Would you like to add a blinking element to your watch design? You can,

Round Custom Faces
1

Would you like to add a blinking element to your watch design? You can, you know, and it’s not all that hard. You just have to mess with time.

You ever notice that the colon in all the digital watches is blinking? Well, it’s just an image of two dots. It could be an image of anything. The hours and minutes on either side could be anything as well, like transparent. So what if you have a blink.xml file that looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> blank_num_0.png blank_num_1.png blank_num_2.png blank_num_3.png blank_num_4.png blank_num_5.png blank_num_6.png blank_num_7.png blank_num_8.png blank_num_9.png blank_num_colon_image.png

Where all the images 0 - 9 are transparent and the last one, the colon_image, is the element you want to blink? You toss a drawable into your clock_skin.xml at the appropriate level with X and Y positioning, as desired that looks like this:

<drawable>
	<name>blink.xml</name>
	<arraytype>6</arraytype>
</drawable>

Bingo! Or should I say BLING

Attached is some sample code along with the invisible number files and a big blue dot for the blinking image. Load it up, test it out, and then show us something cool.

You can probably get away with one blinky element on an analog watch, cause the silly thing blinks at the colon rate and wold be in sync with a digital watch’s colon blink – unless that’s the effect your are going for. Surprise us!

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I’ve tried this a couple weeks ago it works

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Excellent idea, I’ve been looking for a way to tick an escapement.
I have one image of the escapement rotated slightly and using your technique it appears to rock every second. See this link for it in action https://plus.google.com/u/0/collection/Qzx3SB

Incidentally you don’t actually need blank images, just set a blank XML tag with
or simply

e.g. my XML is

escapement.xml
6

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> escapement.png
4

Wow, how simple. No messing with transparent files or anything. Much cleaner Andrew. Thanks.

5

Interesting…almost like emulating an animated GIF file. Hmmmmm :slight_smile:

6

Hey Mr Ticks, Sorry but don’t know to contact you directly, but are you still looking for a wireless file transfer apk that works on the D5 smart watch? If so, I came across this little gem called WiFi File Transfer from the play store. The free version has a limitation of 5mb maximum file transfer size but the full version has no restrictions. Is very easy to use once installed on watch & phone. Just click on the file transfer button on the right hand side to select files to send to the watch (from your phone /tablet) and you can also send whole folders (something you were looking for I believe). Give it a try and see what you think. Good luck!

7

Not sure if you saw my post answering Alessandro Domingos question about simulating quartz movement on the 2nd hand (Still getting used to this Google+, I can’t seem to reference posts here)
But I extended your “colon blink” idea to the digital seconds. Each digit is an image, so instead of a digit I set it to a picture of a 2nd hand at a certain rotation, it gives a nice clean snap to each second. Anyway check it out here https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BysDzZ6Uvo9nQ3BDdGJ2TlpSX0k

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Andrew!!! Brilliant!!! You did it!!! I have sooooo missed the ticking second hand, Your skin has earned first position in my ClockSkin folder. That’s better than being “1” in my speed dial touch tone phone (remember those days?). Anyway, truly excellent job. Very nice overall design as well. [thumbs up emoji goes here]

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Thanks guys, there’s one limitation though, because of the mask the 2nd hand has to be the bottom moving layer (i.e. the minute and hour hands are on top) and the base must be a solid or radial pattern, but we can design around this.