colors in simulator vs. real world

Hey,

What types of color differences are you referencing? Due to some of the display technology, some colors may look a little muted on actual devices. Is this what you are referencing or is there something like a completely different color is displayed?

Thanks,
-Coleman

No, it's what you say - the colors are not as brilliant as on computer screens and blue/gree tones are very close, red/yellow seems to be displayed in a better spectrum.

I try to explain the problem by this example: today I started to write a small weather program with multiple icons in different colors, also the information (high/low temperature) needs different colors. So I was experimenting which background color would be best to recognize all screen elements. On the simulator, a darker blue (0x0000AA) looked fine, but on my forerunner 935 the blue looked very different and the icons and the text couldn't be read easily. So it was a try and error game to check if 0xAAAAFF, 0x000055, 0x0055AA etc. would be a better choice.

Therfore I tought, why not implementing a simple color filter to get a more real impression on the simulator? I did something like this in some minutes (see first post) and even the results are not perfect, they look more realistic now. Not sure how many different technologies are used in all garmin products, but I just did two photos (watch backlight on/off) with my camera and wrote some code lines, not a big deal...

Here a original screenshot from the simulator and how my program is displaying it with active color filter...

"Original display"
"Simulated real display"

You're not going to be able to see things as they are on a device on a computer. Like Coleman mentioned, different technologies for the display. (and different monitors, brightness settings, contrast, etc, on the computer)

Throw together a simple app with a black background and a line of red text. In dim light on a device, for me at least, it's hard to see. But in bright sunlight, it's easy. The reflective LCD on devices can't really be replicated on a computer display, in my opinion.

With a black background, I tend to use orange or pink instead of red as a default color when needed, as those work for me in different lighting conditions on real devices.

I hate to say it, but the only way to understand the colors and how they work together is to look at them on a device, in varying light conditions. This is a case app-settings is really handy. You (and the user) can change the colors of various things to set what works best. I sent to stick with the base 16 colors in apps, but a couple developers allow many of the 64 colors with app settings.

Well done on your work.

I too notice that the colours on my Forerunner 235 screen looks very different to the colours on the simulator due to the screen technology, e.g. yellow it's quite orange. Not a big deal, but it would be nice if Garmin adjusted the simulator colours so that they roughly map to the colour palette of the device's screen tech. After all, it only has 16 colours to remap. It should be relatively trivial too implement. Take a photo, open in Photoshop, use eyedropper tool to find the RGB value.

Hey Puffolino - nice work mate!

I'm thinking of throwing together an online palette selector that allows you to preview the uncorrected, and corrected colour.

This was done on another smart watch platform, and I think it worked well.

I've submitted a feature request for some of the options suggested.

Thanks,
-Coleman

Thanks, meanwhile you can do a lot of things with my updated Screeny Tool which has many more shortcuts now and should work for ALL devices in the simulator (you have to modify the ox and oy value in the ini file to set the display offset if you do not use the Forerunner 935).