Pebble Developer Blog

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!

The time has almost come for Pebble Classic and Pebble Steel to get firmware 3.x!

This is great news for users who get access to all the improvements and fixes since 2.x, as well as new features such as timeline, Quiet Time, no more eight app limit, Standby Mode, and last but not least one new color (gray)!

But let us not forget about Basalt and Chalk app developers, who also have a lot to get excited about - a huge new user base of Aplite watch wearers!

This blog post aims to help developers using SDK 2.x features and APIs to migrate their apps to a single 3.x codebase. As well as bringing compatibility to all older watches when they upgrade to firmware 3.x, these changes will also serve to remove a lot of complex and ugly conditional code that has needed to exist in the meantime. Let's fix some apps!

In the last Tips and Tricks blog post we looked at drawing transparent images on both the Aplite and Basalt platforms.

This time around, we will look at a wscript modification that can allow you to build a Pebble project when you have two completely separate sets of C source files; one set for Aplite, and another for Basalt.

Note: This technique can be applied only to local SDK projects, where access to wscript is available. This means that it cannot be used in CloudPebble projects.

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:

It's a brand new year, which for developers and hackers can mean only one thing - a new year of hackathons! Throughout January and beyond, Pebble will be making appearances at various events (large and small) so if you spot an event near you, be sure to come along. We will be giving away Pebble swag and selling refurbished Pebbles for $50, and will also be on hand to answer any questions you have as well as help you create the best hacks on Pebble. We saw some awesome apps and hacks arise from hackathons in 2014, but we think the best is yet to come!

See below for details on the most immediate dates, or the Pebble Developers website Events page for all our plans for future events. If you are organizing a hacking event that we could attend, be sure to get in touch.

Hey Pebble Devs!

It's been a great year for us at Pebble as well as all the awesome community developers that come up with ever more surprising and useful apps for Pebble. We would not be where we are today with over 5000 apps without all the hard work that you guys put into your apps, so thank you!

We look forward to another amazing year with you in 2015, May your hands always be busy!

Alex, Cherie, Chris, Heiko, Katharine, Katherine, Łukasz, Matthew H, Matthew T, Thomas

The official Pebble Android and iOS apps have been updated to 2.2 and 2.6 respectively. These updates add support for the French, German and Spanish languages. The Pebble firmware, the mobile apps and the appstore are all translated.

Here's another newsletter blog post to keep you up-to-date on the Pebble community happenings. This time we've got stories of success and tips on expanding your app's audience!

Another newsletter detailing our new releases for the Pebble firmware, Android and iOS apps is reproduced here for your blog reading pleasure. In addition, we also have some exciting news about the Pebble appstore!

There was so much to pack into the last newsletter, we had to make a blog post about it!