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Comment by abraxas | Hacker News Reader

Getting into the swim app itself takes a couple of different buttons presses. But then it tries to be both too smart and too stupid at the same time. All I wanted to begin with was lap counting with a big number on the centre of the display. Can't configure it and can't even start to get it to count laps without some ceremony of setting up interval training and it only gets more convoluted from there. It's useless for an amateur like me who is not a peak performance athlete who needs to track every minutiae of their swim stats. How many people are they targeting with these this UX? Just people getting ready for the Olympics? There are hundreds of them. Hundreds!

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I don't think you're being serious. I have had several Garmin watches and this is not an actual problem. I do both pool swim and open water activities and it's very easy to count laps. Sometimes I set up structured workouts but that's completely optional.

My vivoactive 5 swimming is top right button short press (activities) scroll tap swim. Top right to start. Screen shows only interval time and distance or laps (configurable). Bottom goes to interval rest. Lots more data and a rest timer. Bottom starts swimming again. Top stops the activity. Long press top to save, bottom to discard.

All operations are buttons because the touch doesn't work well with water on basically every device.

Literally 3 clicks to a large lap counter.

> scroll tap swim

this watch has no touch interface. any scrolling and selecting has to be done via the five buttons which I ALWAYS somehow get wrong. Who on this beautiful earth thought it was sane to make the bottom right button be the "Back" button in a L2R (English) locale?

you replied to a thread talking about garmin watches... not the pebble

I really can't understand what you're complaining about. There's nothing about the English locale which implies an optimal placement for the Back button. The same devices are also sold in other locales.

These devices have to work in all conditions with some complex functionality available through only five buttons so some level of overlap is unavoidable. Do you also complain that your computer keyboard lacks separate buttons for "4" and "$"?

Ideally, in LTR locales, we move from left to right. This means that objects appear from the right side of the screen (as going forward would mean going right), and a back button is more intuitively perceived on the left side.

No, that's not how it works. Especially not on a wrist device.

https://crossvine.nyc3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/20250128_0...

But I'd have to try actually swimming with it I guess. It always counts my reps in strength training pretty accurately.

Edit: But then again, if you want to manually track laps, the swimming app doesn't matter. It's only there for the convenience of not having to press a button to increment the counter. You can just copy the "other" activity, name it something like "manual swim" with the lap button enabled. The only thing that differentiates the swim activity from a regular activity is setting the pool length, stroke detection, and automatic lap incrementing. The data is still getting logged the same way as far as I can tell, so using the "other" activity would give you all the data you need to track the swim.

Sounds like you might need to turn off a few defaults to make it easier.

It should just be a case of pressing the start button, navigating to the pool swim activity and pressing start.

Use the lap button to record rest intervals at the wall, everything else is automatic

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