About Time

Simple, relaxed, customizable watch face for Garmin smart watches

Get the watch face

If you found this page, the chances are high that you already have encountered some version of About Time in the ConnectIQ store.

In the menu you can find different flavours of About Time. It's been translated to multiple languages, dialects and personal preferences of volunteer translators.

You can download all these versions to your Garmin smart watch for free in the ConnectIQ store.

How to use

The watch face will show a data field if there is enough room for it. By default, it will show the date. You can set it to show battery level, steps taken today or distance travelled today.

The settings also allow you to change the color scheme (black on white or white on black) and font size (smaller font is available in some situations).

To change the settings, open either Garmin Connect or Connect IQ app on your phone or Garmin Express on your computer.

Tap the settings to set new values. Save the settings.

Add a new translation

You can add a new translation either by making the changes to the source code or editing an online spreadsheet.

Translate by editing a spreadsheet (preferred)

Open the translation spreadsheet in your browser. Duplicate one of existing sheets (tabs), rename your translation and drag it into the right place (in alphabetical order). Translate the strings. I should get a notification about the changes, and I can make the code changes based on the spreadsheet when I find the time.

Translate by submitting code

Clone the repository samuelmr/garmin-abouttime on GitHub. Copy some language's resources-lang directory, manifest-lang.xml and monkey-lang.jungle, replace occurrences of lang with your new language and edit the contents of resources-lang/strings.xml and resources-lang/settingstrings.xml.

Submit a pull request and wait for me to accept it.

Feature requests and suggestions

Please create a new issue. Explain why your suggestion is useful, and what value it would bring to which kind of user or situation.

History

The About Time watch face is created by Samuel Rinnetmäki (that's me). I originally (in February 2014) created a similar watch face for Pebble (an early family of smart watches). Although the watch face was only available in Finnish, it was quite popular and I got some praise from users.

When I bought a Garmin watch in early 2019 I wanted to test its ConnectIQ development platform. I chose to re-create About Time for Garmin watches. As an extra effort, I decided to make it multilingual.

At first, I translated the watch face to languages I knew (English, Swedish, German). Then, mostly using online resources, I added support for French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. When a user requested for a Russian version, I was in trouble. I set up a Google Sheet where users could translate the required strings to their own language.

During a few weeks I got translations to Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Norwegian, Polish and Russian - with many corrections to my initial translations. Some users wanted to translate the watch face to dialects instead of just languages. It was great, but posed some technical challenges.

The number of special characters was adding up, and the limited memory of some Garmin watches couldn't manage them all. Although the ConnectIQ platform supports many languages, it has no notion of dialects. I had to break the multilingual About Time watch face into multiple, single-language versions.

Support

In four years, the number of translations exceeded 100. Adding and supporting new features and dozens of translations takes considerable amount of my free time. (See commit stats.)

The watch face, all its features and translations are and will stay free in the Connect IQ Store. If you feel like offering me a beverage or a snack to compensate for my efforts, you can donate a small sum by PayPal.