Pebble Timeline Challenge Week 10 Winner - 8-A-Day!

Doctors have been telling us this for years: drink 8 glasses of water a day, preferably more. Now, with the 10th winner of the Pebble Timeline Challenge, 8-A-Day, you can have your Pebble remind you instead! Get pinged hourly, and use your timeline to stay healthy and hydrated.

At 9 AM in your local time zone, you'll receive a notification reminding you to drink your first glass of water. You can input whether or not you've finished a glass, or choose to stop the notifications. If you continue receiving notifications, a pin will appear in an hour reminding you to continue drinking water. This pattern will continue throughout the day, and at the end of the day you'll receive a summary of your daily water intake.

An Australian developer, Stephen Rees-Carter, developed this app after conversations with his wife about the idea. A web developer by training, he was excited to use his PHP skills to create an app for the timeline. Here are some of the features he used in his application.

• Timeline for reminders, notifications, and updates
• PebbleKit JS for external API calls
• PHP API Wrapper
• An external PHP Application for logging and reminding the user

Read on to hear more about Stephen and his app.

Q&A with Stephen

Tell us about your experience with Pebble development.

It's been surprisingly easy to pick it up. A few months ago I hadn't even touched a Pebble, let alone done any Pebble development! I loved the idea of the timeline when the kickstarter campaign was launched, so I backed it, and when the timeline challenge was announced I thought to myself: I'm a web developer, why not give it a go, and so I did. The C proved to be the hard part, since as I'm a PHP developer, it proved to be frustratingly basic, but the Javascript was familiar territory. That said, getting my head around the split between C on the watch and JS on the phone took some effort, but once I got that sorted, it was good fun, and the SDK and CloudPebble made things easy.

After I completed 8-A-Day, I had an idea for a multi-player game built within the timeline, Timeline Tag. As I'd already built my infrastructure for 8-A-Day, it took very little effort to build the game and get it live - which I was pretty happy about, and it shows how easy it is to get an app going.

What is the backstory behind 8-A-Day?

My wife and I were learning Android development when I decided to go for the challenge, and she had a great idea for an Android app that reminds you to drink water throughout the day... so I shamelessly stole it, as I thought it'd be an awesome idea for a Pebble Timeline app. It turns out that it works really well in the timeline, and a number of the issues that we were having with that Android app were non-issues in the timeline. For example, it's easy to go back, or forward, in time to find a notification when you have another drink - something you can't with a traditional Android notification.

Tell a bit about the creation of 8-A-Day.

I figured that since the timeline API is a web based system, it would make sense for me to build a simple PHP API server (using Laravel's Lumen, for those that are interested) to power the app. This turned out to be a good decision, as I only had to do minimal work on the C and JS parts of the Pebble app - most of the logic is actually in my PHP app, which was easier for me to work with, and it meant I was able to spend more time optimising the look and feel of the timeline pins.

Once I had a working app and server, the next step was testing... If you've ever worked with an app that has to fire notifications at specific times of the day, and handle repeating notifications within a specific time window, you'll know it's really, really hard to test! You have to spend days just watching and remembering what you've done with the app to make sure it's doing what it's supposed to be doing. It's worse when you're stuck using an emulator, and you need to leave your computer frequently during the 11 hour window that the app is running.

What were some challenges you faced?

I faced two challenges with 8-A-Day. The first one was dealing with timezones. The timeline API accepts pins with UTC timestamps, however 8-A-Day creates pins at 9am and 8pm in the local time of the Pebble. After a bit of searching I found a way to get the minute offset amount, and now every request to my server contains the offset so the server can figure out what timestamp to use.

The second challenge was getting the watch to communicate with the phone (well, emulator, at the time) as it only seemed to work occasionally. After some searching, I found a suggestion to send a ping from the phone to the watch to let it know when it's ready. Once I implemented this, everything else fell into place.

What was your favorite part about making the app?

Since 8-A-Day relies on my server, I was able to tail the logs and watch what was happening. I was ridiculously excited when after publishing the app in the store, people actually started installing and using it! I went to bed the first night after publishing it, and woke to find a number of new users had installed it. I have since heard from a number of people who love 8-A-Day and find it useful. That's by far my favourite part of making the app.

Any other applications or projects that you'd like to talk about?

I'm planning on an advanced version of 8-A-Day that allows you to create multiple reminders for different things, and configure specific daily targets and start/end times. For example, if you have to take a specific medication 4 times a day, you could configure it to remind you to take your tablets AND drink water throughout the day. :-)

I'd also love to explore ideas around multi-player games/social apps within the timeline, expanding on the concept I've played with in my Timeline Tag game. So rather than simply interacting with a random number generator, your actions influence what other players receive on their Pebble.

Anything else you’d like to tell us?

I just wanted to finish up by saying that I love the concept of the timeline. It's the perfect companion to the watch form factor, and I'm always interested to hear about apps that are using it - especially some of the more creative and out-of-the-box ideas like the Pokedex Challenge. It's really easy to build timeline apps, so if you have any creative, or crazy ideas, go for it! :-)

2 Weeks!

The Pebble Timeline Challenge is almost over! With only two weeks left, you don't want to delay your participation any more. Publish your apps, submit your entries, and #makeawesomehappen.

Past Winners

• Week 1: Battery+
• Week 2: FitCat
• Week 3: Leaf
• Week 4: Pushbutton
• Week 5: Flights
• Week 6: Meetup
• Week 7: Greeney's Run
• Week 8: Pokedex Challenge
• Week 9: Tideline