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Questions about Refresh Interval
https://www.bbs.xwidget.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=4555		 Page 1 of 1
Author:  CoolWidgets [ May 17th, 2014, 6:09 am ]
Post subject:  Questions about Refresh Interval
Greetings!

I've just recently come across XWidget, and I'm really pleased so far! :D

I have some questions about some Refresh/Update settings in the Editor:
  1. I see that the setting "Updated every minute" overrides the setting "Refresh interval (ms)". Does the setting in the Desktop Editor "Updated every minute" correspond to the Android Editor setting of "Only Update When Minute Changed"? I assume they are the same, but I just want to make sure.
  2. In accweathercore1 it looks like the default Refresh interval is 30 minutes. Is this a different setting than the "Update Interval" that the user can define in Weather Details? If it is different, what is the difference (ie, what is it that "Refresh interval" is doing on the back end?)?
  3. This is partly dependent on the answer to the previous question: In accweathercore1, what would be the performance impact (particularly on Android) on CPU & Battery of setting it to "Updated every minute"? This is assuming that in the previous question that this setting does something differently than the user-defined setting of "Update Interval".
  4. I am trying to make use of the accweathercore1 feature of "${updateMinutesAgo}", but what I'm running into is that the number only updates when the weather has been updated, which makes the number kind of useless (eg, it will say "12 Minutes" for many minutes). Is there a way to make this number automatically update (ideally, every minute) so that it more accurately reflects how many minutes ago the weather was last updated? I have tried setting accweathercore1 to "Updated every minute" but that doesn't seem to be updating the "${updateMinutesAgo}" value (without either manual intervention or just waiting until the next update as defined by the User, eg, 15 minutes). Am I missing something? I also experimented a little with NumbImage, but couldn't get it to display numbers (perhaps because it needs numbers to be embedded as a multi-part image?).
  5. On Android, is there much difference in CPU & Battery usage to set the batterycore1 to a Refresh interval of 1.0 Seconds vs setting it to "Updated every minute"? I am thinking of using "Updated every minute" as that's probably accurate enough, but if it makes no difference to CPU & Battery usage to set it to every 1.0 seconds I might use that if it is more accurate.
Thanks in advance for any help!
:)
Author:  Jimking [ May 17th, 2014, 7:06 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Questions about Refresh Interval
1) The enable "Update" option means that the widget will update its functions in general, the "Refresh Interval" in the time between the update.
On Android is important for the datetimecore. Changing/unchecking the option "Updated every minute" serves for the clock widgets if you want to use seconds clock hands. But is not recommended because the app will use more ram/battery.
2) As I told you the " Refresh interval" is the generic update function. Looking in the accuweather's core tags you will find some more displaying options about the update time.
3) I don't think that there will be so much difference in ram/battery consumption. A little bit yes.. (wifi should enable for automatic update)
4) I don't know if this can be changed though a script for using the default tags works only like this. Don't waste your time with NumbImages or png for this function. Will not work.
5) On Android the default 1sec update interval is the better way for cores like battery. Changing to 1min, you will not be so accurate and then honestly I don't think that you will earn something on battery life. XWidget app uses already minimal resources, no background processes and is very battery friendly near to 0%.

pm: On android we have battery and RAM consumption for the widgets, not cpu!
Author:  CoolWidgets [ May 17th, 2014, 10:22 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Questions about Refresh Interval
Thanks for all that--that's very helpful! :)

Regarding #2: So do the core settings of "Updated every minute" and "Refresh interval" mainly effect things like updating the display? In particular, for the accweathercore1, if I set it to "Updated every minute" does that mean it just checks every minute if new weather data was pulled down (according to the User Update setting, which can't be more frequent than 15 minutes)? Or does configuring the accweathercore1 to "Updated every minute" mean that it will actually check the server for weather updates every minute (which would be wasteful to my battery, probably)?

What do you recommend setting accweathercore1 to: "Updated every minute" or "Refresh interval of 30 minutes" (or something else?)?

Also, you don't happen to know of a easy way to make "${lastRefreshTime}" display in 12hr format, do you (ie, some additional code to add to convert it somehow)?

Thanks!
Author:  Jimking [ May 17th, 2014, 10:36 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Questions about Refresh Interval
Quote:
What do you recommend setting accweathercore1 to: "Updated every minute" or "Refresh interval of 30 minutes" (or something else?)?

Personally I leave all the update/refresh settings to the default values. I think that there is no sense for the weather an interval under 15min. 30mins I think it's more than ok. And you will be sure that the battery/ram consumption will stay low.

Quote:
Also, you don't happen to know of a easy way to make "${lastRefreshTime}" display in 12hr format, do you (ie, some additional code to add to convert it somehow)?

This can be done though script code (if I remember well you will find the answer though "Bugs & Feature Suggestions" section)
BUT since the app doesn't support (yet?) script code, will be useless for Android.
Author:  CoolWidgets [ May 18th, 2014, 11:33 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Questions about Refresh Interval
Thanks that info and your thoughts. :)

A few other clarifications; tell me if these are correct:
  • ${updateTime} is when the weather server last updated it's weather data.
  • ${updateMinutesAgo} is how many minutes ago the server updated it's weather data.
  • ${lastRefreshTime} is the last time the Widget (either per the User settings, or by manually requesting an Update) checked the server, but is different from how current the weather data actually is (which it seems is dependent on when the server was last updated).

Also, for ${updateTime} I'm sometimes seeing values like "15:3" or "15:6" (on Windows). I'm not sure what that means. Values like "15:20" have displayed just fine, so it doesn't seem that a trailing "0" is being dropped (though maybe it is a leading zero, eg, 15:03?).

Aside from the above weirdness (possible bug?) with ${updateTime}, it seems that ${updateTime} is the best variable to use if I want to know how current the displayed weather data is. Because ${lastRefreshTime} only seems to tell me when the widget last tried to refresh it's data for display, but that value seems to get updated even when I know that there is no new data to display because the Android device has not had access to the internet yet. So ${lastRefreshTime} ends up being misleading (for my purposes anyway). Thoughts?

:)
Author:  Jimking [ May 18th, 2014, 12:19 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Questions about Refresh Interval
There is no bug @CoolWidgets.
The tags of the designer are:
1) ${updateTime} : Last update time on server
2) ${lastRefreshTime} : Last update time on local time
3) ${updateMinutesAgo} : The last time you updated the weather.

Personally I use the num 2 for my widgets that I think has the most sense know when was the last time that you update the weather.
Now about the values like "15:3" means 15:30. As I told you the 12h mode for displaying the update can be fixed or changed though a script. But surely this a thing that should be fixed on the next version of xwidget..
The dev is working on the XW v2 and many of these little "issues" I think that will be fixed.
Author:  CoolWidgets [ May 18th, 2014, 1:08 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Questions about Refresh Interval
jimking wrote:
There is no bug @CoolWidgets.
The tags of the designer are:
1) ${updateTime} : Last update time on server
2) ${lastRefreshTime} : Last update time on local time
3) ${updateMinutesAgo} : The last time you updated the weather.

I wasn't meaning to suggest there were bugs with the above--I just was trying to be sure I was understanding what each does.

jimking wrote:
Personally I use the num 2 for my widgets that I think has the most sense know when was the last time that you update the weather.

Cool, thanks for your thoughts!

jimking wrote:
Now about the values like "15:3" means 15:30.

I actually think it probably means "15:03", because "15:20" displayed fine so it would be inconsistent if "15:3" means "15:30" when "15:20" is displayed correctly as "15:20". But, I don't know how the data is being processed on the backend, so I could be wrong. :?

jimking wrote:
But surely this a thing that should be fixed on the next version of xwidget..
The dev is working on the XW v2 and many of these little "issues" I think that will be fixed.

Great--I look forward to v2! The current version has a lot of great things about it, and it looks like you personally have contributed quite a bit of widgets. :) I look forward to more bug fixes and improvements in future updates and eventually in v2.
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