vivoactive has 64 colours but only 16 defined in the SDK

All the colors are listed in the devices.xml under the vivoactive_sim entry. To get a different color use a 24-bit color:
var aqua = 0x00FFFF;
dc.setColor( aqua, Gfx.COLOR_RED );


Why isn't this in the documentation?!

What / where is the vivoactice_sim entry?!

Where is that in the documentation?!

You can find the vivoactive_sim entry in <sdk root>/bin/devices.xml. We'll get the documentation updated to mention that you can define your own colors as well. Please note that while you can define any colors you want you're still limited to the colors listed in the devices.xml for each device. If you provide a color that isn't listed in the devices.xml it will get mapped to the closest color in the palette.

Are those defined colours drawn somewhere so I can find the right colour without having to load each one in turn?

Cannot you set these colour names up in the SDK so they are all pre-defined? Thanks

This may help for now. I'll see if we can update the API docs so these values are specified.

COLOR_WHITE = 0xFFFFFF
COLOR_LT_GRAY = 0xAAAAAA
COLOR_DK_GRAY = 0x555555
COLOR_BLACK = 0x000000
COLOR_RED = 0xFF0000
COLOR_DK_RED = 0xAA0000
COLOR_ORANGE = 0xFF5500
COLOR_YELLOW = 0xFFAA00
COLOR_GREEN = 0x00FF00
COLOR_DK_GREEN = 0x00AA00
COLOR_BLUE = 0x00AAFF
COLOR_DK_BLUE = 0x0000FF
COLOR_PURPLE = 0xAA00FF
COLOR_PINK = 0xFF00FF

I forgot to mention that these are listed in the User Experience Guide included in the SDK. :) Look at the 'Bitmaps' section on page 7 for more information.

But surely we need ALL (i.e. the other 48) colour defined too!

I think it would be more confusing to define constant names for all 64 colors. It would be difficult to differentiate between different colors of similar hue simply based on a constant name (for instance, we could have LT_BLUE, MED_BLUE, DK_BLUE, SKY_BLUE, DODGER_BLUE, ELECTRIC_BLUE, ROYAL_BLUE, etc.). This would still leave you trying out different colors to see what they look like.

Hex color codes are a common convention, and there are many tools available for translating colors to hex. While we don't necessarily use web safe colors, this article on Wikipedia explains hex triplets well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors

Once you're accustomed to working with hex triplets, it's usually pretty easy to have a good idea what color a particular triplet represents.

I got my 920 in some "test" mode or something the other day where the vibration was on and wouldn't turn off and it had a bunch of debug info on the screen.
I was able to cycle through a bunch of test screens and one of them was a color pallet. My goodness this thing supports a ton of colors. Not all of them looked good, so I understand that you would limit the colors for normal use. But it looks like there is enough there to do some interesting artwork later on.

The reason the colors are restricted on the FR920 and Fenix 3 is to reduce the size of the frame buffer on the device. The main system unfortunately can't access the colors you are seeing on that palette page. The test page that is drawing that palette is procedurally generating the grid without using the frame buffer.

The VivoActive and Epix products support the 64 color palette you are seeing.

(The vibration can be toggled by pressing one of the buttons on one of the stat pages.)