Controlling Hand Movement

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As you enjoy your Paper Watch Basic, you'll notice that the minute hand jumps when a new minute has passed, and the hour hand jumps once an hour has passed. Now, especially for the hour, that is not what you want. It should move more continuously. And some watches also move their minute hands more than once per minute; the Casio in the example does it every 10 seconds.

To control how often a hand is updated, you specify the precision in the next smaller unit. That is, for hours you specify how many minutes pass before they move, for minute how many seconds, and for seconds how many milliseconds. Date and Weekday displays will always only jump at full units, i.e. once a day.


Some watches have a sliding second, where the hand just smoothly moves along. This is technically not supported in the simulator, but can be achieved by selecting a small enough precision value. Let's assume your Paper Watch has a sliding second, moves the minute hand every 10 seconds, and the hour hand every other minute (enough so it looks pretty much continuous). Remember to always specify precision in the next smaller unit, and we arrive at the settings below. 10 ms is enough to give the second hand a sliding look:


    <Hand

       type="hour"

       image="hour_hand.png"

       centerX="10"

       centerY="122"

       offsetX="205"

       offsetY="191"

       precision="2"/>

   <Hand

       type="minute"

       image="minute_hand.png"

       centerX="7"

       centerY="155"

       offsetX="205"

       offsetY="191"

       precision="10"/>

   <Hand

       type="second"

       image="second_hand.png"

       centerX="10"

       centerY="165"

       offsetX="205"

       offsetY="191"

       precision="10"/>


There is a sample settings file for this in the paper basic folder, called specs - precision.xml.

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