Opening the Menu on the Vivoactive 6 and Venu 4

https://forums.garmin.com/developer/connect-iq/f/discussion/408309/a-note-to-developers-and-the-va6

https://forums.garmin.com/developer/connect-iq/b/news-announcements/posts/vivoactive-6-now-available-in-the-connect-iq-sdk-manager

The newer "touch-first" watches (Venu 4/X1 and Vivoactive 6) no longer have the universal menu shortcut that every previous watch had (in the form of a button press, a long button press, or a long press of the touchscreen.) This means that onMenu is not supported for these devices.

Instead, there is now a universal "action menu indicator", which is a draggable UI element that appears on the right side of the screen. The user is supposed to drag it to the left, and in response the system/app either opens an action menu from the right, or opens a full-screen menu.

Connect IQ apps can:

- display or hide the action menu indicator using setActionMenuIndicator()

- be notified of a swipe left on the action menu indicator via onActionMenu()

Note that these functions are only available on the watches which don't have onMenu and do have the new kind of action menu indicator - i.e. currently Venu 4/X1 and Vivoactive 6.

jim_m_58 said:

[https://forums.garmin.com/developer/connect-iq/f/discussion/408309/a-note-to-developers-and-the-va6]

This CIQ VA6 announcement is linked every time this topic comes up and I will say the same thing I did all the other times:

- that announcement says *nothing* about the removal of the universal menu shortcut / onMenu in Vivoactive 6. It doesn't mention onMenu at all

- that announcement only says that the "action view pattern" has changed from Vivoactive 5 to Vivoactive 6, and here's how you can display the indicator and respond to a left swipe (you should open an action menu)

- not a single CIQ dev guessed - based on that announcement alone - that onMenu was removed from VA6. It was only *after the fact*, when devs saw the behaviour of VA6 in the simulator, that people put 2 and 2 together

Therefore, the implication that the VA6 announcement explains all of this is just wrong imo.

Also note that other watches may have some kind of action menu indicator, but if they have onMenu, they won't have setActionMenuIndicator() and onActionMenu(). For example, FR9255/955/265/965, Fenix 7, etc all have an action menu indicator in certain situations (it can be triggered by button press *or* swipe), but they also have the regular onMenu behaviour (long-press UP in this case), so none of this applies to them.

Thank you all for the swift response. I had actually read that change in the release notes, but it wasn't clear to me what it meant so I incorrectly disregarded it.

I'll digest what this means for my app and do some testing. I use left swipe and right swipe to switch between map and data field screens so I may need to adjust my strategy a little once I get my head around it

Dresbo said:

I had actually read that change in the release notes, but it wasn't clear to me what it meant so I incorrectly disregarded it.

Which proves my point in the bug report about how Garmin hasn't communicated this change well to CIQ devs.

As I pointed out in the bug report, the Input core topic doesn't mention any of this at all.

I don't think devs should have to do a bunch of detective work to figure things as basic as this (how to implement a context-sensitive menu on the newer touch-first devices.)

Dresbo said:

I use left swipe and right swipe to switch between map and data field screens so I may need to adjust my strategy a little once I get my head around it

I think it's ok since a left swipe in general should still work as long as it's not a left swipe on the action menu indicator (which should not take up a huge amount of screen real estate afaik). I guess you'd have to test it to see how well it works.

That makes sense, thank you. I did also search the forums for 'how can I make the menu work on the Vivoactive 6' and nothing I considered relevant and defintely nothing newer than 3 years came up for whatever reason. I hope my question helps the next person. Perhaps VA6 would have been a better search.

Anyway, thanks all for the swift response and hopefully I should be able to implement it fairly quickly

It seems to work fine and the menu opens, although it's triggered from anywhere on the screen in the simulator if I swipe left. I presume this won't be the case on the device in real life from the comments and bugs linked above?

Not sure tbh, as I don't have a real VA6, Venu 4, or Venu X1 to test with.

I had a friendly user confirm that the menus work on their watch. Small swipe changes screen, swipe from the very edge shows the menu - so it's just the simulator that's broken