Halftone Digital Watch Face

BasilBase

About this app

Halftone prints the time the way a comic book prints a page.

Six panels, divided by hand-inked black gutters. Every panel carries its own printed texture - diagonal speed lines, a Ben-Day dot screen, cross-hatch, radiating burst lines, nested chevrons and vertical rules - It is drawn artwork, not one tiled pattern repeated six times. The hour sits over the minute inside a white speech balloon whose tail breaks its own panel border. The numerals are printed in three passes: a red misregistration plate, a black keyline and a coloured face, the way a badly registered four-colour press lays them down.

WEATHER NEEDS ONE PERMISSION, ONCE

Wear OS does not grant watch faces location access by default, so the temperature stays unavailable until you allow it: Settings, then Security and privacy, then Permission manager, then Location, then Watch faces, then Allow while using the app. Everything else on the face - time, date, steps, heart rate, battery - works the moment you install it.

And you are never shown an empty box. Until the weather arrives, the burst balloon at the top of the page prints the part of the day instead: MORNING, AFTERNOON, EVENING, NIGHT.

FIVE COMPLICATIONS, AND EVERY READING ON THE DIAL IS ONE

Nothing on this face is hard-wired. The date caption and the weather balloon are complications too, so any reading you see can be swapped for one you would rather have.

1. The wide caption panel under the top gutter. Day and date to begin with.
2. The burst balloon at the top. Left alone it draws the weather itself; hand it a provider and it prints that instead.
3, 4 and 5. The three-storey tower down the right-hand side: step count, watch battery and heart rate to begin with.

Each of the five takes short text, a ranged value, a monochromatic image or a small image, and each one may be left empty. Give a complication a provider that carries a minimum and a maximum and a printed rule appears along the bottom of its caption box, filling to the value from that provider's own numbers. Give it an image provider and the icon is printed in its caption box at full size, in the provider's own colours - never recoloured, never replaced with a drawing of ours.

TWO APP SHORTCUT SLOTS, AND THEY ARE YOURS

Bottom left and bottom right, mirrored across the foot of the page. Each one takes an app you choose, and shows that app's own icon, bare: no label, no frame, no backing disc. Leave one unassigned and it is invisible - no placeholder, no outline, no gap held open for it.

A HUNDRED WAYS TO PRINT IT

Five comic styles, and it opens on Noir Manga: a rain-soaked black-and-white city, a figure in a coat under the balloon. Then Golden Age four colour, Pulp Sci-Fi newsprint, Neon Cyber late edition, Modern Pop clean print. Each is a page of its own, not a tint of the last one.

Five time palettes for the numerals: ink black, golden yellow, comic crimson, electric cyan, hero violet.

Two panel finishes: Ben-Day halftone dots, or flat colour.

24 hour, or 12 hour with AM/PM - chosen on the watch, not by changing the setting for your whole phone and watch. A single-digit hour is re-centred over the minute instead of leaving a hole where the leading digit used to be.

One hundred combinations - five styles, five palettes, two finishes, two hour formats - every one of them chosen on the watch itself.

ALWAYS-ON

The same page, inked rather than printed. The gutters, the speech balloon and the burst balloon survive as keylines and the numerals are hollowed out to a wall of line. Measured on the real always-on framebuffer: 9.1 per cent of the screen lit, and nothing on it below 13 to 1 contrast.

The watch face's own words - the Customize labels and the text on the dial - are in English.

If you have a question, or something is not working right, please write to us at [e-mail].

What’s new

First release.

A comic-book page for the wrist: six panels behind six different printed textures, the time stacked in a speech balloon, and the weather in its own burst balloon at the top.

Five complications you assign yourself - the date caption and the weather balloon included - and two app shortcut slots along the foot of the page. Five comic styles, five time palettes, two panel finishes, 24 or 12 hour: one hundred combinations, all chosen on the watch.