Using WatchKit, is there a method to keep the screen on? - watchkit

My app displays various countdown timers that the user will view to see when to do various tasks. I'd like this screen to stay on display on the watch while the app is in the foreground. Currently, the screen will auto-turn off and if I stay away from flicking my wrist, the app will even become suspended.
Is this just something I'm going to have to design around, or is there a method I can't find to change this behavior?

There is no method in WatchKit to programmatically keep an app alive/awake. As you've suggested, you'll have to design around this limitation.

The correct way to have a countdown timer on the watch is to add it to the complication.
It supports a timer automatically when you provide a future date
CLKRelativeDateTextProvider(date: wakeupDate, style: .timer, units: .second)

Related

JQuery - Disable artificial delay on mobile

I just found this:
Touch devices sometimes add an artificial delay to click events, just
to make sure the user isn't double-tapping to zoom.
Ok, nice, now how do i disable it globally? I have no use for zoom events and double-tapping so that delay is annoying...I want it dead :)
Update
PS: I have tried using energize.js but it just didn't do the job for me.

Flex tabbed view gets reloaded every time

I have a very simple Flex application for mobile phones which uses 3 tabs (with the TabbedViewNavigatorApplication).
It seems that everytime I switch tabs, the selected view is reloaded.
I've set a creationComplete command to do something and everytime I click on the tab it executes the function.
Isn't it possible for the views to get loaded 1 time and that's it?
Seems to me that this behaviour is exactly the point on mobile devices since you want to keep memory / cpu usage as low as possible.
This effectively means destroying all non-active views and all related view components / objects.
However you can override this default behaviour by setting the destructionPolicy on every view to destructionPolicy="never".
This blog post will explain the basic understanding you will need to obtain.
Cheers

QMainWindow that ignore clicks, passes them on to background windows

I'd like to create a semi-transparent information window that doesn't get in the way of the user's other activities. Any clicks on the window should just pass through as if the window wasn't there.
How would you recommend implementing such behavior? Is there an easy way to do it or do I have to follow a clumsy workaround? I'm thinking of hiding the window, re-executing the click, then making the window visible again. But this would still screw up drag'n'drop gestures.
Take a look at an enum value of Qt::WidgetAttribute: Qt::WA_TransparentForMouseEvents:
When enabled, this attribute disables the delivery of mouse events to
the widget and its children. Mouse events are delivered to other
widgets as if the widget and its children were not present in the
widget hierarchy; mouse clicks and other events effectively "pass
through" them. This attribute is disabled by default.
I did a little more research into "mouse event transparency" (didn't know the exact terminology) and I found this.
I don't think there is a general and easy approach to your problem. You will probably have to dig into the native API. Once events reach an application they are not forwarded to other applications on their own.
What do you guys think? Am I doomed to work with the native APIs of each OS?

How do you register an event listener to the appear/disappear events of the virtual keyboard on Blackberry Playbook using Flex?

Not why no one has been complaining about this but I'm have a lot of problems with the Blackberry Playbook Virtual Keyboard on the Simulator.
I have an richedit component in the middle of the screen and as soon as the virtual keyboard appears to enter text, it completely hides the text input. I'd like to move the text input up when the keyboard appears/disappears. Is there any way to do this? I don't want to muck around with the focus_in and focus_out events on the richedit. I've tried, and it's not very reliable.
Thank you in advance!
We expect the next release of the SDK (long overdue at this point but, I think, imminent) to provide much more complete support for the virtual keyboard. Until that occurs, I think it's a waste of time to attempt to do anything special with it.
I also think there's a chance it will automagically move your whole stage up when it would cover up a text input, so maybe you won't have to do anything about it anyway.
Edit: Actually I published code in January describing an undocumented way to support this, using some rudimentary PPS support. It also shows how you can programmatically control the keyboard opening and closing. I don't recommend it yet for real code...

Flex Post Event Screen Updates

I came across this topic today while investigating something very strange. Doing certain things in our Flex app can cause the number of frames rendered to rocket, from 12fps to ~30fps: loaded animations start playing at high speed and the GUI starts to lock up.
Since everything I've read on Flex/Flash hammers home the point "the frame rate is capped at the fps set in the top level app", it seems the only way these extra renders can be happening is due to some events causing them (no programmatic changes to the stage's framerate are done anywhere). Since it only happens when I put my update logic in the ENTER_FRAME handler, I'm trying to figure out what might be happening which to apparently causing Flex to go render-crazy.
Hypothesis: something in my update function is triggering an immediate screen update, this raises another ENTER_FRAME immediately, which means my update loop gets called, which triggers another immediate screen update, ...
We have Flex components used in our GUI, if this is a factor. I don't really know where to go next on this.
Clarifications:
When I say things speed up, there
are two ways this manifests.
Firstly, my ENTER_FRAME handler gets
called far more often.
Secondly, a
loaded Flash SWF with a looping
animation built in suddenly speeds
up to te point it looks silly.
I am not using updateAfterEvent, I only
found this existed when researching
this problem. Apparently, some
events on Sprite subclasses
automatically call this and I wonder
if that's the root cause.
I am not doing any direct messsing about with rendering at all. Background animations play automatically as they have timelines built-in from CS3 authoring, all our update function does is change the position of DisPlayObjects or add/remove them etc
Update:
I added a label to my app to print out stage.frameRate, and discovered at certain times, it suddenly changes from 12 to 1000 (the maximum allowed value). While it was trivial to add a line to my ENTER_FRAME handler to reset it that's hardly a big help.
Also, even doing this, the rendering is all messed up. Certain actions (like raising an Alert popup) make it all spring back into life.
Unfortunately, I am not able to view the source of the Stage class to set a breakpoint on the setter property.
That's very interesting about the Flex loading 'set to 1000fps' thing. What we have are several Flex applications which all provide a common interface. A master app is in charge of loading these modules as required through the SWFLoader class. However, the loading process already takes into account the delayed loading... when the SWF loads we then wait for the APPLICATION_COMPLETE from the SystemManager. Once this is received, shouldn't the applications completion have occurred?
Flex sets the frame rate to 1000 during "phased instantiation" of Flex components, which occurs only during initial load of a flex swf. This allows it to build all components very quickly.
Are you waiting for the Flex app to be fully loaded and constructed? You should be waiting for FlexEvent.CREATION_COMPLETE before working with your Flex content.
If you would like a reference to where this occcurs, look in the Flex LayoutManager class, line 326 (using Flex SDK 3.0.194161), in the setter for the property usePhasedInstantiation.
Update:
APPLICATION_COMPLETE should have you covered for the initial load.
This actually happens any time components are created directly from MXML. So there are a few other cases to look for. Are you using any Repeaters? Do you use any navigation containers that are building their children on demand?
One thing I'm not clear on - are you seeing that the actual screen refreshes are occurring faster than the published framerate? Or is it that your animations are moving faster but the screen refreshes are unchanged? (i.e., it used to move 10 pixels per second, but now it moves faster than that, regardless of how often the screen is drawn.)
An easy way to check this would be to try publishing your content at 1 fps. It should be clear whether the screen is redrawing once per second, but animated elements are being moved more frequently than that, or whether the screen is actually updating more frequently.
If the latter, are you using any updateAfterEvent() methods in your code? This can cause actual screen refreshes to occur faster than the published framerate. It shouldn't affect ENTER_FRAME events though. You should still only get one of those per frame update.
Alternately, are the things you're animating just Sprites and so on, or are you implementing them as Flex components, and trying to redraw them with invalidate() methods and RENDER events and so on?
If you could clarify a few of these points in the question the answer might be clearer. Thanks...
Thanks for the clarifications. If a loaded clip with a animation (I assume you mean a frame animation) is speeding up, then that certainly sounds like something is changing your playback framerate, as opposed to other things that could be going on. With that said it's not a problem I've seen crop up before, but I do think there are some things you could try that ought to narrow down where the problem is:
You might as well try tracing out stage.frameRate during the speed-up. Presumably nothing ought to be changing your framerate, but since that would explain your issues you might as well rule it out.
Try removing as many GUI components as possible and seeing if the problem still occurs, if it's possible to trigger the problem without them.
One sanity check you could try, if it's feasible, is to copy some of the contents of your game into a fresh project and try it there. Sometimes mysterious issues like this happen because some class or SWC is being imported somewhere that everyone forgot about.
You could try driving your code from a different event. For example, as far as I know driving it from Event.EXIT_FRAME or Event.FRAME_CONSTRUCTED ought to look the same, but if it doesn't then that's a hint. Alternately, you could try driving it from something like a keyboard event or MouseEvent.MOUSE_MOVE. Then if updates occur even though you're not firing events, you'll know something else is driving things besides your event loop.
Those are the things I'd try, anyway. Hope you track it down...

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