Is it possible to scale down the simulator window?

Until recently I mainly used the simulator with older devices that appear in a reasonable size on the screen. However newer (or OLED?) devices occupy half of my screen. Is there a way to scale them down (similar to how in Android Studio it is possible)?

0 trudelta over 1 year ago

I agree. In fact the size of the watch screen should be the same number of pixels as on the real device. I suspect that it is not in many cases.

0 FlowState over 1 year ago in reply to trudelta

trudelta said:
In fact the size of the watch screen should be the same number of pixels as on the real device. I suspect that it is not in many cases.

Actually the problem is that the simulator always renders the watch screen with the same number of pixels as on the real device. Unfortunately AMOLED devices have smaller pixels / higher resolution which means that a simulated AMOLED device will appear to be a lot bigger than a simulated MIP device. For example, Forerunner 955 has a 1.3” screen and a resolution of 260 x 260 pixels. Forerunner 965 has a 1.4” screen (barely bigger than the 955), but a much higher resolution of 454 x 454 pixels. So if you compare a simulated 955 to a simulated 965, the latter appears to be about 75% bigger.

In both cases, it’s very likely that the Garmin device has smaller pixels than your computer’s (logical) pixels, which means both devices will look larger than life in the sim. (If your computer has a high-resolution / “retina display”, then it’s very likely that scaling is applied by the OS, which means that its logical pixels are bigger than the physical pixels on the display. This means that having lots of small physical pixels on your computer display won’t help, unless you set a scaling mode that’s close to 100%, instead of the normal 150 - 200% for high-res screens.)

I understand why Garmin would want to do this by default. There’s good reasons to have a 1:1 relationship between simulated pixels and device pixels. If you’re trying to do precision graphics work, you don’t want the simulated display to have scaling artifacts.

But I also agree with Gavriel that there should be a simulator mode which scales devices down to some sort of “reference size” which corresponds to their physical size. It would be cool if you could calibrate the simulator with a real watch (or a physical ruler), which would allow “scaled / physical size mode” to display simulated devices the exact same size as real devices.

This has come up before in previous forum discussions, and I don’t really expect anything to change :/.