Northline
· v2.71
About
Northline hangs the whole layout off a single vertical margin instead of centering it. The time sits large and left-aligned, an arc across the top tracks whatever you care about, and the lower third is left deliberately open - so the face reads in a glance instead of asking you to hunt.
SUPPORT NORTHLINE Northline is free. No ads, no trial, no locked "pro" tier, and nothing leaves your watch - every setting is unlocked the moment you install it, and it stays that way.
If it earns a place on your wrist and you would like to leave something, there is a tip jar at https://paypal.me/sendhere9 - entirely optional, and it unlocks nothing, because there is nothing to unlock. A rating or a short review helps just as much and costs nothing at all.
I built it because I wanted this face on my own wrist. Doing it properly took the quiet evenings: every screen size laid out by hand, an always-on frame that respects your battery and your display, a typeface licensed so it can be given away freely.
Either way, thank you for wearing it.
THE LAYOUT
Oversized left-aligned time in your watch's own crisp system font
Live seconds in your accent color, with AM/PM stacked beneath
Weekday, date and AM/PM on the left margin, weather on the right
A hairline rule under the time that fills across as the day progresses
Three data stats, icon over value - no boxes, no clutter
An open lower third holding only small Bluetooth and alarm indicators, and a red battery warning when the charge gets low
A TOP ARC THAT TRACKS WHAT YOU WANT
Steps goal (default), day progress, watch battery, body battery, weekly intensity minutes, floors goal - or switch it off entirely
Fills from left to right in your accent color against a gray track
Hides itself instead of showing a wrong value when a goal is unset or a metric is unavailable on your watch
THREE CONFIGURABLE STATS
Each of the left, middle and right slots is set independently
Nineteen sources: heart rate, steps, distance, calories, floors climbed, intensity minutes, body battery, watch battery, stress, pulse ox, respiration, temperature, altitude, pressure, notifications, sunrise, sunset, date, or off
The weather icon follows real conditions - clear, cloud, rain, snow, storm, fog - and switches to a moon after dark
MADE TO MATCH YOUR WATCH
Two time sizes: Largest, the default, gives every spare pixel to the clock; Balanced brings back the seconds and AM/PM beside it
Twenty-four accent colors, from orange and amber through coral, rose, magenta, violet, indigo, cyan, teal, mint and lime to sand, ice and slate
Seconds can be turned off to save battery
True-black background - on AMOLED watches, black pixels draw no power
BUILT FOR THE HARDWARE
On AMOLED watches with always-on display, the low-power screen shows a dimmed time that shifts position each minute, respecting Garmin's burn-in protection and pixel budget
On MIP watches the full face stays visible, minus the ticking seconds
Seconds repaint in a small clipped region rather than redrawing the whole screen, so the per-second update stays cheap
Layout is authored once and scaled to every supported screen size
What's new
Version 2.71
Steps complication icon is now white.
Version 2.7
Long-press anywhere above the time - the arc or the weekday, date and
temperature row - to open weather, whatever the three stats are set to.
Same device requirement as the stat long-press below.
Version 2.6
- Long-press a stat to open the app behind it. Press and hold the heart rate
and the heart rate glance opens; hold body battery, steps, weather, or any
of twenty-eight sources and you land in the matching Garmin screen.
Needs a watch with watch-face touch support - fenix 7 and 8, epix, Venu 2
and 3, Forerunner 265/570/955/965/970, vivoactive 5 and 6, Instinct 3
AMOLED and others. Older watches keep the face exactly as it was.
- Adds the Complication Subscriber permission, which is what lets the face
ask the system to open those screens. Nothing is transmitted; the face
still has no internet permission and no background service.
Version 2.5
Settings can now be changed on the watch itself. Open the watch face's
settings and press MENU: accent colour, icon colour, time size, seconds,
the top arc and all three stat slots are there, no phone needed.
Icons are coloured by what they show - heart red, steps green, floors
cyan, body battery blue - so the row can be read at a glance. The battery
icon tracks the charge, green through amber to red. Prefer the old look?
Icon color can be set back to the accent colour, or plain white.
Twelve more stat sources, thirty-one in all: high/low, feels like,
humidity, wind, chance of rain, battery days, move bar, active minutes
today, recovery time, VO2 max, week number and steps to goal.
Version 2.4
Accent colours apply reliably again. The face now accepts the colour
setting in either form it can arrive in, so no combination of watch and
phone can leave the control doing nothing. Whatever colour you had chosen
is kept.
Version 2.3
Fixes accent colours that would not apply. The setting stored a position in
a list, so if the watch was running a slightly different build from the one
the phone was showing settings for, the newer colours silently fell back to
orange and the control looked broken. It now stores the colour itself, which
cannot fall out of step. Any colour you had chosen before is kept.
Version 2.2
Nine more stat sources: distance, intensity minutes, temperature, altitude, pressure, stress, pulse ox, respiration and date - nineteen in all, and any of them can go in any of the three slots
Twenty-four accent colors, up from seven, including coral, rose, magenta, violet, cyan, teal, mint, lime, sand, ice and slate
A low-battery warning appears on the lower third when the charge runs down, so the face is no longer silent about it
Sources that a watch cannot supply now show a dash instead of a zero
Version 1.0
First release
Left-anchored layout with oversized time and an open lower third
Configurable top arc: steps, day progress, battery, body battery, intensity minutes, floors, or off
Three independently configurable stat slots, ten sources each
Seven accent colors and an optional seconds display
Always-on display support with burn-in protection on AMOLED watches