Thursday 9 April 2015

Pebble Meetup London

There’s a definite buzz in the air around watches this week — with the Apple Watch due for pre-order tomorrow and Pebble Time just finished its Kickstarter…

Here’s my notes from tonight’s Pebble Meetup — a big turnout of mostly developers and lots of people interested in building new apps.

pebble & evernote

Damian Mehers (@DamianMehers), Senior Software Engineer, Wearables, Evernote

  • have to wait for iOS app to be released for store to be updated (?)
  • initially limited to 120 bytes in messages sent to watch
    • bigger messages allowed now
  • Evernote app pages data into watch (using most recently used caches)
  • attaches a data structure to each window
  • had to implement an Evernote sync engine in Javascript…
    • using local storage
  • timeline allows contextually relevant info
    • possible to query timeline to join with other info?
  • want to get wearable use to be partly subconscious
    • making use of the basal ganglia :-)
  • to keep a pebble timeline continually updated, need something running continually
    • JS in Pebble app doesn’t

pebble time & new SDK

Matthew Tole (@MatthewTole), Pebble Developer Evangelist

  • colors all have names :-)
  • PNG & APNG (animated) support (auto-conversion of GIF files)
  • AppFaces — 3.0 launch only for system apps
    • a peek into your app’s current status
  • pebble drawing commands
    • will have conversion from SVG — some kind of extension of GPath
    • define an SVG in a cyclical form — easy to morph to new forms

timeline

  • will have built-in calendar & weather support
  • can have actions
    • initially just open app with parameter
    • but will allow more later
  • can push notifications through server-side web api

new designs

  • encouraged to make all apps backwards compatible
  • recommended to stick each screen to one or two colours