New Always on Second Hand
Updated 14th July 2017
With the release of the Garmin Connect IQ SDK 2.3.1, watch face developers can now build faces that support an 'always on' second hand! This removes the annoying 'low power' mode that watch faces currently have to support. In 'low power' mode the watch face only receives updates once every minute making it impossible to have the second hand visible for more than a few seconds.
With the new Connect IQ 2.3.1 SDK we finally can have a working second hand! There are still some outstanding issues:
- The new SDK is supported on a few devices however the updates every second feature is only available on Fenix 5 devices. On other devices GMT 4 Beta should behave exactly the same.
- The basic watch face is saved as a image on the device and then the second hand drawn over this in its new position each second. Since GMT 4 can support 16 different colours the memory taken to store the image is currently so large it fails to load on most devices. To work around this you can still select from the 16 different colours however you can only have a maximum of 4 different colours defined for your watch face.
- I only have a FR235 to test on so have to rely on the good nature of a couple of beta testers to do the testing.
Stay tuned for further updates as beta test continues...
