The image should be masked with the circle of the slot bound. It was working fine on beta, now it isn’t.
I think it works just fine. Problem is in the complication provider - Dialer app. It should specify ICON type for the SMALL_IMAGE. It was the same for WFS 1.3.13.
You can test this with some app shortcut. It will have rounded shape. You will see this image shape only with dialer app or some other apps like music player.
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That is weird it was working fine until today that I ran this from the latest version. The complication on the bottom left is media controls and was also working fine earlier, on beta. On the other hand, App Shortcut icons have always been round even if the complication isn’t the circle one.
If you are just running on Device I’ve seen some issues with replacing one version with the next. I think it is caches or rebuilds over the old version. Anyway one person has suggested and I follow their lead and delete the watch face from the watch before running the same watch face on device. See if that makes a difference for you.
Ron
Samsung Developer Relations
This is still not working as of 1.4.20 I tried removing cache uninstalling previous iterations of the watchface and this is still not being masked by the circular bounds of the complication. Like I said, this was implemented right in the last beta and I also don’t think this is the expected outcome/behavior either for an icon or an image, a circle complication should be circular regardless of what it is showing, this is how the Google Pixel Watch stock watchfaces handles its content as show on this image.
Hi. I’m not sure if this is WFS issue. 1.4.13 had also text cropped in circle complications. It was really ugly. They fixed it with 1.4.20, now the text is allowed to go to the ‘real’ edge and adds (…) when necessary.
Maybe only thing that need to be fixed is how SMALL_IMAGE behaves is Circle complication slot.
Also, did you test the same watch face on Wear OS 4 emulator? Maybe there it would be working fine.
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If it was working and now it isn’t seems pretty clear to me that this is a WFS issue here, specially considering that text used to be masked by the boundaries of the circle and now it is allowed to go past them, I think they probably released the small_image from the mask in that process, which isn’t the expected behavior.
In fact, the whole point of it is for the content to be masked by the circle, EVEN TEXT in my opinion, it should be the designers job to accommodate for those boundaries, they are pretty clear in the interface so it is not a hard thing to do, this should probably be reversed as it was implemented right in the first place.
I did not test in wear os 4 emulator since this is supposed to work the same in stable isn’t it? 
why would the user be forced to wait for a future os version for things to work as expected.
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I can’t agree. Text and Title (in every complication slot) is implemented correctly in the WFS 1.4.20
Slot should not serve as masking element. No one wants to see text cropped and ugly as it was before.
Circle complications are most likely meant to be paired with small images and circular progress bars, text isn’t supposed to go over the progress bar so I think designers are supposed to work around those boundaries, the interface makes it pretty clear.
If we follow your logic and the complication should not mask its content then what is even the point of having a circle complication? on its current state it is basically behaving exactly as a box complication so again what is the point? it makes no sense.
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It is even explicitly stated in the WFS documentation.
The components implement the layout, and the slot bound a cut-out through which the complication component appears, in a similar way to masking.
source: https://developer.samsung.com/watch-face-studio/user-guide/complications.html
In my opinion if a designer does not want text to be masked by the circular slot bound then just use a box complication, as simple as that. I think you guys broke something that was working right when you marked it as a bug, this should be resolved ASAP because this implementation people asked for, basically killed the feature.
But we cannot use a box complication, if we want to pair, for example, a SHORT_TEXT with a RANGE_TEXT.
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We asked for it because RANGED_VALUE + SHORT_TEXT implementation can be only done within CIRCLE slot as @kswatch07 pointed.
This is something which is mostly used. The thing that you want - to have circular cropped contact or music artwork icon was and is negligible for most developers. But I understand what you described. It makes sense.
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Then adding ranged_value+short_text for small box complication is what should have been asked for specifically because as it is right now theres no circle at all on the circle complication which is completely nonsense.
I really disagree that this is negligible, this is basically what this complication is there for and documentation is very clear about it, almost every Google Pixel watchface has circular complications, all of them mask small_image and not a single line of text goes beyond its boundaries.
I am honestly surprised your request even made it to stable, this was a big mistake from Samsung and I hope it gets fixed soon.
This thing is evolving. We wanted cropped text to be fixed because it looked ugly. I’ll provide screenshots later. I’m pretty sure no one was looking at this circular crop because app shortcut icons is what almost every dev is using and it works just fine.
None of us knows how the WFS team will fix the bug. What will go wrong and so on.
It’s already there
Edit: This is what we wanted to fix in 1.4.13
We just wanted Text to respect slot boundaries differently and to not being cropped.
Now with 1.4.20 it works fine.
I think that masking enabled just for SMALL_IMAGE is possible to implement back as it was in 1.4.13, without breaking current text behavior.
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I’ll provide screenshots later. I’m pretty sure no one was looking at this circular crop because app shortcut icons is what almost every dev is using and it works just fine.
It’s not about what devs use it for, complications are customizable by the end user so it is about what users are using it for.
Edit: This is what we wanted to fix in 1.4.13
That is super easy to fix using the interface as a guide, if text goes past the boundaries of the circle crop that is the dev/designers fault and asking Samsung to accomodate for that is a very bad design practice since the touch target size and shape is supposed to be delimited by the circle as well, so having anything go beyond that creates a poor experience for the user because it implies the touch target is bigger than it actually is.
If you don’t want your text to get cropped, just make the text box smaller than the circle, the interface and the default preset when you create a new circle complication make this very clear as shown on this image, the 4 corners of each text frame respect the circle:
We just wanted Text to respect slot boundaries differently and to not being cropped.
Now with 1.4.20 it works fine.
I think that masking enabled just for SMALL_IMAGE is possible to implement back as it was in 1.4.13, without breaking current text behavior.
I’ll show you why that is bad practice with this image:
In this very common layout (which is even a similar layout to what Samsung uses for its Wear OS stock app drawer), having text boxes going past the circle creates conflict between the text boxes of every complication but even worse, if the touch target was allowed to go past the circle as well then you create a subpar user experience because now touch targets are all over the place and one over the other (yellow area), behavior becomes unpredictable, so again the circle should be the limit for every single item inside this kind of complication, not only small_image but text as well.
And here is how you should be doing it instead to prevent a bad user experience:
In this example no text will be cropped, no touching targets will conflict with others and the area outside of the circles will be clear (green strokes) so it is just a more predictable experience therefore a better approach.
Where were you when this was discussed? Now it’s easy to mope and complain. When there is new WFS version, test it, and report issues. It’s easy just to wait for others to report and wait for the fix and then complain. Really.
A quick reply to your deleted comment so I make this clear: I am not trying to mope anyone. I am here testing and reporting as well and you have been replying repeatedly that this is working fine when it clearly isn’t (as documentation shows) and that is honestly frustrating because you are saying that just because it suits your conflicting implementation and by doing that you minimize the attention to this report which increases the chances of it not getting fixed, but like I said, the worst part is that the current implementation encourages bad design practices and the user is the one that will be affected the most.
I’ll be honest, I am with amoledwatchfaces for this one, because using the circle shape as boundaries has problems in many use cases.
In this case, I had to make the complications bounds so much larger than it needed to be, just to make the text visible for the same amount of space.
It can easily overlap with the other complications you set and it can also reduce the area of a tap action that you set.
For example, I like to put gradients on the outline of the watchface to make it change colors. I used to tap on on the Steps data to change the colors easily. Now it’s harder because of the circle complication that overlaps it.
And the circle complication is the only one that links the RANGED_VALUE and SHORT_TEXT together.
I’m glad they made the change in 1.4.20, because it took a lot of space. Especially when you want to show the data in a rectangular (bar) form, where you have to squeeze the circle area but keep it large enough so that the Text didn’t go out of bounds.
This can be problematic for many watchfaces that have SHORT_TEXT complications on top of each other, that would benefit from being combined with the RANGED_VALUE complication, and I can cite many examples, just from MD’s catalog alone.
Now I don’t mind if they revert to the old slot bounds behaviour and keep the circle shape.
But only if they also add a SHORT_TEXT, RANGE_TEXT, SMALL_IMAGE, ICON in a box/rectangular form.
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So you’re teaching me how to design watch faces, wow! Looks like the most complex thing you’ve done is sone app shortcut complication. Of course you can use 12px font to fit the complication slot. User will be so happy with the result so he will need to use glasses to read watch face values.
I’m done trying to explain to you what we wanted to achieve and why. I also wrote that I understand what you are trying to do and that it makes sense. However, you still continue to make some senseless accusations about the situation that occurred. We just wanted to be able to update a bunch of watch faces that were working fine so far. There are xx developers who supported this change. If it was complete nonsense, no one would ask…
Yes, I deleted some messages because I didn’t want to sound rude. Maybe I didn’t even have to do that…
Really? By replying to your messages I’m keeping the thread active…
Thanks @kswatch07 for more explanation.
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I am not teaching you how to design, I have seen your work and it looks great but you are getting things mixed here, this is not about our personal work, I am showing examples of why the current implementation is conflicting with both WFS documentation + Android design guidelines and also the workaround killed the circle complication in the process.
I am not against only fixing the small_image type, tho again, I think it encourages bad design practices. There is a better solution (enabling ranged values on the small box complication).
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I’m glad they made the change in 1.4.20, because it took a lot of space. Especially when you want to show the data in a rectangular (bar) form, where you have to squeeze the circle area but keep it large enough so that the Text didn’t go out of bounds.
Yes I think the real problem here is that you are being forced to use a circular complication on a rectangular shaped area which is indeed conflicting, that’s why I think a better solution is to enable RANGED_VALUE and SHORT_TEXT on small box complication, that way both can be used the way they were meant to.