Don't Panic - We're Here to Guide You

New developers typically begin their journey by following our tutorials, and then moving on to projects of their own. The guides section of our documentation is intended to help developers go beyond the basics - to help understand some of the more complex APIs and concepts required to develop a Pebble app. Ultimately, we want developers to feel comfortable enough with our platform that the reference documentation can be their primary source of information.

We’ve known for a while that our guides section was a bit of a weak link (sorry for the inconvenience!) - and to that end, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about, and writing, a new set of guides that should help to better guide you along your path to becoming an awesome Pebble developer!

What Did We Do?

• We’ve restructured the Table of Contents and how we organize guides to make it easier to find the information you’re looking for.

• We’ve substantially improved our Communication guides (i.e. AppMessages, Datalogging, etc), which we’ve found to be one of the concepts new developers struggle with the most.

• We’ve added a new Best Practices section to help you take your apps to the next level by introducing concepts such as creating low power apps and watchfaces, and suggestions on how to organize larger projects.

• We’ve created guides around Appstore Publishing to help you get your hard work into the hands (onto the wrists?) of others.

• We’ve added new guides for CloudPebble, Pebble Draw Commands, and more areas of Pebble development.

Why Did We Do It?

Some of the older guides, as well as the overall structure of this section of our site, have been around for a long time. While seasoned developers are likely familiar with where they can find various tidbits of buried information, more recent additions to the Pebble developer family often struggle to find the information they need.

But we haven’t just updated how we organize our guides - we’ve also taken this opportunity to update some of the best practices (and language) used throughout the guides. We’ve learned a lot over the past few years, and it’s safe to say we’re all better at this than we were when the guides were first published.

How Did We Do It?

The old set of categories was introduced in 2014. Since then we have seen the addition of new content for SDK 3.x, Pebble timeline, Design and Interaction, Smartstraps, and other smaller additions. When we started this project, we had a total of 79 guides in 20 different nested categories. After brainstorming what information should be kept as is, improved, added, and dropped, we ended up with a set of 64 guides across 13 categories.

After the drafts were agreed upon, we set to work with the task of writing the actual content, using a combination of the existing content and an appreciation of the most common questions and problems raised by our developer community.

With all of the new content in place, the final task was to shore up the improved version of the developer site. Links were checked, and redirects were created for all of the old guides - so if you have any favourite guides that you’ve bookmarked they should automagically take you to the appropriate section in the new guides.

In total, the project resulted in 16,467 lines added and 18,386 lines removed across 370 files. Wow!

What Are We Doing Next?

If we’ve done our jobs, the new guides shouldn’t need any major updates for the foreseeable future, and the new structure should make it easier to extend, improve, and add to our guides when new features come along.

Looking beyond the guides section, we have a lot of ideas (and work planned) to further improve the Pebble Developer site, and we’re excited to share it with you as soon as it’s ready.

As always, keep the feedback and bug reports coming! Hopefully nothing is missing or broken, but if it is be sure to tweet @PebbleDev on Twitter or find me in our Discord group.