
Active vs. inactive vs. ambient screen
- Interactive mode – when swipes and long presses are captured by Bubble Clouds
- Inactive mode – when only taps are captured by Bubble Clouds
- Ambient mode – “Always on” mode, when no input is handled by Bubble Clouds
- swipe down for the quick toggles
- swipe up for the notifications
- long press to pick a different face
- swipe horizontally for Google Assistant and Google Fit (these can be disabled in Expert settings, see below)
- open apps and other bubbles
- swipe horizontally for the app drawer (and Quick Swipe Panel if enabled)
- swipe vertically to show/hide peek card
- long press bubbles to edit them
- Make the inactive mode the dominant by disabling the expert option “Priority for Active cloud”
The watch will stay in inactive mode (swipes and long presses are handled by the OS) until you tap on the clock bubble -
Override the horizontal swipes even in inactive mode using one or both of two other expert options:
If you enable these options swiping horizontally on the inactive watch face will enter interactive mode, hence overriding the default WearOS functions (Assistant and/or Fit)
- By default swiping left to right on the watch face in interactive mode takes you to the app drawer (archive cloud) and optionally the brightness control
- You can add a swipe area on the right to left swipe to access voice search (Google Assistant) and optionally the volume control. This is called Quick Swipe Panel in my app → see video below
A) A little background
I call it “inactive” or “ambient” mode when this layer is hidden. In the inactive screen you can access all the regular watch face functionality: swipe down for the quick settings, swipe up to access notifications, sideways to switch watch faces.
We can toggle between active and inactive by tapping the clock bubble, and recently I also added vertical swipe gestures too to switch between the two modes. So the first vertical swipe will toggle to inactive, then the regular Wear OS functionality kicks in. This is still not ideal, but maybe a little bit more intuitive to swipe twice instead of a tap-and-swipe.
Depending on the watch-face layout, you can even toggle the position of the hands and bubbles on the watch face. Tapping outside the ring of bubbles will bring the bubbles to the foreground (even over the peek card), Tapping again, or tapping in the center of the watch face will switch to inactive mode: (I call this the “reveal” mode)
[Theme shown is from pack #4]
Unfortunately there is no other way to implement all this increased functionality. Hopefully understanding how it works makes it easier to use.
- we get to override the horizontal swipe to change watch face
- we get notification peek cards (see below)
- we get unlimited number of watch face complications which can even be put in the archive cloud and folders
- the Bubble Cloud watch face is extremely battery friendly, our watches will last longer than with other watch faces
(except that your watch becomes more useful, and since you will be using it for more…) - you can apply many different watch face styles I call “1-click themes”, and even mix different components of these themes