[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

• Scaling 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!