My wife bought me a Fibit Ionic for Christmas. She's well aware of my frustrations with the lack of support for the Smartwatch3, and the horrible task of developing Android apps. I really have no idea how professional Android devs do it. I was doing the simplest of tasks and in spite of months of effort, failed to get a single watch running on the Smartwatch3. I'm sure it's just me although I was working on numerous boxes, fresh Linux Mint boxes, fresh Kubuntu boxes.
Before getting the Ionic I read a bit about developing for it. Javascript, Json, Svg based. So it should be nice and easy to create the watch layouts etc.
After getting the Ionic I looked further into it. The development studio is web-based so that alleviates the local dev env setup headache that android studio was until I got to know it. I created a watchface from the template. The project was so much simpler than Android projects - which makes sense since my target is one device and one device only... so far.
There's no emulator. Another headache removed - but a problem if you don't own a watch yourself. I don't mind testing on my Ionic. Sadly it seems the only way to use your watches is to load it in the studio and run it. Then your watch is set to that watchface until you change it. Switching watchfaces in general will be a nightmare as Fitbit adds more to their firmware and eventually their store. Hopefully they add a 'my watchfaces' or way to favorite apps and watchfaces.
Anyway, my first day with the Ionic I had successfully coded a terminal style watchface. A couple days later I successfully built a binary watchface. It has a settings companion but so far I've been unable to figure out how to access it, hehe.
The Ionic is more limited than a full on smartwatch but so far I really like it... And it looks super scifi - especially with my binary watchface :)
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