It’s a minimal geometric watchface using squares to display the minutes. This means I had to create a square for every minute of the hour times two because of active and dim states. In total it adds up to 130+ elements.
While it renders as it should both in the creator and in the companion app preview, on the watch itself it sometimes produces unwanted behaviour: When switching between active and dim states, the squares are sometimes not drawn at all or appear with a delay of some seconds. I haven’t had time to confirm this but I think this error is more likely to happen the more elements are to be displayed, i.e. the higher the minute count.
Is this just some limitation on Facer’s side? Do I overstrain the draw routine by such a high element count? If so, are there any alternatives to accomplish my design?
I think I’ll try loading one single PNG file for each of the two states which moves 320px to the left every second. Maybe this is not as hungry on resources as drawing the blocks individually.
Okay, so I tried the method with one image that holds all the frames. It turns out that images wider than 320px are getting scaled down to fit the screen. Upon resizing them to their original size the content of the image is blurred which makes this approach unacceptable.
This left me with no other choice but to remove all the active state elements to reduce the element count. To make the active screen more appealing, the hour digits are now coloured.
This whole workaround is rather unfortunate because I really liked the original look. I made a backup of my first design so you if you’re interested you can inspect it here: SQRS backup.