[Discussion] Simulator vs physical watch: key discrepancies & limitations

SuuntoPartnerTeam

Hello.

The simulator is generally more featureful and more web-standards-compliant than any of our watches. What this means is that especially your wildest HTML+CSS concoctions may appear fine when simulated, but not when deployed on hardware. That said, at times it is the watch which breezes through something that stumps the simulator.

The main goal of the simulator is to show an approximation of the GUI and to provide quick feedback on the logical parts of your application i.e. the JavaScript (JS) code and how it interacts with the GUI. Remember to stick to to the ES5.1 version of JS and to make use of the native functions (which you can find inside the reference documentation). One example of a native function is setText, which you can see under ‘‘discrepancies’’ further below.

We hope you share all additional findings – should you encounter any – in order to be of help to your fellow devs All of the following are true as of the time of writing:

Discrepancies

Use setText instead of output.textField

output.textField = "some text"    // Works in the simulator, but not on a physical watch
setText("#some_id", "some text")  // Works both in the simulator and on a physical watch

Zooming into images with CSS works in the simulator, but not on a physical watch
The watches understand only basic CSS properties, such as width, height, color, background-color, opacity, border and visibility
- Border must be solid and on all sides
- Supported units are px and %. Other units may pass the validator, but will be treated as px.
Making changes to an HTML template right after it has been loaded will work in the simulator, but the watches may require some time between unload and setText/setStyle.
- One way to overcome this is to have the evaluate function wait a cycle or two before making text/style changes.

Simulator limitations

Pause and resume do not work
FIT file coordinates are ignored
- Currently, the simulator does not read any GPS data from FIT files. To test GPS-related features, please use a physical watch.
An application’s settings, which would appear in the Suunto mobile app on iOS/Android, cannot be adjusted
Any sound effects from playIndication() will not play

The screenshot feature is also in a non-functional state.

Again, please share any additional findings below!

surfboomerang

@SuuntoPartnerTeam said in [Discussion] Simulator vs physical watch: key discrepancies & limitations:

The screenshot feature is also in a non-functional state.

I got access to the partner program. Upon uploading the app, I’m requested to send watch images by using the screenshot option. Is there any information about when this feature will be available?

Is it mandatory to use this feature or is a screenshot with the right dimensions also ok?

Nikolai Simonov

@surfboomerang said in [Discussion] Simulator vs physical watch: key discrepancies & limitations:

Is it mandatory to use this feature or is a screenshot with the right dimensions also ok?

not necessary use screenshot tool from sdk

Ecki D.

My app was working well on the Simulator.
When deploying I had to learn that I had to strip out debugging fields from my manifest cause of to many fields.
Further the app still crashes the watch when choosing it on the watch as a suunto plus app.
I tried to get infos from the logs and will now deploy minimal functional versions to the watch to get it sorted.
Is there a way to start debugging on the watch?
Would be great if there would be a pre deployment check of the code if there are hard incompatibilities. Maybe I missed something.

Nikolai Simonov

@Ecki-D. there’s no debug protocol as far as I know. you could do it the oldschool way - use systemEvent('[tag] message $someData'); to populate the logs, using a ‘tag’ just makes filtering easier when you check the logs after a crash or whatever happened.