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
