Building Watch Faces for Android Wear

This submission has been added to the schedule

Building Watch Faces for Android Wear

Submitted Aug 7, 2016

Section: Workshop Technical level: Intermediate

With the sales of smartwatches overtaking luxury ones for the first time in Q4 2015, (refer this), time is not far when they will be our virtual assistants, will provide us information even before asked for, and will help us in being healthy too.

Unlike traditional watches, Android wear lets you modify the watch dials on the fly, allowing you to Wear what you Want. In this workshop, we will learn how to build beautiful watch faces using the digital dynamic canvas of the Android Wear watches to tell time with colors and relevant contextual information.

Outline

In this 3 hour workshop, we will be building a very simple watch face which displays the current time and weather details.

The workshop shall comprise of four parts -

System Setup for Android Wear Development - Setting up the wearable emulator, connecting it with the phone emulator and running of a sample app. Installation of the corresponding software packages will be a pre-requisite.
Introduction to Android Wear - This section will include a quick introduction to the Android Wear platform, its history, display modes, screen technoliogies and other relevant information.
Design - In this section, we will bring forth the concept of Glanceability followed by the idea of Less is More. Few of the successful and not so successful watch faces will be compared and the Sunshine Watch Face will be shown (We will be developing an elementary version of the Sunshine Watch Face)
Development - In this section, we will build a timer for the Watch Face, will leverage the Wearable API to sync data from the Weather App on the phone to the wearable device, will update the wearable UI according to the display mode and will learn how to improve wearable battery life.

Mind Map: https://goo.gl/jcUvvY

Requirements

Android SDK Tools with version 23.0.0 or higher
SDK with Android 4.4W.2 (API 20) or higher
Android Wear System Image
Android Phone
Android Debug Bridge on System Path
Wear companion app installed on phone

Speaker bio

Chirag is an Android Developer at GO-JEK India primarily working on scaling the GO-JEK Android App. He is also an Android Nanodegree Scholar and passionate about exploring what Android offers above and beyond.
Previously, he has been a speaker at the following places:

Mobile Developer Summit 2016, Bangalore, on Optimizing Gradle on Performance
Rubyconfindia 2016, Kochi, on Function Testing of Mobile Apps using Appium and Ruby.
PyDelhi 2016, New Delhi, on Function Testing of Mobile Apps using Appium and Python.

Links

GitHub: https://github.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chiragaggarwal
You will build a watch face like this: https://github.com/chi6rag/SunshineWear

Slides

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1f46MWtrBrfQeG4R1nMsMnBCLC3i2TPyp7oE9WXNaf30/edit?usp=sharing

droidconIN 2016