In this article Ashok Kumar S, the author of the article Android Wear Projects will get you started on writing android wear applications. You probably already know that by the title of the article that we will be building wear applications, But you can also expect a little bit of story on every project and comprehensive explanation on the components and structure of the application. We will be covering most of the wear 2.0 standards and development practices in all the projects we are building. Why building wear applications? The culture of wearing a utility that helps to do certain actions have always been part of a modern civilization. Wrist watches for human beings have become an augmented helping tool for checking time and date. Wearing a watch lets you check time with just a glance. Technology has taken this wearing watch experience to next level, The first modern wearable watch was a combination of calculator and watch introduced to the world in 1970. Over the decades of advancement in microprocessors and wireless technology lead to introduce a concept called “ubiquitous computing”. During this time most of the leading electronic industry, start-ups have started to work on their ideas which made wearable devices very popular. Going forward we will be building five projects enlisted below.
- Note taking application
- Fitness application
- Wear Maps application
- Chat messenger
- Watch face
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This article will also introduce you to setting up your wear application development environment and the best practices for wear application development and new user interface components and we will also be exploring firebase technologies for chatting and notifications in one of the projects. Publishing wear application to play store will follow completely the similar procedure to mobile application publishing with a little change. Moving forward the article will help you to set your mind so resolutely with determined expectation towards accomplishing wear applications which are introduced in the article.
If you are beginning to write the wear app for the first time or you have a fair bit of information on wear application development and struggling to how to get started, this article is going to be a lot of helpful resource for sure.
Note taking application
There are numerous ways to take notes. You could carry a notebook and pen in your pocket, or scribble thoughts on a piece of paper. Or, better yet, you could use your Android Wear to take notes, so one can always have a way to store thoughts even if there’s not a pen and note nearby. The Note Taking App provides convenient access to store and retrieve notes within Android Wear device. There are many Android smartphone notes taking app which is popular for their simplicity and elegant functionality. For the scope of a wear device, it is necessary to keep the design simple and glanceable.
As a software developer we need to understand how important it is to target the different device sizes and reaching out for various types devices, To solve this android wearable support library has component called BoxInsetLayout. And having an animated feedback through DelayedConfirmationView is implemented to give the user a feedback on task completion.
Thinking of a good wear application design, Google recommends using dark color to wear application for the best battery efficiency, Light color schemes used in typical material designed mobile applications are not energy efficient in wear devices. Light colors are less energy efficient in OLED display’s. Light colors need to light up the pixels with brighter intensity, White colors need to light up the RGB diodes in your pixels at 100%, the more white and light color in application the less battery efficient application will be.
Using custom font’s, In the world of digital design, making your application’s visuals easy on users eyes is important. The Lora font from google collections has well-balanced contemporary serif with roots in calligraphy. It is a text typeface with moderate contrast well suited for body text. A paragraph set in Lora will make a memorable appearance because of its brushed curves in contrast with driving serifs. The overall typographic voice of Lora perfectly conveys the mood of a modern-day story, or an art essay. Technically Lora is optimized for screen appearance.
We will also make the application to have list item animation so that users will love to use the application often.
Fitness application
We are living in the realm of technology! It is definitely not the highlight here, We are also living in the realm of intricate lifestyles that driving everyone’s health into some sort of illness. Our existence leads us back to roots of the ocean, we all know that we are beings who have been evolved from water. If we trace back we clearly understand our body composition is made of sixty percent water and rest are muscled water. When we talk about taking care of our health we miss simple things, Considering taking care and self-nurturing us, should start from drinking sufficient water. Adequate regular water consumption will ensure great metabolism and healthy functional organs. New millennium’s Advancement in technologies is an expression of how one can make use of technology for doing right things.
Android wear integrates numerous sensors which can be used to help android wear users to measure their heart rate and step counts and etc. Having said that how about writing an application that reminds us to drink water every thirty minutes and measures our heart rate, step counts and few health tips.
Material design will drive the mobile application development in vertical heights in this article we will be learning the wear navigation drawer and other material design components that makes the application stand out.
The application will track the step counts through step counter sensor, application also has the ability to check the heart pulse rate with a animated heart beat projection, Application reminds user on hydrate alarms which in tern make the app user to drink the water often.
In this article we will build a map application with a quick note taking ability on the layers of map. We humans travel to different cities, It could be domestic or international cities. How about having a track of places visited. We all use maps for different reasons but in most cases, we use maps to plan a particular activity like outdoor tours and cycling and other similar activities. Maps influence human’s intelligence to find the fastest route from the source location to destination location.
Fetching the address from latitude and longitude using Geocoder class is comprehensively explained. The map applications needs to have certain visual attractions and that is carried out in this project and the story is explained comprehensively.
Chatting application
We could state that the belief system of Social media has been advanced and wiped out many difficulties of communication. Just about a couple of decades back, the communication medium was letters and a couple of centuries back trained birds and if we still look back we will definitely get few more stories to comprehend the way people use to communicate back those days. Now we are in the generation of IoT, wearable smart devices and era of smartphones where the communication happens across the planet in the fraction of a second.
We will build a mobile and wear application that exhibits the power of google wear messaging API’s to assist us in building the chat application. with a wear companion application to administer and respond to the messages being received.
To help the process of chatting, the article introduces Firebase technologies for accomplishing the chatting application. We will build a wear and mobile app together and we will receive the message typed from wear device to mobile and update it to firebase. The article comprehensively explains the firebase real-time database and for notification purpose article introduces firebase functions as well.
The application will have the user login page and list users to chat and chatting screen, The project is conceptualised in such a way that the article reader will be able to leverage all these techniques in his mastering skills and he can use the same ability in production applications.
Data layer establishes the communication channel between two android nodes, And the article talks about the process in detail, in this project reader will be able to find whether the device has the google play services if not how to install or go forward to use the application.
A brief explanation about capability API and some of the best use cases in chatting application context. Notification have always been the important component in the chatting application to know who texted them. In this article the reader will be able to understand the firebase functions for sending push notifications. Firebase functions offers triggers for all the firebase technologies and we will explore realtime database triggers from firebase functions.
Reader will also learn how to work with input method framework and voice inpute in the wear device. After all the reader will be able to understand the essentials of writing a chat application with wear app companion.
Watch Face
A watch face, also known as the dial is part of the clock that displays the time through fixed
numbers with moving hands. This expression of checking time can be designed with
various artistic approaches and creativity. In this article reader will be able to start writing their own watch face.
The article comprehensively explains the CanvaswatchFaceService with all the callbacks for constructing a digital watchface. The article also talks about registering watch face to the manifest similar to the wallpaperservice class. Keeping in mind that the watch face is going to be used in different form factors in wear device the watch face is written.
The wear 2.0 offers watch face picker feature for setting up the watch face from the available list of watch faces. Reader will understand the watch face elements of Analog and digital watch faces.
There are certain common issues when we talk about watch faces like how the watch face is going to get the data if at all it has any complications. Battery efficiency is one of the major concern while choose to write watch face. How well the network related operations is done in the watch face and what are the sensors if at all watch face is using how often the watch face have the access.
Custom assets in watch face like complex SVG animations and graphical animations and how much CPU and GPU cycles is used, user’s like the more visual attractive watch faces rather than a simple analog and digital watch faces android wear 2.0 allows complications straight from the wear 2.0 SDK developers need not do the logical part of getting the data.
The article also talks about Interactive watch face, the trend changes every time, In wear 2.0 the new interactive watch faces which can have unique interaction and style expression is a great update. And all watch face developers for wear might have to start thinking of interactive watch faces. The idea is to have the user to like and love watch face by giving them a delightful and useful information on a timely basis which changes the user experience of the watch face. Data integrated watch faces.
Making watch face is an excellent artistic engineering, What data we should express in the
watch face and how time data and date data is being displayed.
More about wear 2.0
In this article reader will be able to seek the features that wear 2.0 offers and they will also be able to know wear 2.0 is the prominent update with the plenty of new features bundled, including google assistant, stand-alone applications, new watch faces and support for the third party complications. Wear 2.0 offers to give more with the happening market research and Google is working with partner companies to build the powerful ecosystem for wear.
Stand-alone applications in wear is a brilliant feature which will create a lot of buzz in wear developers and wear users. Afterall who wants always to carry phone and who wants a paired devices to do some simple tasks. Stand-alone application is the powerful feature of the wear ecosystem. How cool it will be using wear apps without your phone nearby. There are various scenarios that wear devices use to be phone dependent, for example to receive new email notification wear needs to be connected to phone for the internet, Now wear device can independently connect to wifi and can sync all the apps for new updates. User can now complete more tasks with wear apps without a phone paired to it.
The article explains how to identify whether the application is stand-alone or it is dependent on a companion app and installing stand-alone applications from google playstore and other wear 2.0 related new changes. Like Watch face complications and watch face picker. Brief understanding about the storage mechanism of the stand-alone wear applications.
Wear device needs to talk with phone in many use cases and the article talks about the advertising the availability of and the article also talks about advertising the capabilities of the device and retrieving the capable nodes for the requested capability.
If the wear app as a companion app we need to detect the companion app in the phone or in the wear device if neither the app installed we can guide the user to playstore to install the companion application.
Wear 2.0 supports cloud messaging and cloud based push notifications and the article have the comprehensive explanation about the notifications. Android wear is evolving in every way, in wear 1.0 switching between screens use to be tedious and confusing to wear users. Now, google has introduced material design and interactive drawers. Which includes single and multipage navigation drawer and action drawer and more.
Typing in the tiny little one and half inches screen is pretty challenging task to the wear users so wear 2.0 introduces input method framework quick types and swipes for entering the input in the wear device directly.
This article is a resourceful journey to those who are planning to seek the wear development and wear 2.0 standards. Everything in the article projects a usual task that most of the developers trying to accomplish.
Resources for Article:
Further resources on this subject:
- Getting started with Android Development [article]
- Building your first Android Wear Application [article]
- The Art of Android Development Using Android Studio [article]