Vigil Digital Watch Face

BasilBase

About this app

Vigil is a tactical instrument dial, and the readout is the dial. The hour and the minute are set in a stencil alphabet drawn for this face - square corners, one bridge seam straight across the numerals, the way a number is sprayed onto a crate - on a machined gunmetal field.

When the screen dims, the dial goes rather than dimming
Always-on here is a separate composition, not this one turned down. The plate, the hour rail, the date, the weather, both rules and all six complications are dropped. What is left is the reading, hollowed out to a three-pixel wall, and one lit mark standing at the current hour - and both are drawn in exactly the ink they wear awake.
Measured on real screen captures: 3.9 per cent of the screen is lit, and nothing still drawn measures under 11.7 : 1 against its background. Awake, the lowest-contrast reading anywhere on the dial is 6.7 : 1, against the 4.5 : 1 the accessibility guidelines ask of text.

Four complications, and two app shortcut slots
The four data complications sit in two chamfered plates below the reading. Each takes short text, a ranged value, a monochromatic icon or a small image, and each may be left empty - an empty complication draws nothing at all: no placeholder, no outline, no reserved gap.
None of them starts blank. Out of the box they are your step count, the watch battery, sunrise and sunset, and your next calendar event - all from Wear OS's own providers, so the dial carries four real readings before you assign anything. Each cell draws that provider's own icon beside the figure, and the figure steps down through three sizes to fit its cell rather than being cut off mid-string.
Two app shortcut slots sit at the top of the dial. Each takes a small image or a monochromatic icon and draws the app's own icon, bare - no label, no frame, no disc behind it. Left unassigned, a shortcut slot leaves no trace.
All six can be reassigned on the watch.

Weather needs one permission, once
The dial reads the watch's own weather and draws one of eleven condition marks with the temperature beside it. Wear OS does not grant watch faces location access by default, so the temperature shows --° until you allow it: Settings > Security and privacy > Permission manager > Location > Watch faces > Allow while using the app. Everything else - time, date, the seconds rule, steps, battery, the hour rail - works the moment you install it.

The rail down the left edge
Twenty-four marks, one for each hour of the day, with the current hour lengthened and lit in your accent colour. It is the reading a clock does not give you: not what time it is, but where you are in the day. Under the readout, a thin rule fills across once a minute, so the second is a position on a scale instead of another number competing with the time.

Sixty ways to leave it
- 3 machined backgrounds: holographic circuit, stealth cockpit, quantum reactor
- 5 accents: signal cyan, night sight green, azimuth blue, violet, arctic white
- 24-hour, or 12-hour with AM/PM
- the hour rail: all twenty-four marks, or the current hour alone
That is sixty combinations, and the time itself stays neutral in every one of them - no colour setting can make the readout harder to read.

Nothing on the dial carries our name. No account, no ads, no subscription.

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

What’s new

First release.

A tactical digital dial on machined gunmetal. When the screen dims it drops the dial rather than dimming it: 3.9 per cent of the screen lit, nothing still drawn under 11.7 : 1. Four complications, each already showing a real reading, and two app shortcut slots that leave no trace when empty. A 24-mark hour rail and sixty combinations.

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