Circlix Clock

Today I published my first Android (Wear) App! . The idea behind this clock is that it uses concentric circles to show time, and doesn't use analog clock hands or numeric time notation. This is something I have on a bigger LCD screen at home for a while now, and now that there is Android Wear for a while, I wanted to implement this for Android.

Some example visualizations

There is more theory behind the visualization, more on that on the website: http://circlix.click.

Android Watch Face

WebGL from the Website

You need to have WebGL support in your browser in order to see the following live-clock.

Some comments on Android Wear development

Android Wear is relatively new, and I never read any book on the Android Framework. Luckily I had some Java experience. Overall I am impressed by the design of the Framework, although it also confused the hell out of me on various occasions @:|@.

Some stuff I needed to realize or discover during development:

• (Very basic:) an Activity only runs when it's the current activity.
• If you need stuff running for longer than an Activity, you need Services.
• In Java you don't have RAII like in C++/PHP. If you have handlers for threads etc. you should stop them in some onDestroy() method.
• Packaging, creating the APK for use in f.i. the Play Store was counter intuitive, at least for me. Follow the example project provided by Google closely in your project w/respect to Gradle files. I had a perfectly good working APK that came out of Android Studio, it worked whenever I sent it to others, but it was not accepted by the Play store.
• There is already OpenGL support for Watch Faces. You need to extend Gles2WatchFaceService.