Widget 'fastLoad' option

Former Member
Former Member

Hello,

I am developing a widget, and noticed that when I scroll through the widgets and it gets to my custom widget that there is a pause before it loads with the icon and widget name. After reading through several posts I know that this is intentional to prevent slow widgets from slowing down the user experience. However, would like to make a suggestion.

For developers who side load their apps, this should be skipped. I can understand doing this for apps downloaded, but for a developer working on the app would be nice to skip this.

Or, in the Manifest, allow for a "Fast load" permission, that would allow us to control that being turned on and off. Turning "fast load" on would allow for it to load without that delay while developing, and turning it off would allow for the "real world experience".

Which actually then expands to allowing this to be a part of the official upload. I assume when an application is uploaded, and goes through the approval process, that they are run on a VM as part of the testing / approval process. For applications that do load quickly (<500ms) allow them to be approved with the "fast load" option, and therefore go to market with that option. If they take longer than that time then they get rejected.

This would encourage developers to make clean and quick loading code so that they can use "fast load", rather than force everybody to suffer the same delay.

  • The way I recall, that was initially there in the early days of Connect IQ, as loading the CIQ virtual machine could take a bit, and with the delay, a user could see what the widget was without waiting for the VM load and the app to start if they wanted to move to a different widget.  As the devices got faster, there was no need to do that as everything loaded fast, but today, the platform FW still shows that extra screen. (It's not Connect IQ) It would be nice if it was just removed in general.

  • Former Member
    Former Member in reply to jim_m_58

    Hi Jim,

    Removing it all together would be nice, but can understand the concern over bulky / slow widgets and users not appreciating the difference between bad developers and bad devices (vis-a-vis the other discussion on the 'high power' permission). Was hoping that this would be a nice middle-ground option for Garmin to consider.

  • Removing it first came up maybe about 4 years back, and has come up since.

    An interesting thing.  It was removed on the semi-round devices like the 230/235

    If it takes a widget a crazy long time to start, that would also be visible with the delay, so I don't link the delay is an issue.