This week's watchface - Metallic-4

Whilst I'm not a big fan of the name, I'm really enjoying this watchface at the moment, and have been for a couple of weeks now.  It's called the Metallic 4 (4 Colors- And 4 Dials) by bmg1001, and it looks like this...

As you can see from the preview, this is primarily an analogue watch, but with many additional features, including the digital time and the date displayed neatly at the top.  I've never seen a design quite like this, but I really like the symmetry of it.

The watchface has a number of different tap actions as well.  If you tap the digital date then it switches between 12 hour and 24 hour clocks - personally I prefer the 12 hour clock.

The top dial displays the weather, based on your WatchMaker settings (°C or °F, for example) and tapping the dial will refresh manually.

The right dial displays your watch's battery level as a percentage.  If you tap this dial it will toggle to the phone's battery level (which shows a "P" in the dial) and then tap again to get back to the watch's battery level.

The bottom dial displays the current day of the week.  If you tap this dial, it will toggle through the different colour options.  There's black, silver, red and blue - personally I prefer the silver one at the moment, also I've also been using black.

The left dial displays your current step count, as a percentage of your daily target.  If you tap this dial it will take you into the step count app, which for me is Google Fit, with a chart of recent days.

Overall I think this is a very stylish design, with plenty of functionality, but without overcrowding the screen with a complicated array of numbers.  I can see myself settling on this one for a while.

WatchMaker - conditionality

One really simple but incredibly powerful feature in WatchMaker is the conditionality.  The conditions are in the format...

(CONDITION and (IF TRUE) or (IF FALSE))

For a developer or mathematician (or anyone who knows boolean logic) this is possibly not the most intuitive syntax, but it's straightforward to understand, and that's the point really.  It also works without the brackets, so you'll have to ignore the BODMAS rules.

I have particularly found these conditions useful when applied to the "Opacity" attribute, but you can actually apply them to anything.  I like creating battery indicators, like this...

1. Click the plus icon to get a new layer
2. Select the "Battery" type
3. Choose "Watch Battery" at the bottom (or "Phone Battery")
4. Choose your favourite battery set (4 designs to choose from)
5. Position it where you want it, change the colour if required, etc

Now here comes the clever bit (even if I do say so myself).  In the "Opacity" attribute set the value to...

{bl}<25 and 100 or 0

So the watch battery level tag is {bl} and the condition is saying that when the battery level drops below 25 then the opacity should be 100 (100% visible), but otherwise the opacity should be 0 (0% visible).  This means that the battery indicator won't be there all the time, only when the battery level is low.  

You can create the same using the {pbl} tag for the phone battery level as well.  You can even put them in the same place, with whichever you feel is more important on top.  These means that they won't take up much space, in fact they'll hopefully never be visible!

I've made use of these battery indicators on my latest watch face, which I only uploaded yesterday...

Neolog - 47 downloads

This is obviously only one use of conditionality, but I'm sure I'll come up with plenty of other inventive uses moving forwards!

WatchMaker - highly configurable

There's loads of great default functionality in WatchMaker, stuff that can be easily added in to your watch.  Basically it works in layers, so you add a background image, and then say the hour/minute markers round the edge, then the numbers, then the hands, etc., building it up as you go.  You can reorder the layers, duplicate them, delete them, etc.  It's really easy to do, and very intuitive.

When you click the big plus icon to add a new layer, you get the following types...

• Text
• Curved text
• Watch background
• Shape
• Numbers
• Hour+minute markers
• Freeform markers
• Watch hands
• Image
• Animated GIF
• Date
• Time
• Weather
• Moon phase
• Battery
• Compass
• Wifi signal
• Calendar
• Countdown
• Stopwatch
• Expression

They are all very customisable, with the ability to reference many different tags.  For example, just for time you've got so many options (using 18:49 as the example time)...

• {dh} - Hour in the day (1-12) - 6
• {dh11} - Hour in the day (0-11) - 6
• {dh24} - Hour in the day (1-24) - 18
• {dh23} - Hour in the day (0-23) - 18
• {dht} - Hour in day text (1-12) - six
• {dh24t} - Hour in day text (1-24) - eighteen
• {dhz} - Hour in day (1-12) (with leading zero) - 06
• {dh11z} - Hour in day (0-11) (with leading zero) - 06
• {dh24z} - Hour in day (1-24) (with leading zero) - 18
• {dh23z} - Hour in day (0-23) (with leading zero) - 18
• and 29 other tags!  Just for time!!

As you can see, there are just so many options, you can choose whatever you want.  

And if you can't find what you're after, check out the Feature Requests - this allows you to search for features that others have requested, and vote on the ones you like, as well as adding your own, for others to vote on.  You can vote on as many as you want, so please feel free to vote on all the stuff that I want :)

Next I want to talk about the conditionality that is simple and yet so powerful.