2021 Connect IQ Developer Award Winners

Best Edge App

Wind Direction by peterdedecker

This data field shows the currently forecast wind direction & speed in relation to your direction of travel. Your cycling speed IS taken into account but the actual wind direction and speed are not known. It would be very interesting to see something that links to products like Velocomp Aeropod or the elusive Garmin Air in order to combine actual wind measurements. You should also know that Peter Dedecker is a prolific CIQ developer and has other good apps and my understanding is that he is incorporating this WIND data field into one of his other data fields that combines multiple data fields into one data field hence bypassing limits on the number of data fields you can use.

Best New Watch Face

SHN TxD (Tactix D style) by SHN

SHN won last year as well. Nice job.

As our smartwatches become more entwined with our 24×7 lives then the face on display is important from both an aesthetic and functional point of view. You will have your own take on each of those facets and what’s best for you. My personal choice for a smartwatch is the Apple Watch 6/SE which is superior to any Garmin watch in most respects…except sport! For both Garmin and Apple, watch power consumption is an ever-present issue; Garmin has under-powered watches and Apple has to control screen usage VERY tightly in order to keep the battery life up to its customers’ expectations…consequently, Apple is restrictive about how complications are allowed to use the active watch face but nevertheless an Apple Watch’s ability to curate watch faces is an interesting contrast to the approach taken by Garmin and worth a look for those of you who might be interested. [Thoughts on Garmin & Apple Sports Watchfaces]

Fun Fact: 80% of you who click from this post to the Garmin Connect store have clicked for this watch face…I’m surprised!

Best Audio App

Podcasts by LucaSax

I do like listening to ‘interesting stuff’ and so I should perhaps be an avid podcast devotee…but I’m not. I tend to run occasionally to music and never to podcasts. I did look at some Garmin podcast software a couple of years back and the RunCast CIQ app was pretty cool. HOWEVER, it required payment to be useful and so you might find Podcasts by LucaSax a better alternative if you want a freebie.

Best Active Lifestyle App

SwimSports+ by f3b

I didn’t quite get the purpose of this app at first. However, as it was written by 2019 winner F3B I decided to take a look.

My understanding is that this is a CIQ App for lower/mid-range Garmin watches that lack a specific swimming sports profile, effectively adding in all the ones that Garmin has omitted! I’ll have to see if he covers my indoor VASA swim trainer but I suspect not! (It’s like a Concept Rower but for front crawl swimming). This class of CIQ apps and/or data fields can be very useful if you want to boost the fitness features of your Garmin watch. I refer again to my Vasa Trainer…it produces power and so I want to log power and I want to do that in a sports profile that is correctly saved as a ‘swim’ of some sort – there are a variety of reasons why I ‘need’ to do that but the only solution for me is to copy an open water swim profile (so it records as a swim with swim metrics) and then use a 3rd party CIQ field that can be linked to a power meter (no Garmin watch can pair/use a power meter in swim mode).

Best Wearable Smart App

FeverMonitor by dev372

This widget turns your watch into a smart thermometer, automatically tracking your body temperature throughout the week and alerting you to any abnormal temperature changes. The app has mixed review and people seem to either love it or hate I. Personally, I don’t see how the body temperature data will be accurate as I believe that data comes from the watch. If data instead came from an accurate thermometer like CORE which measures skin temperature and core temperature then my opinion would change.