Pebble Developer Blog

Creating companion apps using PebbleKit Android and PebbleKit iOS is a great way to extend the functionality of your Pebble watchfaces and apps, but what if Java or Objective C just isn't your thing? What if you love JavaScript? What if you just don't want to write the same companion app twice?

Now you don't have to! Enter Cordova - an open source framework for building cross-platform mobile apps using web technologies such as HTML5 and JavaScript. What does this mean for you? One framework, and one codebase for building Pebble companion apps for iOS and Android!

It is with great pleasure that I present to you, Clay, a Pebble package that makes it easy to add offline configuration pages to your Pebble apps. All you need to get started is a couple lines of JavaScript and a JSON file; no servers, HTML or CSS required.

Developers rejoice - we’ve released the first version of our SDK 4 developer preview! This SDK enables you to start building applications for the new Diorite platform (Pebble 2), and includes a set of new APIs for interacting with the 4.0 user experience.

In this blog post we’ll dive into the App Glance, UnobstructedArea, and AppExitReason APIs, and explain how you can use them to create great experiences for your users!

I am thrilled to announce that, as part of SDK 3.13 and Pebble Tool 4.3, we have launched our own packaging system: Pebble Packages!

You might have noticed a bit of a buzz around Pebble today - we have officially launched our third Kickstarter campaign, and it is jam packed with exciting new products and features for developers to explore and hack on. We have been hard at work not only creating the next generation of health-focused smartwatches, but also refining what great wearable user and developer experiences look like. We are introducing an entirely new class of wearable device, and adding a modern JavaScript SDK that takes advantage of the Web APIs JavaScript developers around the world know and love.

There is a lot to take in, so we’re here to help break down what’s new and exciting for our favorite developer community!

This is a guest blog post from Powerstrap, the team behind Pal, a GPS and battery extending smartstrap that launched on Kickstarter this week:

kickstarter.com/projects/655382546/pal-strap-gps-and-extended-battery-strap-for-pebbl

Powerstrap is incredibly excited to share that our Kickstarter for the world’s first GPS and battery Smartstrap for Pebble Time and Pebble Time Steel watches is now live! We have been working very closely with Pebble to provide the best strap for this amazing community since 2014 and the time (pun intended) is finally here to share it with everyone!

After many morning coding sessions on the weekends, Pebble.js has been updated to support the Chalk platform (Pebble Time Round). This update is available in CloudPebble, and ready for you to work with right in your browser with no setup!

Supporting Chalk required a ton of bug crushing to become compatible with the new 3.0 style status bar, changes to accommodate reduced memory on the 3.x Aplite platform, adding new features such as text flow and paging, and making it easier to target multiple platforms by adding a feature detection API.

This is a guest blog post from Mike Jipping, professor of Computer Science at Hope College (Michigan, USA), who has been writing an open source book which teaches the C programming language using Pebble smartwatches.

If you want to learn to program using the C programming language, you have lots of choices. C has been around a while, so there are many textbooks and lots of Web sites that have information on the language. Most are very general, with examples and projects that you could run on any general purpose computer. Very few are tailored to embedded systems and none are targeted at smartwatches, until now, that is.