Different colors for each line?

[itsmewe]

Hello! Thank you for this app! It is great! I really appreciate that it is FOSS / on f-droid!

I'm visually impaired. Therefore I need large text and a color contrast that is not too low or too high and your app already fits these needs. In addition it has the touch action to open the system clock from the widget - in contrast to other apps I tried and used before. Can you add the option to set a different color for every line? That would make it easier for some visually impaired people and other people with difficulties in orientating on screen. Kind regards!

[rparkins999]

If you have poor vision, I doubt if different colours would really help. The human eye has much better spatial resolution in intensity than in colour. In the bad old days when video memory was very expensive I used this fact to fool people into thinking that my device had more bits per pixel than it actually had. The trick that I used was to get the intensity right at each pixel, but I only made the colour right averaged over groups of four adjacent pixels. This meant that I didn't need so many different colour map entries, so I didn't need so may bits to specify one.

In any case, for the widget it would be a huge rewrite. Currently it uses an Android built-in to display the the widget, and that has no provision for changing colour or any other formatting within its text string. The splitting into lines is done by including newline characters in appropriate places depending on your choice of which items of information to display. The code to put the newlines in the right places is already quite messy and it took a lot of experimentation to get it right. To change colours I would have to construct a composite view and lay it out by hand, and it would need to choose between a large number of different layouts. Also I would need a colour chooser for each item.

For the full screen clock in landscape mode, I can't see how it would help. It's always two lines and the date information at the bottom of the screen is always much smaller because I'm trying to make something that works as a bedside clock and people who wear glasses don't wear them in bed. So I want the time to be big: most people don't wake up in the middle of the night not knowing what day it is!

For the full screen clock in portrait mode, I do lay it out by hand: it's much easier than for a widget because of the way Android does widgets using RemoteViews, and I wanted to have the hours and minutes use the full width of the screen, which means that they have to be bigger than the long day or month names if you're showing those. So I could in principle have a colour chooser for each item, but that would make the setup much more complicated for what I think would be very little gain given my observations about human vision above.

[itsmewe]

What you say about human vision might be true, I can't tell if different colors make a differece for people with no visually impairnent as I am born with it. I just can't imagine how the world would look like without it so I have to believe what you say about it. I don't use landscape mode so I can't say anything about this part and I also don't use the clock of my phone at night. Even a 12" Tablet in landscape mode with a full screen clock wouldn't work for me without classes so this is not what I would use an app for.

After reading your explaination I really understand and agree with you that this would be too much work for something most people would only use "for fun". I simply had no idea because I don't know anything about app development.

What I can tell you for sure is that colors make a differece for me. I don't know if this is because of my visual impairment only or if my other disabilities/difficulties are involved. In my everyday life this is not that important because I'm on this planet about 35 years now and I know what works best for me. I know what makes things more asseccible for me and this is what is important for me, not why exactly something works better or not. I'm married to a sighted person and even though we are together 24/7 her assumptions about what I can and can not see are still wrong. Simply because of the fact that vision is more than the "optic" part of seeing, as you may know. So what you said is right and kinda wrong the same time. If someone with a disability tells you what would make something easier for him/her/... please don't assume you know it better than that person. You have your opinion and you have your knowledge, and you have the same right to say what you think as the person you are talking to. But what you don't have is the experience to live with the disability that person does each and every day. I don't mean to offend you, just saying. For the different colors I will use different widgets agaim. This is easier for me than it would be for you to add that feature to your app.

Thank you for your explaination, time and this great app!