Skip to content

feat: updated contrast and theme for health #874

Draft
tilden wants to merge 1 commit intocoredevices:mainfrom
freakified:health-cards-update
Draft

feat: updated contrast and theme for health #874
tilden wants to merge 1 commit intocoredevices:mainfrom
freakified:health-cards-update

Conversation

@tilden
Copy link
Contributor

@tilden tilden commented Feb 21, 2026

In #854, it was noted that there was a potential plan to make health menus lighter and more consistent.

Note we're thinking to make all the health menus lighter to make things consistent and overall more readable

Originally posted by @gmarull in #854 (comment)

My goal here was to achieve this in a way that was consistent with the Pebble visual language established in PebbleOS 3.0.

  1. Used higher-contrast color palette consistent with PebbleOS 3.x fitness visualizations
  2. Enabled the black stroke for color watches (previously it was only visible on BW watches)
  3. Used a light grey background matching the PebbleOS 3.x Health app and built-in Music app)
  4. Re-enabled deep sleep visualization on BW watches

There are several known issues with this branch:

  • On round watches, the bottom left stroke line draws slightly too far to the left
  • On round watches, the progress bar lacks a bottom outline
  • On color watches, the sleep icon should have a black outline; while I replaced the icon in /resources, I was unable to find a way to rebuild the snowy pbpack resource file that is used for the test cases.
  • On color watches, the steps hexagon outline has some points that are slightly misaligned.

I can definitely fix all those issues, but before moving forward I wanted to get confirmation if the Core team would be open to merging changes along these lines. Thoughts?

Example images (generated via test run):

Before After
image image
image image
image image

Signed-Off-By: Dan Tilden <freakified@gmail.com>
@ericmigi
Copy link
Collaborator

CleanShot 2026-02-21 at 10 57 09@2x

Re-enabled deep sleep visualization on BW watches

Ouch, did these get disabled somewhere? Was there any comment about why they were disabled?

We used different background colours to more clearly differentiate between these views. It makes it feel a bit more vibrant! But I agree that contrast feels a bit worse on colour here. Any other ideas that keep the background colours distinct but increase contrast?

@tilden
Copy link
Contributor Author

tilden commented Feb 21, 2026

Ouch, did these get disabled somewhere? Was there any comment about why they were disabled?

Good question! I'm not sure why they decided to disable it; there's no comments in the code, but the "progress secondary color" (which is used for deep sleep) was set to transparent on non-color watches, effectively disabling it:

#define PROGRESS_SECONDARY_COLOR (PBL_IF_COLOR_ELSE(GColorVeryLightBlue, GColorClear))

https://github.com/coredevices/PebbleOS/blob/e5e6aad19ee152c094515d478fe83cefda26ab60/src/fw/apps/system/health/sleep_summary_card.c#L38C1-L38C87

Assuming it was deliberate (and not an oversight), my best guess might be that they were worried people might see the black as gaps in the chart. Personally I feel like it's more valuable being shown than not!

We used different background colours to more clearly differentiate between these views. It makes it feel a bit more vibrant! But I agree that contrast feels a bit worse on colour here. Any other ideas that keep the background colours distinct but increase contrast?

You're not the first person to ask this! An alternative could be pastel background colors that match the foreground:

test_health_activity_summary_card__render_current_above_typical4~snowy-actual image

Thoughts on that version?

@ericmigi
Copy link
Collaborator

yeah that's a good catch! great to enable that. let's see how it feels.

Re colours, tough thing about changing these is that everyone has different opinions/thoughts. So inertia always prefers the status quo. We do have theming now, maybe add these as theme options?

@gmarull
Copy link
Member

gmarull commented Feb 23, 2026

yeah that's a good catch! great to enable that. let's see how it feels.

Re colours, tough thing about changing these is that everyone has different opinions/thoughts. So inertia always prefers the status quo. We do have theming now, maybe add these as theme options?

note that theming is not really implemented; we have "something" very primitive. I personally like the ones with light color bg.

@tilden
Copy link
Contributor Author

tilden commented Feb 23, 2026

yeah that's a good catch! great to enable that. let's see how it feels.

Great! I can make a separate MR that solely contains the deep sleep color change (should just be 1 line)

Re colours, tough thing about changing these is that everyone has different opinions/thoughts. So inertia always prefers the status quo.

I agree! That's why I was a bit surprised to hear that all the fitness screens were changing to a light theme. (The HRM screen was changed to a new lighter color scheme in a recent commit).

We do have theming now, maybe add these as theme options?

Would be neat if it could tie into PebbleOS theming overall!

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Labels

None yet

Projects

None yet

Development

Successfully merging this pull request may close these issues.

3 participants