final Surge Developer Team takes great pride in what they do. Check out the clear dedication in this app and the surrounding training platform.

Developer Of The Year – fbbbrown – Brian Brown

Being a pioneer is never easy. Providing things that people want can be even tougher, and people want what fbbbrown provides. With a collection of apps spanning everything from watch faces, to Yoga trackers, and everything in between, fbbbrown has made an ecosystem to be proud of. Brian Brown is all in. Check out his story and see what drives him.

Today Garmin is releasing Connect IQ 3.1, the latest generation of the Connect IQ platform and our most exciting update to date. Connect IQ 3.1 adds several new features and improvements to reduce friction, add tools, and make your apps more connected

New Store

The Connect IQ store is now available for iOS and Android. The app combines the App Store, app management, and Face It into a unified experience, and is the single location for Connect IQ on your phone.

Reducing Friction

Connect IQ 3.1 introduces a new TextArea class that wraps text within an area of the screen and will choose the best font for text display. The layout system has also been modified to accept relative positions and distances, making it easier to make one layout that matches numerous products.

The Connect IQ page stack has been improved to allow for View instances to be pushed on top of native View instances, addressing a long-time issue with the user interface framework.

In Connect IQ 3.1, the Storage module now allows all app types to store 32 KB per entry. In addition, music apps will no longer be capped at 500 MB.

New Tools

Connect IQ 3.1 introduces several tools to make developing your apps easier. Connect IQ 3.1 includes the new Exception Reporting Tool. Developers will now be able to collect anonymized crash log information from users, allowing for improved turnaround in finding and addressing issues.

Our developer forums have been upgraded. The new forums are a modern solution that we hope will be a gathering place for our developer community.

Connect IQ 3.1 introduces a new animation toolkit for importing animations into your apps. Animations can play full screen, can play over a View, or content from a View can be overlaid over an animation.

More Connected

Connect IQ 3.1 expands the capabilities of Connect IQ in wireless communication. Connect IQ device apps now use device Wi-Fi by implementing a SyncDelegate class, bringing higher bandwidth network access to device apps.

Connect IQ 3.1 apps using the AntPlus can now access ANT+ manufacturer pages of paired devices. This opens up new possibilities when interfacing with paired ANT+ sensors.

Connect IQ 3.1 also adds a new Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) framework for interfacing with BLE devices. This opens up new frontiers for Connect IQ in the Internet of Things space. You will need a Nordic nRF52 development kit to test this feature with the Connect IQ simulator.

Update Your Apps

Today we have also released the Connect IQ 3.0.10 SDK. This SDK adds support for the MARQ as well as an upcoming wearable and Edge device. Get a head start on supporting the latest Garmin devices.

Try it Today

You can download either the Connect IQ 3.0.10 or the Connect IQ 3.1 beta from the SDK download page. There you can also get a preview Connect IQ 3.1 firmware for the Fenix 5+. Get the SDK today.

We have made 20.01 beta firmware available for the fēnix 5 Plus, which supports the Connect IQ 3.1.0 Beta 1 SDK.

Although this software is believed to be reliable, it has not yet been released for production and should be used at your own risk.

Installation Instructions:

1. Connect your fēnix 5 Plus to your computer using a USB cable
2. Download and unzip fenix5plus_5F00_2001Beta.zip
3. Copy the GUPDATE.GCD file to the /GARMIN directory of the device
4. Disconnect the device from your computer and follow the prompts on the device to complete the update

To find out more about the Connect IQ 3.1.0 Beta SDK, check out our announcement at https://ciq.forums.garmin.com/developer/connect-iq/b/news-announcements/posts/connect-iq-3-1-beta-now-available.

Thanks!

Welcome

We are pleased to announce that we have a new set of tools for our Connect IQ Developer Community!

This blog is meant to help you get started and become familiar with some of the new tools and how they work. We appreciate all the work you have all done to make our community great and wanted to say thank you by giving you better tools to communicate with.

More than just a forum

As you can already see, this is more than just a replacement for our existing forums. Our new tools offer several different ways that we can communicate. Below is a breakdown of the some of the features:

Forums

These are exactly what they sound like. We have a set of forums available to our community for discussion, Q&A, etc. These come with some new feature that are helpful. If you are asking a question, we recommend using the Q&A forum where answers can be marked as accepted and voted on. Up and down voting is also a feature of regular discussion forum threads. If given the choice of "question" or "discussion" when creating a thread, use your best judgment for the type of post you are creating. We have our forums broken out into the following categories:

• App Ideas: Submit ideas for Connect IQ content.
• Discussion: General discussion about the Connect IQ platform. This is where we will also hold the content from the previous Connect IQ general forum.
• Legacy Bug Reports: This hold all of our Bug Report threads from the previous Connect IQ forums. We will begin using a new Bug Reports tool  moving forward (more below).
• Q&A: This is for asking questions about Connect IQ and its use. The intent is that the developer community along with the Connect IQ team will be able to build a database of accepted answers to questions in a format that is more in line with current developer communities.

• Showcase: This is our forum for showcasing and supporting Connect IQ content that has already been released to the App Store.

Bug Reports

The new Bug Reports tool provides the Connect IQ Team and developers with greater tracking and visibility to the status of bugs that are reported through the Connect IQ developer community.  This is located at the bottom of the main Connect IQ page. Here is a sample Bug Report. Notice the updateable status at the top, code formatting, and upvoting capabilities on bugs to help prioritize what matters to you!

Blog

Formerly our News & Announcements forum, we now have the ability to post announcements about events, SDK releases, and other community news in a different format that is easy to digest (You're reading one right now). Our recommendation is to subscribe to the blog so you can be notified of any news as it hits! A banner with the latest content will be posted at the top of the Connect IQ Developer Page.

Wikis

We now provide information about our community in one place. A list of these Wiki pages is displayed on the right in a browser and stacked on Mobile. Wikis provide us with easy ways to create FAQs, how tos, and other longer form content.

We are so excited to start using these new tools with our great community of developers.

-The Connect IQ Team