Hello Wear
We at Dexetra, are big supporters of wearable technology and have tried everything from the Nike Fuelband to Fitbits. But, the true potential of wearables surfaced when Google announced the Android Wear and we are pretty sure this would change the way we interacts with these devices. Wear is all about quick responses and notifications, which in essence, abates the need to open up our phones and besides, it’s cooler to check emails on the watch.
Ever since the wear Developer Preview SDK was published we have been exploring the platform to to see how we can include Wear into our Apps and thanks to a couple of our guys being at Google IO, we got our hands on a Samsung and an LG. We’d already started developing on emulators, and a physical device just stepped it up for both Designers and Developers. We could find a lot of issues which we couldn’t have spotted in the emulators, for instance, touch areas became more apparent and we could shape up the notification icons better.
The extensive and comprehensive documentations for the Wear helped us navigate the maze faster and we at Dexetra have always believed following guidelines is the easiest way to build stable, scalable and clean solutions. So, if you follows these, adding Wear support to your apps will be a piece of cake.
But Wear, however, was born just yesterday and needs a lot of nutrition to have widespread adoption. Occasionally, even the sample apps provided by the SDK fails to behave in the proposed manner. And, to developers, not having a round faced devices made it harder to test our apps.
Note: Round emulators are not completely dependable.
We started off our Wear venture with Knock. Knock replaces calls with a single intent/question, by showing a message in the incoming call screen with, quick response options. The incoming Knock screen on the phone has the text, photo, name and response options. It did not take long to translate the design onto a wear screen.
When someone Knocks you, you can either say YES, NO or send a location from the phone or Wear. You needn’t take your phone out to reply. Simple and quick, exactly what wear is meant for.
We recently pushed an updated to Dialapp, adding a host of quick response options, primarily, taking down notes while on a call. With the Wear update, the notes pop up on the watch when you are a call, making the second screen really useful!
Here are our 2 cents to Wear Developers:
Learning Curve:
Android devices and Wear work on the same APIs. Our android devs had an almost zero learning curve while working on the accompanying wear apps.
Building through Android Studio on the updated SDK was very easy.
WearableListenerService is very useful and works like a charm!
The Support library is very helpful. We used it for our Incoming message screen, Speech confirmation screen and Notes Screen. Technically, they we used in GridViewPager, BoxInsetLayout,ConfirmationActivity, DelayedConfirmationView, WatchViewStub, CardFragment. Highly Recommend this.
Some views in the Support Library did have bugs, like GridViewPager crashing when either row or column count is zero.
Dev Environment:
The emulator for rectangular screens is pretty accurate and correctly reflects touch areas and type and icon sizes.
Round Emulator, however, has not proved to be equally dependable. For e.g. round emulator does not have the 30px cut in the bottom seen in Moto 360. So it is not possible to accurately set touch areas to the required sizes, and developers cannot predict behaviour on real devices.
The round emulator also has a few other bugs : sometimes it does not box the children inside even when used with a BoxInsetLayout.
Some feedback we have: It will be great to have an emulator on the phone, as touch experience will be easier to understand, experience and perfect.
Some links on building for wearables and designing layouts.
Documentation:
The design documentation is extensive and complete. The UI toolkit was detailed enough for us to design and develop initial versions with relative ease, without the actual Wear devices
The documentation for support library should be better to make it more effective. For e.g. Listing all the attributes and methods available would be really helpful.