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