The unique feature of the smartwatches is the capability to use different watch faces. We are using Samsung Galaxy Watch LTE for testing our designing and development. There are mainly three tools to convert your art created on vector tools like Adobe Illustrator and general-purpose tool Adobe Photoshop. Facer like two third party platform has paid tools to do the job. However, Samsung Galaxy Watch Designer is completely free. It is quite advanced. Galaxy Watch Designer supports PSD files. This article will help to install the Galaxy Watch Designer application on Windows PC and guide to develop your watch face. Another way to develop watch faces for the Samsung smartwatches is by using Tizen Studio. Samsung Galaxy Watch Designer needs either JDK 8 or JDK 11. Tizen Studio needs JDK 8.
Installation of Galaxy Watch Designer
You need to install JDK 8 or JDK 11 to run Galaxy Watch Designer. We have a separate guide to correctly install JDK 11 on Windows PC. You must configure the PATH properly to make Galaxy Watch Designer working. Next, download and install Galaxy Watch Designer from the official website (perform a web search).
Launch Galaxy Watch Designer and load some sample to understand how things work. It is not mandatory to connect your watch just for designing. You can connect to watch via Bluetooth. Put your watch in debug mode, turn on Bluetooth on your watch and connect it to your computer.
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The Designing Specifications
You’ll see that Galaxy Watch Designer can load graphics of each part of the watch like background (which is the dial), the hands and so on. Samsung has a good guide on using the application :
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# https://developer.samsung.com/galaxy-watch/design/watch-designer/gear-watch-create-watch-face # |
The watch face area is a circle of 360 pixels in diameter. This is a too-small size for designing on Illustrator or Photoshop. You can use double (720 pixels) or triple size of 360×360 and later reducing their size to 360×360 during saving from Photoshop. You’ll find the default graphics files on a standard installation on Windows PC at these locations :
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# # watch face area aka background C:\Program Files\Galaxy Watch Designer\res\background\circle # # hands C:\Program Files\Galaxy Watch Designer\res\Watch Hand\circle # # index (scoring of time) C:\Program Files\Galaxy Watch Designer\res\Index\circle # # other components C:\Program Files\Galaxy Watch Designer\res\Complications\circle # # mask for background C:\Program Files\Galaxy Watch Designer\res # # various other resources for the dial C:\Program Files\Galaxy Watch Designer\res\Complications\circle |
To add watch hands, after import each of the images, change the “Sync with” setting from the “Rotation Properties” of “Properties” window of Minute, Second etc. Otherwise, the hands will not spin! Notice the screenshot below to get an idea what I am talking about. To get a smooth sweep effect of seconds’ hand, change the “Movement effect” in the same “Properties” window. Also, you need to centre the watch hands by going to the “Align Center” option in the main toolbar.
You’ll get the PDF of the next steps (how to test on your watch and optionally distribute) inside the C:\Program Files\Galaxy Watch Designer directory.
Conclusion
I found another easy way to just clone your existing watch – simply take a series of high-resolution close-up photos of a real watch with hands at different positions and use Photoshop’s tool to remove the hands. Then just separate the score/numbers (index) using your Photoshop skill. Of course, you can only use such kind of watch face for personal usage (it violates the copyright). But, this way gives instant gratification!
Samsung Galaxy Watch Designer is a great and easy tool. It was not easy to use Tizen Studio (size is 5GB, things are more complex). Galaxy Watch Designer made the watch face designing as easy as various desktop widget designing.
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