Give your feedback on the Facer Creator here!

Facer Creator
41

Hello Facer team.
Let me say first off that I like what you have going here.

I have been in the theming game for a while and was waiting for a nice clean Web based GUI development tool.
I was/still am the Admin over at the official Zooper Community page. I was hired by Themer as their in house Zooper nerd after they acquired the app, and before they killed it. I then helped Frank get Kustom Live Wallpaper up and going as the first closed beta member, and got his community started. All of this is not to boast, but just show that Im not some yahoo fresh from the boat telling you what I think you need to fix.

With that said, :wink: There are a few things I wanted to make note of after playing around with the tool for a few days.

First you guys should think of a dedicated feature request section, with voting and status notifications(planned/working/beta/release).
It REALLY helps keep the community happy in my experience and makes them feel like they are participating in the apps growth. It also help your team out as there is less need to answer the same request posts over and over.

GUI improvements. The formula window, OMG you guys are killing me. That single line space is just not enough for complex statements or formulas. Maybe a break out window or the like. Not sure how robust the Caret API is, but if that could be implemented as a breakout window, with your own syntax enabled, I cant really think of anything more someone could ask for. If you have never used it, its basically Sublime in a browser. Caret - Professional Text Editing for Chrome and Chrome OS

Missing Variables. Actually the list is pretty impressive as it stands.
There was one I found that seemed like obvious omissions.
1 - Boolean Day/Night var #isday#=1/0
Keeps us from needing to write more complex formulas just to determine if its day or night.

BBcode. This is one of those things that most people dont think is too important, but having the ability to manipulate text characteristics inside of a formula ends up getting used a LOT when its available.

Robust Shape settings. I assume that just like Zooper and Kustom, shapes are vectors in the editor and then before being displayed on the device are converted to bitmap. I know most people are going to import bitmaps from Photoshop, but as the display resolution on the devices begins to change we will start seeing faces that were once nice and crispy start to get blurry due to scaling. Adding the ability for some light weight design settings for the shapes, (glow, outline, clipping, gradients) would allow us to build more attractive themes that can scale to any resolution without compromise.

Thats it for now, but Im sure Ill come up with some other stuff.

Thanks again for the great app.

3 Likes
42

Awesome feedback, and great to have you being part of this community!

Love the idea of a feature request section - in your experience, what format worked best? We could just add a section in this forum dedicated to this, but it could become unruly quickly. Any 3rd party tool youā€™ve seen and recommend?

Regarding the formula window, definitely agree that it could be improved and this is something weā€™re working on and should get significantly better soon!

The #isday# tag is a great idea - Iā€™ll add it to the list of new tags weā€™re building immediately.

Regarding BBCode - are you envisioning people formatting their text directly in a text layer this way? Weā€™re trying to stay away from requiring users to learn new formats and codes, and hoping to make it more user-friendly, but open to suggestions that could make the format more powerful!

Regarding the shapes, weā€™re indeed seeing most users use images instead of shapes, but adding things like gradients should be fairly straightforward for us. Weā€™ll look into it!

Thanks for all the feedback again. Keep it coming! Looking forward to seeing your designs too!

43

please add a universal coordinated time tag (UTC). That way I can create a dual clock watch face that is independent of the main clockā€™s timezone.

44

I second the UTC tag request! I work all around the world and need to reference UTC every day. It would be great to have that as a tag. At its core the phone has to be keeping time in UTC and then just displaying an offset. There are paid faces in the app store advertising UTC, but itā€™s not clear if they require a manual update every time the local time zone changes.

45

Thanks guys, weā€™ll add the UTC tag to our list of upcoming new features!

46

Hi All,
At first let me tell you i really like your good work!
Itā€™s fun to play with watch faces in the creator, but i think i have found a bug.
The deg and rad functions are swapped. I mean on my watch it works perfectly, but when i try it in the creator the deg function converts degrees to radians and the rad converts radians to degrees. It took a while to find out whatā€™s happening. :smile:
Eg.:
#DWFHS# gives a number between 0 and 360, so it should be converted to radians for sine, like:
(sin(rad(#DWFHS#)))
But in the creator deg should be used for the same result:
(sin(deg(#DWFHS#)))
So when i test my watch face in the creator i have to use the deg, and before sending it to my watch i have to replace them to rad.
Keep up the good work!

47

I think it would be cool to have gifs work natively.

48

Did anyone suggest grouping of layers, already? :neutral_face:

49

I like Facer a lot,
would love to see something like Pujieā€™s Widget/ Indicator/ Tap Drawer to be added.

50

Iā€™d like to say that Iā€™m having tons of fun customizing watch faces and I really like the powerful GUI for it.
I have some suggestions :slight_smile:

  1. It would be nice to have a modulus operator.
    Modulus is important because time is modulated (on 12, 24, or 60). This seems like a missing function and I was surprised to not see it in the operator list. In order to do a modulus function right now you have to use a conditional. This can cause problems if you want to do anything else to the field because it usually will lead to nested expressions which tend to explode.
  2. Allow nested expressions.
    I would think that having something like ā€œ$(1<2)?$(1<2)?works:no$:no$ā€ would work. Currently, this doesnā€™t even return. I fiddled around with parentheses and things for a while and could not get more than one expression to evaluate in a single field. This tool could be even more powerful if we were able to use nested expressions.
  3. Render expressions on the watch the same as in the creator.
    Iā€™ve noticed that with more complicated expressions, even if they work in the creator, the watch will just display the expression itself instead of the result. This can be very frustrating.
  4. Add the ability to link to an app.
    Iā€™m not sure how difficult this one might be, but it would be really cool to add a widget to my face that, if I click it, will take me directly to an app on the watch.
  5. More shapes and shape/text options.
    Not too much to say about this one, just would be nice to have a few more options for things. (more shapes, maybe some default icon sets, more fonts, etc.)
  6. Snap to center of object vertically.
    I really like the grid snapping, but it seems like it only snaps the bottom and tops of objects to the grid when snapping vertically. Snapping to the middle of the object is almost always more useful.
  7. Change grid granularity.
    Would be cool to be able to set a bigger or smaller grid.
  8. Re-sizable editor fields.
    In the advanced mode, the sometimes the tiny editor fields just arenā€™t big enough.
  9. Add some conversion functions.
    A problem I ran into while creating this face: AdhesiveWombat - Sliding Time - watch face for Apple Watch, Samsung Gear S3, Huawei Watch, and more - Facer was that I was not able to add ā€œleading zerosā€ after doing math calculations. This detracted from the look of the face. I tried to add them back using a nested expression but those donā€™t work. Maybe it would have been easier if there was just a function for leadingZero() and other things like converting ā€œ8:26ā€ to ā€œeight twenty sixā€ etc.

Overall I think you guys are doing a great job with this app. I do really appreciate that you actually ask and listen to your community for feedback and then follow through with features. Really good work!

2 Likes
51

Hi!
I want to use conditional like this:

$#Dw#%2==1? Up : Down $

In Facer Creator all works fine, but when I send my watchface to watch, I got just a text of the conditional, not the result:-( Can you, please, tell me what Iā€™m doing wrong?

52

I liked the old app-based editor and it would be good if I could still use this as an alternative.

I cannot find any way to export my web site creation to upload it elsewhere. Is it possible?

I can see why you made a web-hosted editor as it must be easier to maintain than an app, but today the website it crashing my browser and itā€™s so frustrating to have to be online to tinker. When itā€™s running properly I do prefer the web site editor though.

53

My Facer Creator just shows blank faces for all my created watch faces, on 2 machines running Windows 10. Iā€™ve tried to uninstall and reinstall with no luck.

Anyone else seen this?

54

Hi there! this is a known issue on the Windows version of the Facer Creator. Weā€™re working on fixing it, but in the meantime we recommend you use the Creator at www.facer.io/creator instead. Thanks!

55

I like the Facer Creator.

But itĀ“s not yet done if you want to compete with the Watchmaker App.

Thats my Wishlist:

  1. Stopwatch

  2. Zoom Button

  3. Zoomable Editor for Finetuning

  4. Text-Effects (Spacing and Character-Wide)

  5. User moveable Bezels

  6. Gif-Animations

  7. Free User-scalable rotation of objects

  8. 1/10 seconds

9.Working Tachymeter, Telemeter, Pulsemeter

You did a great Job, but there is lot to do to create the best Watchmaking Tool ever.

56

Thank you. Iā€™ve been using the Web version.

57

This expression will (quietly) return wrong details:
#Dy#-#DMM#-#Dd# #DUHZ#:#DUmZ# UTC

Needs to be:
#DUy#-#DUMM#-#DUd# #DUHZ#:#DUmZ# UTC

So need new UTC date/time tags: DUy, DUMM, DUd, etc.

58

Its a little expensive, especially when you use watchmaker or pujie black or gear watch designer for waaaaaaaay cheaper. Whatā€™s the advantage using your app?

59

Some of the things you mentioned are actually done with custom scripting and not default presets, standard LUA tags or codes in watchmaker. Over the years some of us have created pretty extensive custom scripts that allow us to do so much more with our faces and their features and functionality than any app out there. The difference being anyone can create wm faces utilizing custom scripting and make them multi functional and themeable without needing to pay $6 a month to do so lol. To force people to pay that to use the same tools as sellers is kind of ridiculous to me.

Editā€¦ Just realized your comment is a year old lol. Still what I wrote applies though :laughing:

60

I know, i did a lot custom scripting myselfā€¦

Well - is it better facer denies normal users completly the access to enhanced Features? Like the way it was before?

The ones, that are ambitious in watch face making will pay - i would have paid for this enhanced Features.

Even those who canĀ“t sell can build watch faces now with enhanced complications, customization and tap Actions for themselves and othersā€¦