InfiniTime 1.7 "Jackfruit" - Motion service, buttonHandler and new torchlight
How about you can get the number of steps you walked synch'ed to your companion app? That's what this version brings, along with other nice improvements. Let's have a look!
Motion Service
Something I've been eagerly waiting for: InfiniTime now exposes a service
allowing companion apps to get the number of steps.
That way, they can display this number, and use this to build nice charts :)
Adam Piggz recently shared his ongoing work on Amazfish for Sailfish OS in
a tweet:
Set Date and Time from the watch
Up to now, when booting your PineTime, the date and time would be set to 00:00
and April 1970, and you had to sync with a companion app so that it pushes the
correct date and time to the watch.
Starting with 1.7, it is now possible to manually set date and time from the Settings menu:
Improved torchlight app
The torchlight app has been around for a while, and while it did the job, it was pretty basic: just ON/OFF with no possibility to define the brightness level.
The improved torchlight app brings 3 levels of brightness, and you can increase/decrease brightness by swiping to the right/left, and enable/disable the torchlight by taping the screen.
Misc
There's a few more nice features:
Wake-up on charge
Thanks to this PR, when you place your PineTime on the charging craddle, it will wake up the screen - small one but definitely useful to check that the watch is correctly charging.
Wake-up time
Before Jackfruit, pressing the button of your PineTime to wake up the screen would incur a small yet perceptible delay - not a huge deal, but you expect a watch to wake up right away when pressing a button.
So Martin Hub worked on it as part of this PR and found that a lot of delays were part of the previous code, which is why waking up the watch took so long. Removing those delays didn't break anything as they were just "checks".
Better battery level reporting
Another "nice to have" but definitely useful improvement: battery level used to
be a bit weird, and the percent shown could go up or down without any reason.
This is a PR from Riku Isokoski.
Double-tap and Long-press on the button
Another PR from Riku - how about we take advantage of this button, which so far
only supported single tap to wake up or switch off the screen?
This feature brings:
- Long-press: will display the
Aboutscreen - Double-tap: will display the notifications screen, no matter where you are in the interface - pretty handy if you want to avoid going back to the watchface to see notifications!
Those behaviors are not configurable today, but I bet we'll soon see something appearing in the settings menu, allowing for such a configuration :-)
Templates for reporting bugs and features requests in GitHub
As I highlighted in my article about how non-developers can contribute to Open
Source,
it is important to report bugs or request new features, so that the project can
improve.
InfiniTime is no different, and making the end user experience pleasant is
critical - so the team has improved the templates for reporting bugs and asking
for features.
You can do it from here, and then you'll have to choose between:
Awesome Community
While testing the latest version of InfiniTime (something now super easy as the
project uses GitHub's actions to build a new firmware everytime there's a new
PR), I found out that the Alarm app would crash almost every time I was using it
: either when setting it up, or when it was vibrating, trying to stop it /
return to the main menu would just reboot the PineTime.
A quick search on the GitHub issues showed that I wasn't the only one as there
was an issue opened about that very same
topic.
Riku Isokoski fixed the issue super quickly, and
tests showed that indeed the Alarm app was not crashing anymore thanks to this
PR
To me, this once again shows how awesome an open source community can be, with
people reporting problems, developers looking at them and fixing them, and
people testing/validating that the problem is indeed solved.
This is especially true with InfiniTime, the project is super active, I see it
daily on the Telegram channel! (You can also join via other means, more details
here on the Wiki).
And this, despite the fact that 1.7 includes not less than... 45 PR!!! If you look at the 1.7 Milestone on GitHub, you can see all the good work that the community has produced :)
Wrap Up
InfiniTime "Jackfruit" 1.7 is yet another nice release: after 1.6 which fixed the BLE bug, this one brings more "smartwatch features" (notably the Motion service), and the improvements on the wake-up time and button pressure handling are also welcome.
Now just go download it from here and enjoy!
Tags: PineTime