Fellow designers, please let me know your experiences.
I recently recognized that I’d adapted - rather than designed for - owners of watches with square faces. It’s something I tried to remedy recently - but with rather poor up-take.
I’m not talking about the walled garden of Apple, just android watch owners.
Am I right in thinking that they are few in number? Or, is that they’ve been so poorly served in the past, that they don’t use apps like Facer.io, expecting there’ll be nothing designed for their watch?
Open discussion… interested in hearing thoughts and ideas.
Cheers
Rich
AKA Richard2 / MACH-1
What you can do is to design a face using conditionals with the #ZISROUND# tag for round or square and have the face automatically switch for the user. I’ve done one analog like that which would switch between a square and round face, but now I can’t find it. I know it’s there but with over a thousand faces it’s hard to remember which one exactly. All I done was use $#ZISROUND#==false?100:0$ to show the square face. You could use the same style and move things to different places if it’s round or square in the X or Y box $#ZISROUND#==false?160:999$ or whatever placement you would like.
Honestly for me it would be easier to just design two separate faces one round and one square instead of moving objects around with tags. You might try and see how the sync counts compare between round and square versions and verify for yourself what the square vs round ratio is.
I may be wrong but my assumption is the square WearOS watch piece of the pie is extremely small. In fact, without pausing to Google I am not aware of any square WearOS or Tizen watches except the couple that are represented in the library of preview watch bodies here on Facer, and I think those few are all pretty old and not available new. Galaxy line, Fossil lines, Tic Watch, etc… Those are the watches out there, not a square face among them.
I know next to nothing about Apple watch, does Facer run on them? Because obviously that’s a big share of the smart watch market. So if Apple users are loading Facer them that’s enough to consider square, but if not… I don’t see the point to investing much effort in it.
Facer runs on Apple Watch, but the limitations imposed by Apple restricts the available functionality severely. Never owned an Apple watch myself, but AFAIK you can’t do much more than upload a static image to Apple Watch.
Hey mountain_lion, Apple is a ‘closed garden’… such a shame, Apple have the biggest single wearable market share, but the ecosystem is closed to us. That’s my understanding of it.
I read an article recently that suggests Wear OS, Tizen and Apple Watch have an equal share of the Facer pie. That’s interesting to me, but I’m not sure that anyone other than apple sees a future in square watches.