Acknowledged
2 months ago
CIQQA-3123

Vivoactive 6 Simulator problems

The Vivoactive 6 simulator does not seem to respond to a Menu command, and only responds to the buttons in a very tiny area along the edge of the button where it meets the body of the watch in the simulator. 

The Vivoactive 5 simulator operates as expected so it looks to me like this is a set of simulator bugs.

Jeff
  • 2 months ago

    Someone with a real va6 tested an app I had modified in the way I talked about in the thread I mentioned, and it worked fine with a Menu2 instead of an ActionMenu.

    Again, nobody ever claimed it would not work. You can obviously do almost anything you want in onActionMenu(), same as you can in onMenu(). (A device app could take a lap in onMenu(), if the dev really wanted it to.)

    The claim is:

    - it's not what Garmin intends

    - it won't fit in with the native behaviour of left swiping on the action menu indicator (which is to open an action menu)

    There are many CIQ apps which do things differently than native Garmin apps wrt to input and UI, and ofc that's up to the dev. Especially since garmin often doesn't make it easy for devs to mimic the native UI. But in this case, they are trying to make it very easy for devs (out of necessity tho).

    I can't speak for anyone else, but as a user I definitely notice when CIQ apps behave differently from native apps. Yeah in this case I'm sure nobody will care.

  • 2 months ago in reply to FlowState

    Thanks again.

    I'm actually fine with not supporting these devices. The 5 button models are the best fit for the enviroment anyway.

    As I said, doesn't seem worth any more effort than I've already put in.

  • 2 months ago

    > I already use the start/stop button to bring up a menu that's different from the one displayed when Menu is used.

    In that case, it sounds like your app is a lot like the Strength app on Forerunners (which brings up an action menu when the user presses START).

    In your case, you could:

    - bring up action menu user presses START

    - add all the items from the "START button menu" to the action menu

    - add a new Settings item to the action menu which opens the "MENU button menu"

    This would have the advantage of being very similar to native Garmin behaviour (at least in some contexts.)

    > I'm quickly coming to the conclusion that it's not worth any effort to support devices that work like this, particularly since my app is a sailing app so it's used in a wet environmet.

    I get where you're coming from, but what if Garmin does this for all Venu/Vivoactive devices in the future? After a few years, your app won't be available on newer watches (except for 5-button touchscreen watches.)

  • 2 months ago

    Someone with a real va6 tested an app I had modified in the way I talked about in the thread I mentioned, and it worked fine with a Menu2 instead of an ActionMenu.

  • 2 months ago

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

    But that page doesn't say that onMenu was removed. It doesn't mention onMenu at all.

    It just says the action menu indicator has moved for VA6 (compared to VA5), and (for VA6) Connect IQ has explicit support for displaying/hiding the indicator and responding to a left swipe of the indicator.

    Yes, perhaps one could guess from the note that onMenu support was removed but that would be a stretch. In fact, I don't think anybody guessed that.

    Those of us who's already discussed this issue only noticed it when they actually tried in the sim and/or looked at device files, not solely because of that announcement. And once we looked into this, we could see that DCR's review said you no longer open device settings by holding a button, but by opening the activity/app list, scrolling to the Settings item and selecting it. From all of that, we could conclude that onMenu was purposely removed.

    Furthermore, the VA6 manual was unavailable at the time of announcement, so it wouldn't be possible to literally read the manual and see that there's no longer a universal button shortcut to open a menu.

    So actually, I think it's unfair to say they should've "RTFM" (in reference to that announcement), when the announcement doesn't really address onMenu at all.
    Immediately after that announcement was made, literally 0 people said "whoa so you mean onMenu was removed???"

    I think Garmin should've made it clear that onMenu was removed, and maybe even explained their rationale for why it was removed, instead of devs having to discover this on their own and speculate about why it happened.