Impressions of 6.04 Alpha

I wanted to share my impressions of the 6.04 Alpha, especially for stuff that wasn't covered in the changelog

Good:

• Map Pan/Zoom is available while not following a course, but only when the activity is not paused
• Pan/Zoom itself works a lot better, although still not perfect
  • [UX] The map still sometimes gets "stuck" but now it's possible to just long-press a Pan button *once* to get out of this state
  • When the map isn't stuck, either a short press or a long press both work for panning and zooming
  • [UX] A long press still makes the screen flash white, but thankfully short press works, including rapid short presses. Unfortunately, the screen does flash white at times during rapid short presses, but it's not as consistent as with the long presses. The problem here just seems to be that rendering is slow - e.g. just short pressing a pan button once, you can see that the rendering of street names lags behind drawing everything else.
    
    Maybe the problem is that there only seems to be roughly 3 "levels" of rendering: everything (including street names), everything except street names, and a blank screen (I'm ignoring points of interest here). And once you pan at a certain speed (by holding down the button or pressing it rapidly), you're stuck at the blank screen level. Maybe there could be intermediate levels of rendering between "everything except street names" and "blank screen", such as "roads only" or "main roads only"
  • Holding DOWN no longer brings up music controls
  • Overall, I can actually use the map now, whereas before it was practically useless. Thanks Garmin!
• When you change an activity's background color to black, this is properly communicated to CIQ data fields, so that they don't become invisible (black text on black background) or otherwise look strange or inconsistent with the rest of the activity
•  Text input (e.g. rename activity)
  • Holding DOWN no longer opens music controls
• Overall, scrolling though the UI seems faster (this could be my imagination)

Needs improvement:

• [UX] Stopwatch has been improved somewhat for very large times (such as 46:03:47 -- i.e. 46 hours), but is still messed up
  • When 10ths of seconds are displayed, hours are simply hidden (when you have no laps)
  • When 10ths of seconds are hidden, hours (e.g. 46) are displayed vertically, but the bottom digit is slightly cut off
  • Time and laps are no longer invisible when you return to the stopwatch
  • The lap display for very large times (like 547:14:23) looks bad.
    • Milliseconds are displayed but cut off (if your lap is in the bottom lap row)
    • The hours are vertically stacked into two 2-digit rows, but the bottom row is cut off
• [UX] Scrolling through widgets still slows down when you hit certain widgets like Notifications (there's a noticeable pause)
• [UX] Text input (e.g. rename activity)
  • Pressing LIGHT (to enter a space) still toggles the light on or off, which is annoying at best and an active hindrance at worst (when you're trying to enter text in the dark)
    Here I would suggest that either pressing LIGHT does nothing to the light, or it only turns the light on (never off).

Bad:

• [BUG] Adding certain Connect IQ fields in a certain order (like Stryd) still causes the fields to crash.
  In this case I already had Race Screen and Stryd Zones in an activity. I changed Stryd Zones to Timer, then tried to change it back to Stryd Zones, at which point the field crashed. Other fields crashed in the same way. I was only able to work around this by removing both CIQ fields, and adding Stryd Zones first.
• [REGRESSION] Still can't launch a CIQ widget during an activity, although this was possible with 935 and other watches from the same generation.
• [REGRESSION] GPS still turns off when you return to the watchface/widgets during an activity. Did not happen with 935 and other watches from the same generation. (Others have already reported this in the alpha bug reports forum: https://forums.garmin.com/beta-program/forerunner-945-lte/public-alpha-bug-reports/i/public-alpha-bug-reports/gps-off-when-return-to-watch-face-during-activity)
• [MISSING FEATURE] The changelog claims "Added prompt to pause media during Wi-Fi sync" but this doesn't seem to happen. If I try to manually initiate a Wi-Fi sync when music is playing (by pressing Sync from the controls menu when WI-Fi is enabled and Bluetooth is disabled), the watch just prompts me to enable the phone connection, as before.
• [BUG] If your activity background is black and you edit a data field, first the selected data field will become invisible (white on white), then when you press back, all data fields will become invisible. They go back to normal once you exit "data field editing mode".
• [BUG] Track Run is missing cadence and running dynamics fields. 255 seems to have the same issue
• [BUG] Map pan/zoom is still unavailable when the activity is paused. (It is available when the activity is not paused.)
• [BUG] Stamina Time Gauge field sometimes displays the time remaining in huge text which covers the Stamina %. Also, the unit changes from "hrs" to "mins" even though the displayed value is the same. See screenshots at  forums.garmin.com/.../1445198
• [BUG] When the "normal" Map data page is added to an activity (outside of the context of following a course), the Up Ahead page is also added (and can't be removed independently), even though Up Ahead is only useful when following a course.

EDIT: I've added links to bug reports in the public alpha forum, where applicable.