I was using the watch face as a desktop clock, but the device went into standby mode. I don’t know if that is a use case you want to support.
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Great feedback, thank you! Yes, using Playdate as a desktop/night stand when showing Pebble watchfaces is certainly something I would like to support – ideally even with the upcoming https://play.date/stereo-dock/.
The SDK certainly allows for this, but right now, Gossan refreshes unconditionally at 30FPS and would burn through its battery in no time. I captured this in my backlog and will distinguish between interactive apps (aka games) and passive experiences (watchfaces and demos).
I just uploaded a new version with the following changes:
- 🆕 no more autolock of the screen for watchfaces (currently, Intrinsic Gravelty will lock. Later, games will too)
- ↗️ various power optimizations so that rendering (or processing for Pebble apps) only happens when a watchface needs to update (e.g. once per minute/second depending on their use of TickTimerService)
- 🆕: correctly propagate Playdate's battery level and 12h/24h clock mode to the corresponding Pebble APIs
- Note: while Pebble's BatteryStateService would allow watchfaces to show charge + plug state, Playdate's equivalent API is seemingly only available for Lua apps. I created a request on the DevForm about this.
EDIT: It seems as if the battery will still not last for even 24h despite my efforts to reduce the refresh rate to 1.0 FPS doing minimal logic only and no redraws. I will try to optimize further, but right now you can only use this as a desk clock when also connected to power.