InfiniTime 1.3 "Purple Fig" : LittleFS + Style watchface
One month after Blue-purple Elderberry / 1.2.0, "Purple Fig" 1.3.0 is out and brings both visible and (most importantly in my opinion) super nice, non visible improvements. Let's have a look!
THE groundbreaking (and invisible) new feature
Right, so I can already hear you: "how can a new feature be at the same time
groundbreaking and invisible?".
Well, sometimes, "under the hood" features bring a lot more than visible ones,
e.g. what they bring can then be used to improve existing features/bring new
features.
And that's the case with the introduction of LittleFS: this will allow using PineTime's external memory (4 MB), rather than the internal flash (512 KB) like today.
As noted in my article about PineTime 1.2.0, section "Memory usage optimisations": it becomes challenging to include new features because of a lack of internal flash.
Therefore, being able to offload some of the most consuming resources (images, ...) into the external memory will definitely help.
In addition, we'll also be able to save the numbers of steps (which today don't survive a reboot) and various other settings, into the external memory.
New features
New watchface: PineTimeStyle
Having owned a Pebble Time smartwach, that was the watchface I was using: clean, displays all the basic information you need, and big, readable digits for the time. So I'm glad we're having this watchface as third option for our PineTimes!
This super nice work has been done by Kieran, and he is already working on a color picker which hopefully will make its way to 1.4!
Battery level as BLE notification
InfiniTime now sends the battery level as a BLE notification, allowing to get the information from GadgetBridge (on Android). Since GadgetBridge stores this information, it will also display a nice graph of the battery consumption.
Hopefully this will become available in Amazfish, for SailfishOS!
Existing apps improvements
Riku Isokoski contributed a lot of improvements,
in the existing apps (Stopwatch, Paddle game) as well for call notifications,
and smoother refresh of the display.
Finally, Riku also added a feature that forbids the user to closing the
"upgrade" window while an upgrade is ongoing - pretty useful! :)
Wrap-up
The title of the first paragraph of this post is a bit provocative - JF would not have released a new InfiniTime version if it was not worth it :-)
And indeed, apps improvements and this gorgeous new watchface are super nice, and I can't wait to see LittleFS in action in the upcoming InfiniTime versions!
Tags: PineTime