How do these things work?

Nope. Go to the Fossil page and hit "zoom photo" and you'll be able to see
the segments of the digits. They're the usual fixed segments, of a numeric
display, just funny shaped to mimic handwritten script and maybe a few more
segments than usual. In a pixel mapped display you wouldn't see the segment
outlines but in a zoomed in view you'd see the "jaggies" on the curves,
which would ruin the sleek effect of the handwritten font. I'm pretty
confident that the "til" , "after" etc. icons are separate segments that
are mapped "on" or "off" as a single element.

The programming is much easier for this kind of display than for a pixel map
but you have to have the ability to make a custom LCD screen just for this
watch. Instead of driving hundreds or thousands of pixels, you just have to
drive a handful of segments. with predefined mappings for each of the
digits. Fossil has a lot of experience with custom screens - they have all
kinds of LCD watches that display Chinese characters , etc.

...

It's a little more complex than that. ;-) The display this watch is
using is most likely similar to what you'd find in an older cell phone.
IOW, it's a pixel oriented graphics display (like a PC uses) instead of
a custom LCD that can only display fixed patterns. I'm reasonably sure
that by now these little displays can be had in bulk for around $1 each.
Certainly for a cost that would rival that of a traditional dial and
hands.

I did something like this, on a larger scale, using a 4" x 6" graphical
LCD display and an 8052 type microcontroller to keep time and drive the
display. I used the windos paint program to create bitmap images of the
numbers I wanted to display; courtesy of an OCR font that I had
available. ;-) I then converted that to C #include file descriptions
for use by the clock software by using some other glommed together
program that "cut" the numbers out of the bitmap. Just another stupid
micro trick, but it looked pretty cool with the OCR characters.

Hello NG:

In case someone of you is interested in digital watch programming,
Timex sells their Timex Datalink watch that can be programmed by its
user.
The application is developed in your PC and its behaviour simulated on
a desktop interpreter. When the application is ready to be deployed, it
is "cross-compiled" and then installed into the watch via a USB
connector.

See the url:
#

Regards,

Sergio G.

To expand on what our saintly friend said,

in addition to the usual digits there are

there are 3 extra segments of the lcd that light up "after", "half past" and
"til". Then it is just a few lines of code:

If minute counter is less than 30, display the minutes, the "after" segment
and the current hour.

If minutes = 30, display no minutes, display "half past" and display the
hour.

If minutes
This is around ten minutes worth of programming over and above what it would
take to make a "normal" LCD watch, plus you need a customs LCD screen. But
it ain't rocket science - in the mechanical era you had to be real clever to
pull off any kind of complication but in the electronic era it's just typing
at a keyboard, basically.

Like many quartz watches, they incorporate a microprocessor, so the
output is a SMOP (simple matter of programming).

--
St. John
Common sense is the most evenly distributed quantity in the world.
Everyone thinks he has enough.
-Descartes, 1637