Pebble Developer Blog

Ever wondered how to draw transparent images in a Pebble app? This post will walk you through the process.

In this post, we'll be using a sample image with a transparency component, shown below:

On Monday, we announced the first winner of the Timeline Challenge: Battery+. Battery+ was created by Eric Phillips, a Pebble developer who many may know for his watch timer, Timer+. Twitter has been abuzz with compliments for Eric, and needless to say, we agree! Battery+ is a useful, beautifully designed app that gathers data to generate intelligent battery life predictions.

We hope everyone is as excited about the Timeline Challenge as we are! Look out for details on our first winner, Battery+, in this week’s developer newsletter.

Below, we’ve answered some of the questions that have been popping up about the challenge. If we’ve missed anything, fill out our contact form or tweet at @PebbleDev to get in touch with us!

Hackathons are packed with tutorials, tech talks, and demos, and it’s simple for important activities to sometimes slip through the cracks. However, thanks to Hackawatch, Pebblers will never miss an event at a hackathon again! Hackawatch is a Pebble application created at LA Hacks that allows hackathon organizers to push pins to hackers’ timelines to notify them about important events.

Pins are a new and intuitive way for your users to interact with your app via the Pebble timeline. In a previous blog post I went through a complete walkthrough on how to get started with timeline. This post will focus on one single part of that process; how to deploy a server with Heroku, run jobs with Scheduler, and how to build APIs that push pins with the Express and pebble-api node modules.

In last week’s timeline blog post, we teased a new competition we’re running. This will be a challenge to see who can create the coolest Pebble applications that are optimized for the Pebble Time: we’re interested in seeing apps that use the timeline interface as well as other awesome watchfaces and Pebble apps in color. Winners can look forward to a Pebble Time, swag, and publicity in the Pebble developer community.

The Timeline Challenge will feature 12 winners, one per week for 12 weeks. We’ll start announcing winners on May 4th, so you have plenty of time to develop and submit your apps before the first deadline! Don’t worry though, you can continue to work on your apps throughout the challenge and submit them after the first round of the challenge, but the early bird gets the first Pebble Times!

For the past few weeks, we’ve been releasing updated elements of our new SDK. As many of you know, one of the most important facets of the Pebble Time is the Pebble timeline.

The timeline is a core feature of the Pebble Time that allows users to see important events in their past, present, and future. The timeline creates a unique opportunity for both Pebblers and developers. Not only can users simplify their lives by tracking the important events in their days, but developers can also create applications that push pins directly to their users’ Pebbles.

We launched the first version of our new SDK with support for Pebble Time two days into our Kickstarter campaign. Since then, we have updated it every week, releasing six iterations of our developer preview. Some of these versions included major new features like support for color in the emulator and support for the timeline. Some other features were more subtle, like the new antialiased drawing mode and the updates to the animation system. All these changes together, and a bunch more that you have not seen yet, will form the SDK that you will use to build watchfaces, watchapps and timeline apps for all models of Pebble watches in the coming months.

These updates include lots of changes, and no matter how hard we try to document everything there are a lot of unanswered questions. Some subjects have just not been addressed by the developer previews yet, some need more explaining and as always there are things we just missed in our communication efforts.

In this update, I want to answer publicly the most frequent questions received from the community in the last few weeks. I will cover components that have been released but also those that are still to come so you have the information needed to plan ahead and prepare your apps for the Pebble Time launch.