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Kudos to Garmin for choosing "Complication" as the resource name

Bruno Bragança
over 1 year ago

First of all, this is not a typical bug report, functionality question, etc. I just want to give Garmin a praise for choosing "Complication" as the resource name and start a discussion about this.

For those who don't know, in analog/mechanical watches, anything that goes beyond showing the time (hour, minutes and seconds) is called a complication. For example, showing the day of the month is a complication to the watch mechanism because it requires an extra-gearing that moves every other time the hour hand passes at the 12 mark. This is a simple and relatively common mechanism but requires manual adjustment when month has less than 31 days. There are watches that shows moon phase, extra time zones, and some luxury watches that are complicated to the point of accurately showing day, months, jumping months correctly at months of 28,29,30 and 31 days (yes, it takes into consideration leap years), all of this using mechanical gears, they are called perpetual calendars, as they don't require manual adjustment until the year 2100 (due to being divisible per 4 but not being leap year). For who's interested, here's a nice article explaining this in detail: Watch Complications: A Comprehensive Guide | Teddy Baldassarre.

So, in my opinion Garmin had a very nice idea to chose the "complication" as the name for anything that goes beyond showing hour, minute and seconds. Kudos to that.

  • over 1 year ago

    That's really not what Garmin complications are.  Many watch faces show more than the basic data, but complications aren't involved.

    When Garmin first added them to native watch faces, what I heard was Garmin was just using the same term Apple was using for similar functionality -pressing on the data opens the glance for that data.  They were then added to CIQ and announced at the GDVC last October

  • over 1 year ago in reply to jim_m_58

    Yeah, yeah, I know there are things outside complications, like Activity.getActivityInfo().currentHeartRate, and that complications are a relatively recent functionality, but seems to me they're on a move to unify everything that's not time inside complications. Anyway, my point is that there are a funcionality called complications that shows stuff beyond time.

  • over 1 year ago in reply to Bruno Bragança

    But also understand that only the new devices, you can't use complications.  You may also find the complications don't give you data the way you want - some of the weather complications for example.

    And doing something like Activity.Info.currentHeartRate is actually easier and more efficient than subscribing to a complication and getting updates you never display.

  • over 1 year ago in reply to jim_m_58

    Garmin copied Apple and Apple copied luxury watch terminology (as per OP).

    Doesn't matter that complications aren't *literally* anything beyond time on a watch face, the connection is very clear.

    For context, here's how Apple describes complications:

    https://developer.apple.com/documentation/clockkit/deprecated_articles_and_symbols/creating_complications_for_your_watchos_app

    "Complications are small interface elements that users place on the clock face.

    Having your complication on an active watch face gives you the opportunity to provide useful data whenever the user glances at their watch. Users can also interact with your app by tapping on the complication and launching your app. The system also provides apps with active complications larger budgets for background refresh tasks. You can use these tasks to keep the content of your watchOS app and your complications up to date and accurate."

    https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/complications

    "A complication displays timely, relevant information on the watch face, where people can view it each time they raise their wrist."
    jim_m_58 said:
    When Garmin first added them to native watch faces, what I heard was Garmin was just using the same term Apple was using for similar functionality -pressing on the data opens the glance for that data. 

    You may also be glossing over the fact that the data for a complication may be provided by a 3rd party CIQ app (as opposed to native data). That's a key part of the functionality IMO.

    What's baffling to me is the fact that native watchfaces can't use complications (which means no 3rd party data), although Face-It apparently can or will in the future -- I haven't checked.

    Bruno Bragança said:
    So, in my opinion Garmin had a very nice idea to chose the "complication" as the name for anything that goes beyond showing hour, minute and seconds. Kudos to that.

    Idk they literally copied Apple, it's not that deep (imo). Same goes for the Venu Sq. form factor, music, touchscreens and AMOLED.

    If they truly wanted to unify all non-time watchface functionality around complications, the *first* thing they would do is allow native watchfaces to use complications, instead of just native data.

    For example, a few ppl have been complaining that native watchfaces on newer watches don't have the move bar anymore. If native watchfaces supported complications, I could possibly write a CIQ app to provide a replacement move bar. But then again, the complications API doesn't allow the provider enough freedom for that kind of functionality (i.e. the provider can't draw arbitrary graphics on the watchface, they can only specify data with certain predefined units that the subscriber will render in its own way.)

    So my hypothetical move bar complication might be something lame like "Move: X", where X is a number from 0 to 4, or X is a label like "Ok", "15 min", "30 min", etc. Either way, nothing like the old native move bar. If emojis were allowed, might be a different story, but I noticed emoji support on Garmins is pretty sparse.

  • over 1 year ago in reply to FlowState
    FlowState said:
    You may also be glossing over the fact that the data for a complication may be provided by a 3rd party CIQ app (as opposed to native data). That's a key part of the functionality IMO.

    1. I have a few apps in the store that do publish.  It's tricky in that it's not that well documented and you use "COMPLICATION_TYPE_INVALID" to find them, and what's seen as data  can vary by type of app/data.
  • 2 days ago

    Thank you for this post, I was not sure where the name "complication" came from and I'm glad it was chosen for a historical reason. I always had assumed "widget" would be a better name but this is much better.