Pebble Developer Blog

Can you believe it's already been a month since the developer retreat? This blog post is long overdue but it was waiting for some very important content so that I could share some highlights from the retreat! I asked the retreat attendees what their favorite presentations/parts of the retreat were and I think these represent some of the best. If you don't agree, then tell me in the comments!

Check out the full developer retreat recap broken down day by day in the community section of our new developer website! We're still working on a video montage of the robotics competition so that should be on the website soon! For even more detail on what this awesome group of 100 developers from around the world got up to check out our full schedule.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

The old adage applies just as well to your Pebble apps! One of the most common requests when we attend hackathons is "How do I transfer an image from the Internet to my Pebble app?".

Today we introduce a new example that demonstrates downloading a PNG file from the Internet and loading it on Pebble. We will also cover how to prepare your images so that they take as little memory as possible and load quickly on Pebble.

The code is available in our pebble-examples github account. Continue reading for more details!

As part of our commitment to the open source community, Pebble is releasing its recent modifications to the FreeRTOS project. Pebble has made a few minor changes to FreeRTOS to enable Background Workers for PebbleOS 2.6 as well as to make Pebble easier to monitor and debug.

The changes are available as a tarball.

Below is a changelog of the modifications since the last time we released our fork of the FreeRTOS code back in May.

CloudPebble today gains significantly enhanced support for code completion, as well as inline syntax checking and the ability to "go to definition".

Check it out!

Today we released SDK 2.6.1, which includes support for background workers. This enables great activity tracking apps like Misfit and Jawbone's Up to keep counting in the background — and you can use them too! Head over to our background worker guide and read through the API documentation to find out how.

We have also added APIs for direct access to the framebuffer, and to retrieve information on the watch, including its color and firmware version.

Browse through the release notes for full details.

Almost two months ago the XDA Forums and Pebble set out on a mission to find three amazing apps/watchfaces and their developers. We called it the XDA - Pebble Developer Challenge and last Friday it all came to a close! These three developers have taken the Pebble and truly stretched its limits to create some amazing products and we want to show them to you!

The XDA - Pebble Developer Challenge was a 3-week competition - your opportunity to pitch your proposal for the best Pebble app and bring it to life with a Pebble of your own. Of the 20 proposals that we selected for the second phase, the developers of the best three Pebble apps have been invited to attend the 2014 Pebble Developer Retreat in October. We also gave each of them a Pebble Steel to flaunt!

There were a lot of really great entries to the second phase of the competition and all of them deserve a quick download! Check out the complete list of apps and watchfaces that were made during the competition on the XDA forums.

This is a guest post by Chris Ismael, Senior Developer Evangelist at Concur. Developers use Concur's APIs to reinvent their travel apps into time and money-saving tools for the business traveler. Concur and Pebble are sponsoring the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon 2014 in San Francisco. You can also get a shot at $100K prize for the best travel app at The Perfect Trip Fund Awards. (Special thanks to Ethan Fan and Gabi Zuniga for the source code).

The Pebble SDK makes it easy to build Pebble apps that call cloud APIs. It also facilitates communication between your Pebble smartwatch app and your smartphone. Add to this the fact that your development environment is run from the browser (no installation horror!) - you know you've got a winner.

We are pleased to announce that we will soon be automatically updating apps installed from the Pebble appstore. We believe this will be a significant improvement to your ability to get your work into the hands of your users, as well as to the user experience.

However, as developers, you need to make sure that your app is ready for these updates. In particular, you will need to make sure that your app conforms to our new version numbering, and that it can tolerate persistent storage left over from old app versions.