Do we do everything to warn customers about WEAROS 6 or +

General General discussion
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Hi.

I want to bring focus on a problem customers of mine seem to have with awakened animated faces. With awakening, i mean the need to time, condition sequences based on tapping on the watch, or turning the wrist, short said, awakening the face.

FACER offers this for me and others, needed funktion, tag, #DWE#. That one is incompatible with WFF format. And i think it is right to say from WEAROS6 on. That one, is a big mistake.

I have a GW 5 pro watch, nice watch, with WEAROS5 which i protect with my life so to say. Because i get always this annoying message about this upgrade thing, which i hate. I dont want it. Because, if i did, that means 90 % of my 2.500 faces WONT WORK. They ALL have #DWE# somewhere.

Yeah i know about the necessity to get more and more imposing apps on your watch, but me for one, i dont need it. I am satisfied as it is and it is a lot. I get the feeling, we must change because they tell it. Not me. I dont like the rat race at all.

I asked also AI. Seems upgrade is or has been rolling out for older watches - the new already are only WFF compliant. For some, for me ridiculous, reasons i hear, as battery saving. Which is untrue, if i look - every time - at the power impact statistics inside Facer Creator Page, or on pixel ratio. ALL LOW.

I know GOOGLE is the bigger fish in the waters where Facer wants to swim, but do we and FACER do enough to warn people about the consequences, or does it not matter at all.

I think it does matter a lot, and although we here are forced to play along, still, i think we should warn them at least at every showcasing face. That is why i post here. I have a client you probably all know, BIANCA. She is really a big heart one of the few who writes, interacts about faces instead of the quick liking thing, and a fan of mine. It is sickening to see what has happened. She is very sad. She got the upgrade to WEAROS 6, which means bye bye many many animated faces.

Some problems with #DWE# relating to animations, would also be solved mainly, by getting rid of the 25 images limit. In WFS that is not the case. If i could put 96 frames in a sequence, many problems would disappear. It surely pushes me further and further away from FACER to WFS, if nothing changes. I am pretty close to leaving.

BC

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I feel your pain. I have 200+ premium watch faces with interactions, chronographs, cool animations upon wake, etc, which are no longer running on WOS6. And even worse, 700+ free watch faces now look terrible because there is a triangular hole in my logo. I use a triangular shape to cover the hole varying the color as I wish. Arcs and the triangle shape do not display on WOS6. Great!

Besides that, people are complaing that premium watch faces I created for them have vanished. Am I to recreate the faces with limited functionality? I feel obliged to… thanks for the additional work G.

But this is probably not the right place to complain. Where to shout and file a complaint with the big G? Hope they are listening…

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Sadly, if you are not making them rich, they won’t listen to what you have to say. I always joke about Walmart being the Evil Empire, but I believe that Google really is an evil empire!

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Thanks for everybody commenting. I wonder however, if any non face maker would comment here. It is about them too. I have a feeling, the forum does not reach enough which i would consider the largest part of Facer people, not only based on this post. Should that not be a goal. To have everybody on board as far and deep as possible, aspiring face makers but also just people who stand up for their rights, participate, or do they only want to sync.

Because i believe WEAROS 6 and up, tears down creativity as we known here on Facer and perhaps dangers Facer, sadly. The big fish dont share, support the goals on many face makers i believe. We are not on the same page. I do not care so much for more and more apps and what’s needed for that, instead of maximizing everything to customize your watch and by thus, creativity. It is true, we count for nothing to them. Nobody listens, profit lies elsewhere in their eyes and that is sadly the red line in many things that surrounds me. And the power of the consumers is always too divided, too unorganized, too silent, to make a impact. Sad.

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If it was just down to Facer I believe things would be different . If you look at the very early topics ( 2017 ) you will see there were many less Tags and they had limited tools to play with . Since then Facer have added some fantastic things to play with . I think the Drive slowed down when they realise which way the wind was blowing . See the restrictions on Apple Face making on Creator .

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If you want to see and reach the everyday users, rather than watch face makers, you would have to look more often to the Facebook group. As the forced updates progress to older watch models, cases of disappointed people show once and again, searching for advice or audience. I guess positive reactions are more rare, as satisfied people silently enjoy, while they can and typically do not search for ways to praise.

I am sorry, but I do not see an effective way to inform people what is going to happen on their watches, because most of them search and find the pages only after having trouble. Some examples below:

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I know Facebook group is not the only nor main channel, but even there (at least for me) the default setting has the pinned announcements collapsed and not “in sight”, unless one notices and deliberately opens it just in case there could be something hidden.
Then all the news are just bragging about the bright future and only very “diplomatically” informing about the possible drawbacks, which may for some people feel like hiding the truth, that king is naked.

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Do not get me wrong, I still like Facer as a platform with for me easiest free way to make and publish even imported faces, but all these compromises took from me the joy of making new faces. I made me all I liked and tried all features I as non-partner could and now I somehow do not see virtue/challenge in dumbing down old faces, there is a sea of prettier simple faces around.

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I never liked the way Facebook collapses conversations because people don’t bother to read replies that may add details for clarification. One very respected news commentator and author once referred to Facebook as “a magnet for dumb people”. Yes, some people there are unhappy with the WFF change. People do not like change – especially older consumers. It is not easy to convince the public that it is their responsibility to maintain their devices and stay informed. When I was adding shaders, I had customers tell me that their batteries didn’t last. Now Google has removed shaders and more. The customers are still complaining.

As to creativity I don’t feel that WearOS6 necessarily “tears down creativity”. It just forces everyone to be clever in finding new ways to deal with it. Yes, it will take a while and require some patience, but if we stay positive and view it as a challenge it can be fun. Russell’s reminder of Apple’s restrictions was a good analogy. There were some very simple Apple faces in the beginning. After a few years I see some real beauties in spite of Apple’s restrictions.

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Oddly if you are an admin in a group, you can’t hide the “Featured”. It is there always in the way.

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An Ocean of Simple faces that are remarkably similar .

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None of my faces are the least bit complicated, so I didn’t expect when my galaxy 4 watch updated to Wear OS 6 that I would find out that some of my watch faces were broken. First loss: displaying the phone battery in any form is not an option. I can’t think of any fix.
Some items requiring counterclockwise rotation had a minus sign in front of them. They malfunctioned until I surrounded the entire expression in parentheses.
My moon disks depended on #DNOW# for rotation. Does not work. When I devised my formula #MOONAGE# didn’t even exist as a tag. I think replacing the formula with (-90+(#MOONAGE#*180/29.53058770576)) will work. Who knows what else I’ll discover is broken. I have so many designs. I can’t begin to think about fixing them.

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I would test #DNOW# seperatly . I can not belive they scrapped that . Obviosly the syntax rules have changed again . Sad loss phone power . It has to be done in Future with thexAMOLED app from the Google Store but you can not use the number in your own layer and you need Pro to set the complication up in your face .

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I have a few watch faces where I switched from the new moon tags to use DNOW. I thought it worked, but then again it was new moon, so the moon did not show - which is actually correct.

I’ll let you know…

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Coming back to these upgrades where we actually are talking about and the effect it has on us, face makers, and our customers. I reflect on my younger days where i was responsible on the financial department for software, system, data, process management, we as company were often confronted with the challenge of upgrading. Of course we looked at the benefits and risks involved and they could be, big. So what we always did, was not jump to it as the PR requests and pushes, and if we did, it was totally controlled. We had development, test, acceptance and live environment and we tested everything, so we could be sure to processes, data and our stake holders, it is safe. Reminds me of the Marathon man, where the big question was, is it safe. :grin:

We all have that, not here. We cannot roll back, downgrade on for example Samsung watches and probably others. Another rule shoved in our throat, again against our interests. And Facer is vulnerable, as a dependent platform, a follower by necessity. Those are not good conditions. We should have a place at the table and not only that. There is only power. Sad and bad.

Facebook was mentioned, i was for a couple of weeks a member there. I remember the welcome was warm. Then i got a Facebook message, my account was deleted, also there, not mentioning why. I could have appealed, but i have a problem with Zuckerberg and the other 1% people anyway. So…

If Facer mentioned to have 3.000.000 users in 2017/8, and if Facer made this forum available to all, well, i wonder are they all on Facebook, nah. Neither here, i believe. Many of them are only interested in synch i feel, likes. But that is not my coin, interaction i want.

So, we have not much to say only follow, and few are participating, communicating. No good signs, but it is just me telling that. And i remain a fan of this forum, dedicated in the end to face makers and that is a good thing.

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Totally agree.

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You might be right.
I have 2 formulas, one with DNOW, one without. The DNOW version works correctly in Facer Creator, but on my WOS6 watch it seems to run backwards!

I picked the following moon rotation from G7 a while ago, not sure it was covered here in the forum somewhere… but works for me:

((((((((((((((365*(#Dy#-1))+(((#Dy#-1)/4)-(((#Dy#-1)/4)%1)))-(((#Dy#-1)/100)-(((#Dy#-1)/100)%1)))+(((#Dy#-1)/400)-(((#Dy#-1)/400)%1)))+#DD#)+1)-735486)*24)*60)*60)+((((#DH#*3600)+(#Dm#*60))+#Ds#)-5880))-(3600*7))/5102886)*360)

This is the G7 watch face:

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I use one similar to this but since the moon wheel discs are generally symmetrical with two moons that complete a cycle in 180 degrees not 360, the multiplier at the end is 180 instead of 360. I’ve used it for years and it’s remarkably accurate (although requires a slight calibration adjustment offset too - not sure why). BUT just yesterday I had a WearOS 6 user show me a screen shot where it was wrong on his watch. I don’t see anything in the expression that would be not supported by WFF but who knows. I need to figure out if other WearOS users see the same issue or if that guy just needed to reboot his watch or something.

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update… reboot didn’t change anything. …Stupid WFF :face_with_symbols_over_mouth:

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I feel your pain!

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You can cross Joanie off the list. Joanie found updates and is now a happy camper.