Complete
3 months ago

Watch faces downloaded show a blank screen when starting to scroll up or down

When I start to scroll up or down from the watch face. To access the glance widgets. If I have a pre installed watch face selected. It will show the face image as I start scrolling, but with any installed faces (I've tried a few different ones from different developers including Garmin) when I start scrolling the watch face image disappears and shows a blank screen instead, making the whole scrolling feel very unnatural. 

Not a huge deal. Just cosmetic I guess. But I wish it would be fixed

JoeyRub
  • 3 months ago

    > Not a huge deal. Just cosmetic I guess. 

    Imagine if every screen on the watch scrolled like this? Instead of a smooth transition between one page and another that tracks your finger precisely, the old page would just be abruptly replaced with the next page. That would be a terrible UX. You wouldn't really have the impression that the your finger is directly moving the content, like you do with 99% of touchscreens.

    There was a super old Garmin touchscreen watch (released 2015) which worked just like that. It was definitely noticeable, and there's obviously a reason Garmin has implemented smooth scrolling for later watches.

  • 3 months ago in reply to FlowState

    Ya I already figured out this as well, the watch face doesn't stay active when scrolling, true. It is basically just a screenshot image all the face. But it makes the scrolling feel so much more natural. 

  • 3 months ago

    I will also point out that even native watchfaces will stop animating (e.g. changing seconds) once you start scrolling. (This is very easy to see if you choose a watchface with seconds and scroll part way, leaving your finger pressed against the screen. The watchface, including seconds indicator will be frozen for as long as your finger stays on the screen.)

    This suggests that a "screenshot" is taken of the watchface (*) and scrolled, as opposed to the watchface animating in real time while it's being it's being scrolled. This is presumably done for the most efficient and smooth scrolling experience possible.

    (* or something to that effect.)

    My point is that the same could be done for CIQ watchfaces, if efficiency and smoothness was a concern.

    I did notice that on old watches (like Forerunner 935), when you scroll away from CIQ watchfaces they don't go black and the process is painfully slow. So it seems likely that this change was made deliberately to speed up scrolling. I just wonder if the same scrolling performance hack that was apparently applied to native watchfaces could also be applied to CIQ watchfaces.

  • 3 months ago in reply to Brandon.ConnectIQ

    I hear you but you're wrong. This bug happens even with Garmin made faces if they're downloaded from the iq store. So it isn't specific to a developer, and after emailing the developer many times and we figured out that the same happens to even Garmin made faces that are downloaded, so he directed me here to report it. 

    So I believe you're wrong. But I am sorry if I didn't include certain info required