Responsiveness

[Juan Martín]

I'm playing with Cicada and the responsiveness is very bad, have you thing how it can be improved?


Saludos,
   Juan Martín

[Joe Hughes]

Hey Juan,

It's true: the way the MetaWatch works, by sending raw screen pixels
from the phone to the watch, means that making the screen update in
inherently slow. Hopefully there will be a few optimizations we can
do to the internals of Cicada and the bluetooth protocol, and maybe
future watch firmware tweaks will allow for more chunks of autonomous
interaction on the watch. Ultimately, I don't see a full-screen
update being faster than a second or so, no matter what we do, as long
as we're sending raw pixels.

That said, Cicada tries to only send the rows of the screen that have
changed since the last update. The smaller the vertical area of the
screen that's being updated, the faster the screen should update. You
can see this in the Cicada app list; moving between the first few
items is faster than scrolling further, where the app names scroll and
update more of the screen. We should rewrite that to page rather than
scroll, so that the whole screen doesn't need to update as frequently.

Note that this optimization happens right before the pixels are sent
to the watch; it doesn't matter how much of the canvas you touch
during onDraw(), it's how many of the watch's screen rows are changed
as a result.

Cheers,
Joe

[Dominic Clifton]

Joe, I too was going to ask how responsive it should be, on my watch it
takes about 15-45 second to update the screen after I press a button on
the watch or start the service. I see the phone display update very
quickly after the button press. Sometimes the watch reboots and often I
get a corrupt display with missing lines.

I have similar rebooting problems with the metawatch app too.

I'm running the latest firmware. My phone is a Samsung Galaxy 2 S. I
could try it with my HTC Hero to see if that has the same problem.

Dom

[Joe Hughes]

Dominic, 15-45 seconds sounds like what I was seeing with PyMetaWatch
on my Mac, and possibly related to the "sniff mode" Bluetooth stack
issues that Kai has been debugging:
http://ka010.wordpress.com/2011/10/02/mwkit-a-cocoa-framework-to-talk-to-the-metawatch/

From what I've heard on the forums, this issue doesn't come up on pure
Google Android versions (i.e. Nexus devices) or Cyanogenmod builds,
but does occur on some manufacturer-tweaked versions of Android.
Personally, I've only encountered it when pairing with my MacBook Pro,
not with any Android phones (which are all Google-experience devices).

Joe

On Oct 4, 11:58 am, Dominic Clifton <mailinglist.goo...@hydras-

[Joe Hughes]

Incidentally, Bill from MetaWatch just sent me an update about the
bluetooth compatibility issues, which I added to the MetaWatch Wiki:
https://sites.google.com/site/metawatchdev/bluetooth-compatibility

Joe

On Oct 4, 12:09 pm, Joe Hughes <joe.hughes.c...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Dominic, 15-45 seconds sounds like what I was seeing with PyMetaWatch
> on my Mac, and possibly related to the "sniff mode" Bluetooth stack

> issues that Kai has been debugging:http://ka010.wordpress.com/2011/10/02/mwkit-a-cocoa-framework-to-talk...