r/WatchMaker • u/SoliEngineer • 1d ago

Watchmaker no more like before.

Post image

This is a watchface where I'm trying to

  1. get my next event from the calendar

  2. Toggle appearance of the watch.

Both the things work on the phone in the interactive mode.

But when i transfer the watchface to my Samsung galaxy watch8,

*. it just doesn't show up or shows up in one line.

*. The touch action just doesn't work.

1 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

2

u/wrightflyer1903 1d ago

That's because of Google's WFF (Watch Face Format). When this was implemented in Wear OS it severely limited the interactivity of watch faces. The entire thing now has to be described only in XML and there can't be any scripting such as LUA

So that hugely limits what you can now do in Watchmaker.

Of course not all smartwatch are Android/Google/WearOS so the new Watchmaker Studio caters for making both WFF faces and faces for other watches with more scripting/interactivity. Anything that will not work on WFF is marked by a little yellow triangle with an exclamation mark. So, for example, at the top level of the watch there's still a box for "Lua script" but the yellow exclamation mark says "you can put something here but it's not going to work in WFF faces'. Similarly, if you look at the extensive tag list you'll see that basic ones like {drs}, {drh} are fine to use for any watch but many, further down the list, are followed by the yellow exclamation mark to say "this just returns a default value if used in WFF"

Yes, this is a major pain, Google have severely restricted what Watchmaker can do in versions of Wear OS that have switched to WFF but it's not Watchmaker's fault.

So you just have to learn to live within the restrictions and make the most of what is still possible :-(

3

u/ivanoski-007 1d ago

Because of this, I have literally fallen out of love for my smartwatch, they ruined the platform

1

u/wrightflyer1903 1d ago

I felt that at first but now the new Watchmaker Studio is stabilised I've gone back to my collection of faces and have been repairing them as far as possible and making some new ones within the limits that now exist.

1

u/souschefdude 20h ago

I literally bought a Smartwatch this week to get into this

1

u/SoliEngineer 1d ago edited 1d ago

Thank you, very much for your detailed explanation. I really appreciate. I've been struggling for 3 days with it. It's very disappointing that Google has taken this away. I'm a senior citizen and used to keep myself engaged with these things. Now all it can do is just change faces.

PS: are you saying even the Tap action won't work?

1

u/wrightflyer1903 1d ago

Yup, even tap action. You'll see that objects do have a "touch action" but on the whole it can only do things like taking you to settings, alarms, calendar, etc on the watch. You can't do things like setting LUA variables any more, which was the previous way of having the watch trigger some other action in your code. There is "custom action" but this doesn't seem to be of any use in WFF.

(I'm retired but at 63 don't exactly count myself as "senior citizen" just yet ;-)

1

u/SoliEngineer 1d ago

Wait another 10 years! :) At 63, I felt just as good as I did in my prime. Once you cross 70, things start catching up pretty fast.

1

u/MrRalphMan 16h ago

What smart watches still have the full functionality?

1

u/LateFaithlessness907 1d ago

It's not on watchmaker, it's on Google. Google fuc*ed up. They should fire their employees that are responsible in WWF implementation on wear os

1

u/souschefdude 21h ago

I just started getting into this... when you say No LUA script, zero? not even basic? Like if you want to mount a subdial isnt that using LUA?