A true maze, and new things to see on the dial:
- Maze, a new kind of pattern: a labyrinth whose walls grow out from the centre as one connected tree. A wall may grow only where it keeps the walls in one piece without closing a loop, so every corridor can be reached from every other, and by one way only. Choose it as the kind, or tick it for the mix.
- The small disc can show your heart rate (Time 2), the weather (in °C or °F, looked up by your phone for where you are; the phone asks to share its location the first time), or a second time zone as a little dial.
- An hourly chime: one soft buzz on the hour, never in quiet nights.
- A flick of the wrist can show the seconds, turning on the small disc for half a minute.
- Settings saved by much older versions now carry over when you update.
Keeps the watch safe on memory: on the Time 2 with the dial's pattern in its case, the size across the dial now stays even rather than leaving the face with almost no free memory (the settings page says so). With the plain case, and on the Round 2, grading works as before.
A dial that stays alive, and much more to choose:
- Spiral waves, a new kind of pattern: an excitable medium whose spirals keep turning.
- Alive between hours: the pattern creeps a little every minute (spirals turn), and a flick of the wrist can melt a patch that heals itself, never quite as it was.
- A small disc opposite the date: the moon's phase, the battery, the day's steps or the weekday.
- Two classic hands: Dauphine and leaf.
- Night: night hours with their own theme, and quiet nights (a new pattern grows unseen, no buzz).
- Alerts: the hour ring turns red while the phone is away (with a buzz if you like), amber when the battery runs low.
- Your themes can be shared with a short code, and "Surprise me" makes one by chance.
Fixes the preview on the settings page squashing as you scroll. The preview now shrinks smoothly with the scroll and always keeps the watch's true shape.
Fixes saving settings: the watch now takes in the whole set of settings the settings page sends. Before, the message was larger than the watch was ready to receive, so the watch dropped it and nothing changed. The phone also tries again if the watch is busy.
Tapered lume hands, modelled on the reference: a flat lume needle, wide and round at its inner end and fine at its tip, with a lume capsule for the hour. The new default.
Gradient themes: the dial or its lines can grade from the centre out, side to side, top to bottom or corner to corner, dithered across the watch's 64 colours. Fourteen new gradient presets (58 themes in all), and a theme editor on the settings page: make your own themes, name them, pick every colour and the gradient's way, and keep as many as you like on your phone.
A new settings page with a live preview of the face. It runs the watch's own drawing code, so every choice shows at once, exactly as the watch will draw it: themes and options appear as small live dials, you can scrub the time of day or play it as a time-lapse, grow a new pattern at the watch's pace, switch between the Time 2 and the Round 2, and tap the watch for a closer look at the hour disc.
44 colour themes (up from 8), and your own colours picked from the watch's 64.
Fixes the Time 2 freezing after an update. The finished pattern was saved at full precision (24 KB), and the watch's storage handles that badly: each hourly save meant over a thousand flash writes, more than a second of blocking on the watch's flash, and much more the first time. The pattern is now saved at one bit a cell (about 3 KB), and the old saved data is cleared out once in the background.
Fixes the watch freezing. The regrowth could take many simulation steps in one go without letting the watch catch up, and the finished pattern was written to storage all at once; on a real watch both could hold it up for seconds. Each frame now stops stepping after 40 ms, and the pattern is saved a little at a time in the background.
Size across the dial: the pattern can now grade from small at the centre to large at the rim, or from large at the centre to small at the rim, about the size you choose. The stripes widen smoothly and fork where they must, as a real reaction-diffusion pattern does when its scale changes (it takes more battery while it grows).
Also: the finished pattern is saved in small pieces. On the Time 2 with the patterned case it did not fit in memory to save, so coming back to the face regrew it; now it is kept.
A new hourly regrowth that grows the way reaction-diffusion does. The old pattern melts away, then the reaction takes hold in a patch at the centre that spreads outward. Each new patch starts as spots, which stretch into worms that bend, join and wiggle into place. The pattern is grown on a seamless sheet that knows nothing of the dial: the dial cuts its circle out of it and turns.
The regrowth now takes about the same time on any watch (Pace: about 14, 9 or 5 seconds), and the simulation is about a quarter cheaper per step.
Pattern size: tiny, small, regular, large or huge, from about 8 to 20 pixels from line to line. Line weights and settling follow the size.
Time 2: an option for the patterned case to stand still while the dial turns. It lines up with the dial at the top of every hour, when the new pattern grows across both.
New store gallery: the hour update (a new pattern growing by reaction-diffusion at the top of the hour), a time-lapse through the day, and the variations: themes, patterns, hands, emblems, numerals, date and layouts.
The hourly regrowth now behaves like a real reaction-diffusion run: the old pattern melts away by diffusion, then the new one condenses out of the haze across the whole face, first near the hands, and sharpens and settles. The pattern runs under the hour ring and the bezel as if they were not there, so at 12:00 the dial and the hour disc line up into one; on the Time 2 the dial and its patterned case are one surface.
First release of Morphogen 9: a living Turing-pattern dial for Pebble Time 2 and Pebble Round 2. The dial turns once an hour, the hour disc orbits opposite the minute hand, and every hour a new pattern grows from the hands. Patterns, hands, emblems, numerals, date, bezel and colours are all configurable.