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InfiniTime 1.4 "Pink Grapefruit": Touch, UI and battery level improvements

September 03, 2021 — Nico Cartron

This release includes many improvements, making InfiniTime a lot smoother to use.


Touch driver improvements

There's been a lot of work by Riku Isokoski on improving the responsiveness of the touch interface.
This is of course a major improvement and super critical for a smartwach with a touch screen :)

Overall, the system feels a lot smoother and is really nice to use:

  • swiping from the watchface to e.g. the notifications screen,
  • using the touch screen when playing the game,
  • or when using the stopwatch and countdown applications: the buttons are more responsive and work at first attempt!
  • this is also clearly visible when using the "draw" application: drawings are much nicer/sharper.

Other features

UI update (settings, quick settings, app list)

Another nice work from Riku Isokoski.
The most visible change is the "quick settings" screen (right swip from the watchface):

But other screens (settings, app list) have been changed to e.g. have slightly larger icons, to make the UI more consistent.

Dim screen before sleep

A nice touch (still by Riku Isokoski): rather than having the screen going black straight away after the defined timeout, it will dim 1 second before, then will go black.

Call notifications improved

PR from Florian Raupinger.

Previously, the call notification would vibrate just once, making it hard to feel it, and causing a lot of missed calls.
This changes with 1.4, as InfiniTime will now cause periodic vibrations, until the call is accepted, declined or muted.

Color picker for PineTimeStyle watchface

This nice watchface, introduced in 1.3 by Kieran, can now have its colors customised:

  • Font color,
  • Right pane color,
  • Background color.

Battery level improvements

The battery icon and status screen are now a lot more accurate, as a significant amount of work has been spent on analysing the voltage and what it means for the battery life.

You will no longer have your PineTime "discharging" all of a sudden when hitting 30% :-)

Fix bootloop

This PR, still from Riku Isokoski, aims at fixing a bootloop that occured when the watch was reset while the i2c bus was used - the only way to fix that was to wait for the battery to drain, which could take a couple of days.

Fortunately, this is now fixed with 1.4 :-)

Improve metronome

One of the reasons I like InfiniTime is that it comes loaded with some nice utils: stopwatch, countdown, music control, and, since InfiniTime 1.2 "Blue-purple Elderberry", a Metronome app (see my article about 1.2 for more details).

This PR by Riku Isokoski improves its accuracy.

Conclusion

Many improvements in this release, but for sure the most significant one is the touch driver, which makes using InfiniTime a real pleasure: no feeling of slowness or hiccups with the UI, it's super responsive and for a device that you only use with your fingers, that's a great step forward!


Tags: PineTime


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