Upon receiving the 4.4W.2 update on my G Watch, I noticed that notification cards weren’t appearing on my watch face anymore. Of course, I could still see them if I swiped up. The way I was expecting it to work was that the most recent notification card would appear over my watch face, but the update would now allow me to swipe down, thus removing it from my watch face, but not clearing it. I immediately posted on Google+, but nobody knew what was going on.
Turns out that Google made a change to the Android Wear app that controls this. In previous versions of the Android Wear app, there was a setting for, “Hide cards on dimmed screen.” This would simply hide your most recent notification card from the “Always On” or Ambient Screen,” but it would still show up when your watch face lit up. With the latest update to the app (1.0.2.1534065), that setting becomes “Card Preview.” Putting the terminology aside, both the old and new version of this setting operate exactly the same. Here’s how they work.
Assuming you have the 4.4.W.2 update on your watch, open your Android Wear app and tap on the double gears icon at the top right to open the Settings. If you still have the older version of the app (1.0.2.1476973), you will see “Hide cards on dimmed screen.” Tap on that and you will have two choices: Always show or Always hide. If you choose Always show, you will see notification cards on both the “Always On” (or Ambient Screen for Moto 360) display and the fully active waked display. You can still swipe down on the notification card when your display is awake, revealing your full watch face. However, if you would rather there be no notification card ever on the watch face, you can select Always hide. You won’t see notification cards on either the “Always On” display or the the waked display. You can still swipe up to see all your notifications, plus new incoming notifications will always appear on your watch face for a few seconds just like before.
If you have Android Wear 1.0.2.1534065 or higher, you will get the same exact feature, just with different terminology. Just open the Android Wear app and tap on the double gears icon at the top right to open the Settings. You will now see “Card Preview.” Tapping on that will give you two choices: Watch face sets card preview or None. Selecting Watch face sets card preview will show notification cards on both the “Always On” display as well as the fully active display. Just like with the previous version of Android Wear, you will still be able to swipe down on the most recent notification card, revealing your full watch face. If you instead select None, you won’t see notification cards on either the “Always On” display or when the display is waked. You will still be able to swipe up to see all your notification cards, and you will still see new incoming notifications for a few seconds.
For whatever reason Google made this an all or nothing proposition. I would imagine some people might not mind notification cards on the active display, but not on the “Always On” display, which is exactly how it was before the 4.4W.2 update. However, there is no option for that at this time.
I put together a video showing you how both versions of the app works……
Click here to view the embedded video.
I hope this guide helped you. If I missed anything, please let me know in the comments.
source: Android Police
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