Watch Face: Military24Time (Big Font)

Former Member over 8 years ago

https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/apps/72f03afa-3f30-4d32-b60f-2b428f987840#0

This is my first watch face project. I am a non-coder and non-techie so this is very new to me. I have to thank the people at Garmin's developers' forum that offered tips, directions and help such as jim_m_58, PETERDEDECKER, TRAVIS.VITEK and ASmugDill.

If anyone who has no experience in coding like to have the source code to go thru (I have embedded quite a lot of comments in it to describe what I did for each part), please send me a PM and I will send the zipped copy of the files to you. You are more than welcome to take it apart and do something new or different with it.

As I only have the Vivoactive HR, I have designed only for that. One issue with this watch is that the display is not that great and most of the watch faces available for it tend to cram too much information rendering the details rather difficult to read. So I have designed this to be big and bold and for (hopefully) maximum visibility, it is white on black only.

This watch face displays the time in 24 hours military style with steps counter below. Above the time is the Day, date and month. And on the status bar, there are: (1) Bluetooth connection indicator, (2) Incoming alerts from phone indicator which is an exclamation mark in a white box, and (3) on the right is the battery power percentage next to the power icon.

Oh, I can't guarantee that this will work for your Vivoactive HR, so please use it at your own risk.

I am not taking requests at the moment as I am still a newbie figuring my way about (lots to learn). And I have yet to figure out how to make a configurable watch face so there is no way to change the format of time and date for this one. I might attempt that in the future.

Credits:

These are the web pages I learned and got some of my information from:

1. https://www.programmableweb.com/news/how-to-develop-wearable-apps-connect-iq/sponsored-content/2016/10/11
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRQyA4BeqqE (Video tutorial by Petr Koula)
3. http://datawillconfess.blogspot.sg/2016/01/opensource-connect-iq-face-for-garmin.html
4. https://runningprogrammer01.wordpress.com/
5. http://starttorun.info/tutorial-1-create-a-connect-iq-datafield/
6. https://developer.garmin.com/connect-iq/programmers-guide/ (Garmin's developer guide)
7. https://forums.garmin.com/forumdisplay.php?479-Connect-IQ (Garmin's developers' forum)

The status icons obtained from http://www.flaticon.com/ designed by below mentioned:

1. Power icon by Freepik
2. Bluetooth icon by Google Material Design

peterdedecker over 8 years ago

Looks good, a clean watchface, very good for a first attempt. ;) Don't have a vivoactive hr myself so can't try it myself though.

A lot of people that want to share their source code create a project on https://github.com or https://sourceforge.net/ which both suit perfectly fine if you want it all in the open and shared publicly.
Myself I use https://bitbucket.org for my source control, because there's a free account there that offers the choice between a public or private repository (collaboration for up to 5 users).

Once you've uploaded the project you can then link from your app page directly to the source code repo.

jim_m_58 over 8 years ago

When sharing source, you may want to include a comment somewhere (maybe the beginning of the main .mc), that when used, it's recommended that the developer generate their own UUID for the project (it's "ID=" in the manifest.xml, and a site to generate a unique one is in the Programmer's Guide). Having your version on the same device as the developer's version could result in odd things if they both have the same ID.

jim_m_58 over 8 years ago

I got the inbox full messages too, and cleaned out a bunch of things, but didn't know who was trying to send something to me.

For app settings, the best page to look is in the ObjectStore sample (screen 2 is app settings/properties, while screen 1 is the ObjectStore. Also in the programmer's guide there's things. You set up an xml file to define your properties, and your settings. Also, be sure to look at the new developer FAQ #2, point 10 to avoid a problem with Android phones.