Project origins

Genesis

I built Trending Time as a teaching tool for watch face development and also as an entertainment utility - the stuff that pops up throughout the day cracks me up and is often extremely informative. This type of quick-hit snapshot of what's happening in the world is precisely the type of UX that wearables rock at delivering. The key lesson here is that watch faces don't always have to be about expressing time itself. In this case, the time is actually secondary, being a data-driven utility.

The trick is manipulating the WatchfaceService.Engine lifecycle, specifically calling View.invalidate() within the onPropertiesChanged handler to force a redraw of the screen. This is less draining on the battery overall that a time-based redraw heuristic. So the re-drawing of the screen with fresh data according to when data becomes available is more dependent on the visibility state of the watch rather than some hard-coded timer or tick or animation loop.