So my watchface wants permissions it can't have... options?

Former Member over 10 years ago

Hi All,

In my spare time I've been working on a watchface that shows me tidal conditions and some weather information in my local area.

I actually built a lightweight web service to do most of the parsing/talking to various API's to collect the data, so the watch could make a simple json call, here's the watchface running with some mockup data:

Now I just got to the bit where I was plumbing everything together, once every few hours the watchface would grab it's location, make a json call to my webservice using that location data and update the tidal information etc. However, as you more experienced ConnectIQ folks will know, you can't actually do that from a watchface, both the Location and Communication permissions are inaccessible from the watchface - I kinda wish I'd realised that sooner.

I saw somewhere on the forum discussion of the possibility of adding a 'last known location' function in the API and have that accessible from the watchface, I think that would be great. I'd also like to suggest that there be a heavily QoS'd Communications function added, perhaps something that would allow a watchface to make a json call just once an hour?

In the meantime I'm not sure what my options are? Convert this watchface into something else like an app? I'm not sure what the impact on battery life would be if I did that.

I'm kind of bummed out, made a cool watchface that does exactly what I want, got a brand new Fenix 3 and no way to make the two play nice :(

tonny.madsen over 10 years ago

Also see https://forums.garmin.com/showthread.php?185343-Request-Communication-permissions-for-datafields

Brandon.ConnectIQ over 10 years ago

I appreciate your comments--that watch face looks pretty nice, too. :)

Right now, using a widget or an app are your best options. I'd recommend a widget that you could quickly flip to from the watch face. I understand it's not ideal, but it's what we currently have available.

I'm going to submit your suggestion to make communications available once an hour from the watch face. I might be a good compromise between maintaining battery life and giving some communications capabilities. Another thought is to have communications available on hi power mode, or when the user checks the time. Right now, that wouldn't work well because the wake period is relatively short and could easily end before a response is received with your data.

No promises, but this is certainly not a dead issue. We'll continue to work on ways to make features available. We just need to make sure that we do it in a way that doesn't violate the overarching goals for our products.

tonny.madsen over 10 years ago

I'm going to submit your suggestion to make communications available once an hour from the watch face. I might be a good compromise between maintaining battery life and giving some communications capabilities. Another thought is to have communications available on hi power mode, or when the user checks the time. Right now, that wouldn't work well because the wake period is relatively short and could easily end before a response is received with your data.

In that case, please also also consider the same for data fields.

I have quite a few use cases, where some limited communication for data fields would be perfect.

Former Member over 10 years ago

I appreciate your comments--that watch face looks pretty nice, too. :)

Right now, using a widget or an app are your best options. I'd recommend a widget that you could quickly flip to from the watch face. I understand it's not ideal, but it's what we currently have available.

I'm going to submit your suggestion to make communications available once an hour from the watch face. I might be a good compromise between maintaining battery life and giving some communications capabilities. Another thought is to have communications available on hi power mode, or when the user checks the time. Right now, that wouldn't work well because the wake period is relatively short and could easily end before a response is received with your data.

Thank you for considering this, I think it would enable some really interesting features at a relatively low cost to battery/performance.

In the meantime I'll have a look at building a widget to do this. I will have to check but right now I'm thinking I'll have the widget fetch the forecasts for a whole day (wind, tidal, swell etc) and put them in the object store, that way the widget only has to make a json call once per day.