[21.19] BUG – touch is always enabled during activity

flocsy🤠 said:

You mean the shortcuts? When you long press the light button? It's a shortcut to the system touch setting. It's global, has nothing to do with the last/current app

That's not true. As mentioned above:

- If you select it outside of a built-in activity, it toggles the global/system setting. (The text in controls menu says "Touch: On/Off")

- If you select it inside a built-in activity [*], it toggles the activity-specific setting. (The text in controls menu says "Touch: On/Off [activity name]")

[*] not a built-in app which doesn't record an activity, or a CIQ app

(yeah, I'm beating a dead horse :/)

tony_twowatch said:

most disruptively with RaceQs

flocsy🤠 said:

Ask him about making it possible to disable touch from within the app.

It may be worse than you imagine, as it's not just a question of having the option to disable touch within that app, it's the fact that the app refuses to run if the user doesn't disable touch on the device. Meaning if the user can't disable touch on the device, they can't use RaceQs at all.

The rationale: the app doesn't work well when touch is enabled (it's a sailing app, so phantom touches are a problem in that environment), and instead of implementing the app so it ignores touches, the app just requires the user to disable touch on the device. Obv I can't tell anyone else what to do, nor do I want to, but when this came up before, I pointed out that this isn't necessarily the best user experience. To be fair, Garmin doesn't make it easy to implement this kind of thing -- you can't just flip a switch saying "ignore touches pls" -- and you discovered a bug/quirk where a certain kind of touch unexpectedly acts like a certain kind of button, so maybe he had a decent point in the first place.

This goes back to our other convo about how it's not necessarily the best UX for a third-party to *ask* the user to do something that the app *should* be able to do itself. [Here, "should" is ofc from the end user's pov, which may or may not correspond to what's actually possible in CIQ]

Especially in this case, where the app refuses to run if the user doesn't do something, and especially when the user is unable to do that thing due to a bug in the device.

I'll just say that, based on previous discussions about that specific decision in that specific app, I don't think the app is changing any time soon.

Yeah, FlowState's analysis is accurate here. The version of RaceQs i have will actually run with touch enabled on my FR965, which is good, but it's still super hard to use because the touch screen is constantly getting triggered by various things and water touching the screen. Either way, this isn't the behavior my watch had in older versions of the software and it's pretty frustrating. Hoping Garmin-Sierra can help us find a resolution for the issue.

tony_twowatch said:

The version of RaceQs i have will actually run with touch enabled on my FR965

Ah my bad. I guess you have a special version to get around this problem?

FlowState said:

I'll just say that, based on previous discussions about that specific decision in that specific app, I don't think the app is changing any time soon.

I should clarify and say that I don't think the app will be changing so it either always ignores touches or it has an option to do so.

That would be a lot of work (CIQ arguably makes it unnecessarily complex or even impractical) and the dev already indicated it's not the direction they wished to go in.

I don't have any special version - i wonder if the dev just rolled back the feature, or whatever they were using to detect touch screen enabled stopped working.

tony_twowatch said:

whatever they were using to detect touch screen enabled stopped working.

Yeah that could be it.

The Connect IQ API has a function which indicates whether touch is available, which is almost certainly what the app uses.

And in your case, you actually have disabled touch in the device settings, so it's not surprising that the corresponding CIQ function might indicate that touch is unavailable, as it normally would.

After, all it's obviously a bug that touch still works even though it's supposed to be disabled. Based on what you said, everything else on the device indicates that touch is disabled, such as the system settings menu and the controls menu. So why shouldn't Connect IQ apps also think that touch is disabled in this case? Touch actually is supposed to disabled, so technically it's not wrong.

badyl said:

What I noticed in my app is that even if the app ignores touch events, the watch still will react to "global" gestures, for example swipe right will take you out of the app to the home/watch screen.

There's a new bug/quirk where swipe right in an app is also detected as KEY_ESC (Back/Lap key on most devices).

I'm sure this was done on purpose by Garmin, but I think it's a bad idea.

forums.garmin.com/.../bug-swipe-right-on-the-left-side-of-the-screen-triggers-onkey-key_esc

So I reached out to the RaceQs developer and they said that there was a bug preventing touch screen recognition. They pushed an update, and the app now correctly detects that the touch screen is enabled... which means I cannot use the app at all. I really would love to hear from Garmin on this