2.60

Putting the issue of the release notes aside, it really gets my goat to see yet another post from RUPERTHAWKES complaining that something isn't done yet, or that some feature is missing or not complete to his satisfaction. Maybe I was brought up wrong, but if you're trying to help people or trying to get someone to do something for you, you don't do it by complaining or yelling at them.

Travis, I'm very sure that upbringing is not part of this. But our different professional backgrounds are...

My take is that the idea of the Connect IQ language and SDK is that you should not need a major i Computer Science to develop stuff for the Garmin devices. So Monkey C is intentionally kept very simple and the SDK is as simple as it can get. Maybe too simple, but that is another story :D

[This is very different from the situation for the people that develops apps for the various mobile devices - if you want to develop anything non-trivial for these you probably need a background in computers as they all - without exception - are very complicated. I know - I have worked professionally on all the major platforms from Apple, Google, MS and BB]

For Connect IQ, this means the developers of apps for the devices is going to be a very diverse lot - from the adventurous athlete with a specific need over the hobby-programmers with a new gadget to play with but also including a few like Rupert and myself that have developed applications professionally for 20-30 years. And given the very different backgrounds of the developers, we have to expect a very different outlook on the development processes and our expectations to the processes.

The end result hopefully is that the Connect IQ Store is going to be full of small apps and data fields that can do lots of interesting things. And since the bar has been lowered by the simplicity of the platform, we can hopefully see stuff in the store that the real end-users - the athletes - need and can actually develop themselves.

At the other end, you will find me: I have the hope that within the next 4-6 months the platform will have matured enough to allow for commercial applications that bring some of the things you currently only do on a mobile or dedicated device to the watch itself. Given the money people spend on the devices themselves - they are not exactly cheap - I hope there will be a market in the future.... We'll see...

And that is going to be my last words on this for now in this context... We must really strive to keep the tone civil in the forum...

It's going to take some coordination between our team and the device teams to make sure more detailed release notes are included, which means it may take a little time to get a reasonable process in place. I definitely want to improve things as much as I can, but I can't dictate device firmware releases or the processes they follow. :) Please be patient!

In the meantime, I can provide some details about changes that took place between 2.50 and 2.60 relevant to Connect IQ:

1. Adds full support for the 1.1.0 Connect IQ release.
2. When registering for the position updates we requested them as quickly as possible. Limited the requests to once per second to prevent running Connect IQ code all the time.
3. Fixed Positioning module to properly process data from bike speed or footpod sensors.
4. Fixed memory leak in event callbacks in positioning, ant, and sensors modules. The positioning module was also skipping a null check and calling a null method if no method contained a callback for the event.
5. Fixed various RTL trap and memory leaks. (I'm not listing all the details, but there were several memory leaks that were addressed, including one specific to the vívoactive that would leak memory when a Connect IQ widget was launched and closed.)
6. Fixed an issue where the pixel height field for certain data fields was not being set. This could cause device crash when allocation for label string was made.

THANK YOU! Very helpful :-)

Can I also bring this to your attention in case you missed it...

With 2.60, I have removed the activity tracker widget and use a custom watch face, but when the "move" action is triggered it shows the activity tracker widget (that I've just deleted!), whereas before it showed a nice "move" message at the top of the screen. Sorry but this is a backward step. Surely this cannot be correct behavior, the activity widget is not installed yet it's displayed! Not complaining, just reporting new unwanted unexpected behavior!

With 2.60, I have removed the activity tracker widget and use a custom watch face, but when the "move" action is triggered it shows the activity tracker widget (that I've just deleted!), whereas before it showed a nice "move" message at the top of the screen. Sorry but this is a backward step. Surely this cannot be correct behavior, the activity widget is not installed yet it's displayed! Not complaining, just reporting new unwanted unexpected behavior!

This is a device behavior, which you have appropriately reported in the device forum. As this behavior is not related to ConnectIQ, we can't really address it over here.

This is a device behavior, which you have appropriately reported in the device forum. As this behavior is not related to ConnectIQ, we can't really address it over here.

Sorry but I do wonder whether that forum is policed by Garmin device programmers. :-(