tile & firmware improvements

[devbent]

I completely understand what you are saying. I think that giving developers a memory limit to stay under and reserving X heap for custom dialogs would be a viable solution. I had a heck of a time trying to figure out custom layouts and why they would work sometimes and not other times (when they dont work, they just decide to not appear at all). I couldnt find any help online on how to implement them correctly but ultimately figured it out. Is the memory limits also the reason why my text strings get cut-off after a certain length? Do you know if there are any other 3rd party band apps in the store that use custom layouts other than mine (Chancy Band)?

Sorry about that, I'm responsible for the current mess.

We're trying to fix it, but it is hard. My current aim is to reclaim some heap space so that third party dev's have more room to work with and that the limits are hit less often.

Strings are hard. Back in the old days (v1 third party tiles) they were cut off in a very predictable manner. Each page is allocated one "long" string of 160 characters (including the null terminator) and 2 short strings of 20 characters. (We very much reused the data structure we had for emails: sender, subject, body)

We are a bit more flexible now, but from a third party developer's perspective the rules are rather nebulous. Part of that is because we're constantly trying to increase the flexibility of how this works, mostly it is because we haven't done a good job communicating.

Some explanations;

Because of how little memory we have, we cannot afford to fragment a heap, which drives a lot of our design decisions. Allowing dynamic changes to pages means that we cannot do the easy thing of having all strings checked when the tile layout is first created on the phone.

We started off as UTF-16 internally, we're slowly moving to being UTF-8 pure. We plan on giving developers back some of the memory we reclaim from the switch over, at that point we'll probably just say "You have this many bytes to work with per page, allocate strings as you so desire", and we'll hopefully start returning descriptive error codes when something goes wrong. I don't really have an ETA for this. (On top of my not allowed to give out ETAs anyway!)

 

[devbent]

Am I allowed to chime in?

Ok, here is what I'd do:
- Utilize swipe right more. (Right now it just show us battery and bluetooth)
What to change?
Give us the options to have screens that we want when we swipe RIGHT.
(WHY do we have to swipe LEFT and tap on the weather tile to see current weather? Why not give us the option to swipe RIGHT and see weather forecast right away if we want?)
Or music controls... swipe right: music controls. Just imagine: put the headphones, swipe right, hit play.
(Garmin VivoSmart HR does this and I think it's brilliant)

This was actually one of the proposals for music controls. It didn't solve the problem of how to access music controls within an activity, though we could just add it as a right swipe there as well. Ultimately we went with our current scheme for music controls because you can do it without looking at the device, double tap power to bring it up, tap the action button to pause.

- Why can't we customize time screen more? If we want weather there: why not?
- Want to see battery level there? Why not?
- 2nd time zone on time screen? Sure.
- Want last heart rate reading there? Absolutely.
- Last UV reading? Sure.
- Missed notifications? Yea. After all why would we NOT have a option to see number of missed notifications when we check the time?
Limit this to one or 2 pieces of info. Give us options so we can go nuts personalizing it.
If this creates battery hit that's fine: let us decide if we want to go that route or not.

All of these come up for prioritization during our planning meetings.

Piping all the data through is actually kind of hard. For everything on device it is pretty easy, but for weather, stocks, and any third party tiles, we'd have to expand out third party tiles by a fair amount.

For missed notifications, we'd need icon support for all our notification tiles, both ours and third party tiles. (Both Email and Facebook Messenger are built using our third party SDK, which forces us to do the right thing when adding features!)

The missed notification thing is a huge personal pet peeve of mine. I'd love to have an SMS and Messenger count. It also makes do not disturb mode much more powerful.

Swipe right "screens" would be open to customization just like tiles are currently

That is an interesting idea, it'd take a lot of work on our part and on the part of third party developers, our development model isn't rich enough to support that idea right now, but it's an interesting idea, thanks!

- Add customization and "one tap" function to time screen. Just imagine: simply tap once on time screen (once it's on)
and start music (if you want).
Or tap to see the weather (if you want).
Or pick the app you want to start with one tap on the time screen.

We actually turn off the touch controller when Watch mode is on, power savings and all that fun stuff. That aside, we also want to avoid inadvertent taps, if you bump into someone's arm it'd be even more awkward if your cell phone started playing music! (I'd love that bug report though)

We should be using the action button to cycle info on the Watch Mode screen (commonly asked for). This actually goes hand in hand with putting more information along with the time.

Rotate Watch Mode, do not disturb turned on, a user select metric, and an icon + count of unread messages is a very powerful scenario that completely transforms how someone can use their Microsoft Band.

Hope this helps.

Feedback is always appreciated! It helps us plan what we're going to do next. Each time I get a request in, I increment the counter on if we should do it. This is why the Uservoice page is so useful.

 

[DeNachtwacht]

From a band perspective, Run does not have split markers. I just checked the code to make sure, during runs our manager for split notifications is hard coded to be at either 1 kilometer or 1 mile.

Is this something you are seeing in the App when viewing your runs?

With the Running tile, I'm not for sure whether I saw it everytime, that's why I thought it was set to the same 5 kilometer split mark as I use with the Cycling tile. What I do know, is that if the screen is on and you're working on it, the kilometers are being shown. Because that happened at kilometer 7 for me, right when I was curious if I had hit the 7 kilometers, i turned on the screen and about 2 seconds later I got the notification. I just don't know if it's being shown every kilometer if the screen is turned off (the way I use it while running).

It would still be great though if it's possible to set custom splits because for course tracking on the running circuit, this is great. The international distances distances (and thus very important) are: 100, 200, 400, 600, 800, 1000, 1200, 1600, 2000 meters. As a setting 100, 200, 400 and 1000 are very important split marks that you'd want as a circuit runner (you don't need 600 because that's 3x200, same goes for 800 being 2x400, 1200 and 1600 the same).

And an upgrade of the running tile to do programs with it just like with the workout tile would defenately make this band WAY more competitive towareds Garmin, TomTom and other sport GPS watches. You want to be able to create custom running programs (and ofcourse always the possibility to pause your workout).

 

[snakies]

This is so neat being able to communicate with a developer directly on the band team.
Can I ask if it will ever be allowed for outside developers to create activities on the Band?
I have a great idea for a Band app and would love to implement it, but it would require an activity screen.
I'm a competitive pistol shooter and the way these competitions are timed is with a special timer (shot timer) than can detect the sound of gun fire. I think Band can replace this device (at least for practicing) and do it better perhaps. Here is how I can see it working.
Open Shot timer tile on Band.
Press Activity button > a random time between 2 and 5 seconds passes
The Band vibrates (this is the signal to draw pistol and begin firing)
A timer begins on the activity screen.
Detect each shot fired - I'm positive there is enough acceleration to detect the recoil of the shot from the wrist (this will probably even be quicker than the time it takes the sound of the shot to reach a real shot timer)
Allow the user to review all the shots and their times.
Pressing the Activity button will start a new timer.

Please let me create this!!!

Bonus video: me shooting a competition just this week (Band can be seen on my wrist)
https://youtu.be/NgwWn_lSSkg

 

[devbent]

This is so neat being able to communicate with a developer directly on the band team.
Can I ask if it will ever be allowed for outside developers to create activities on the Band?
I have a great idea for a Band app and would love to implement it, but it would require an activity screen.
I'm a competitive pistol shooter and the way these competitions are timed is with a special timer (shot timer) than can detect the sound of gun fire. I think Band can replace this device (at least for practicing) and do it better perhaps. Here is how I can see it working.
Open Shot timer tile on Band.
Press Activity button > a random time between 2 and 5 seconds passes
The Band vibrates (this is the signal to draw pistol and begin firing)
A timer begins on the activity screen.
Detect each shot fired - I'm positive there is enough acceleration to detect the recoil of the shot from the wrist (this will probably even be quicker than the time it takes the sound of the shot to reach a real shot timer)
Allow the user to review all the shots and their times.
Pressing the Activity button will start a new timer.

Please let me create this!!!

Hi snakies!

This is already possible, but not completely on the band. You can stream accelerometer data to the phone, do processing on it, and then send the results back to the band.

Likewise with the button press, button press events are sent to the phone, where your main app logic would exist. The timer part would be sort of in-eloquent, every second you'd have to send an update to a string on the page.

(I cannot remember right now if we've fixed up the action button in the SDK, if not, err, we're well aware, if we have, then ignore this parenthetical!)

 

[snakies]

Hi snakies!

This is already possible, but not completely on the band. You can stream accelerometer data to the phone, do processing on it, and then send the results back to the band.

Likewise with the button press, button press events are sent to the phone, where your main app logic would exist. The timer part would be sort of in-eloquent, every second you'd have to send an update to a string on the page.

(I cannot remember right now if we've fixed up the action button in the SDK, if not, err, we're well aware, if we have, then ignore this parenthetical!)

Last time I looked I didn't have access to the Action button callbacks. I would use it in my current app for sure if I could!!
Its true my idea could probably work now, but it would be way better as an Activity. Then I dont even have to have my phone with me. Plus I would want to use the swipe left and right actions for navigation. So Im guessing there is no immediate plans to allow us to create Activities.

 

[mohsol]

I receive messages in Arabic that my Band 2 cannot read. It only displays squares. Shall we expect an update where it will be able to display Arabic characters or others than English properly?

 

[DeNachtwacht]

Hi snakies!

Question(s); any ideas about when we could expect the next firmware update/ms health update? And what about a sneak preview of the added functionality here... thanks in advance

 

[DroidUser42]

Question(s); any ideas about when we could expect the next firmware update/ms health update? And what about a sneak preview of the added functionality here... thanks in advance

And is expecting V3 in Oct/Nov a reasonable guess?

 

[jlzimmerman]

I like to add that it would be convenient if the tiles can be accessed by sliding up or down as well as side-to-side. Currently, one has to swipe multiple times to get to the end of tile set. If we had say 3x3 (3 tiles across/screen + up (3 more tiles) + down (3 more tiles)) for 9 tiles, accessing any tile of interest would be much faster. This capability would add more tile to the Band too, so if you had 9 tiles per set, one could have 18 or 27 (though I can't imagine why anyone would need that many tiles). This would be something that you arrange on MS Health app on the phone and sync.

I think this would be ok as long as the current menu is the default. The average user doesn't want to be barraged by a complex menu on a fitness tracker. Putting too much on there is only going to intimidate folks and be a noted as "confusing" on tech site reviews.

 

[Victor Engel]

Please please please Mr. Microsoft Santa - for the next firmware upgrade I whish an option for portrait/vertical watch mode. Like the Vivosmart HR (see picture)