Pebble Developer Blog

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!

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.

This is a guest blog post from Jeremy Karbowski, who created a theremin-like gesture based instrument for the Pebble smartwatch at GrizzHacks 2016.

Hackathons are wonderful. The three I've attended thus far have been amazing opportunities to learn new technologies and work with other hackers to bring an idea to life. Hackathons embody some of the pure magical joy of computing that make your eyes light up with new ideas, and they provide an opportunity for participants to work with hardware and resources that they may not have had access to otherwise.

This is a guest blog post from Kiezel's Kristof (in Belgium) and Jaron (in the US), who recently opened their KiezelPay payments platform to all Pebble developers! We're super excited to see how it will be used and adopted! You can find a list of KiezelPay Powered watchapps and watchfaces in Pebble's appstore.

KiezelPay was designed to help developers sell their apps and watchfaces for the Pebble smartwatch as easily, securely, and globally as possible. We learned a lot when we created a payment system for our Kiezel Watchfaces, and we wanted to improve that system and open it to all developers!

If you have been following Pebble in the news, you have likely seen that there have been some recent changes to the Pebble Team. We wanted to take a moment to acknowledge the #awesome work that has gone into getting our developer program to where it is today, and introduce you to the (somewhat) new faces of Pebble's Developer Relations team!

This is a guest post by Mathew Reiss, developer of countless Pebble apps including Snowy and Yahoo! Fantasy Football.

My goal with writing apps for Pebble has never been to make tons of money. Despite Snowy's success, I'm not going to go quitting my job and moving to an exotic island any time soon. However, it has been absolutely awesome making some money off my hobby. Most importantly, having paid users validates my efforts as a developer and proves that what I'm building is not just something that users want, but something that they're willing to pay for.

This is a guest post by Dries Oeyen, developer of the Pebble app Commute and Rockstar of Belgium's Pebble Developer Meetup, PebbleBelgium.

Hello everyone. I'm Dries Oeyen and I live in Belgium, a tiny country in Europe. In case you're wondering what Belgium is like: in the morning on weekdays, it looks roughly like this:

Our first steps down the red brick paved Pearl St in downtown Boulder Colorado set the tone for the weekend. The streets were bustling with activity. Street musicians were setting up their stage. Students and locals alike were just getting started with their Friday evening, funneling into the many restaurants and bars that lined the street. We had a different target, Galvanize-Boulder, the coworking space that was the venue of Pebble's first hardware hackathon, Pebble Rocks Boulder. This would prove to be one of the most successful and worthwhile events we've had the pleasure of attending. Here are 5 ideas on what made Pebble Rocks Boulder great.

This is a guest post by Matt Langlois, developer of the Pebble Meetup app, contributor to pebble.js, and active Pebble developer.

The Time to Code hackathon in Ottawa, Canada on July 11th and 12th was a huge success! We had developers from all over the city come and join us to create their first app. We even had a developer who had never touched code before join us to create his first app ever!

This is a guest post by Jonathan LaRocque, developer of MusicBoss, MusicTime, SimplyAlarm and Rockstar of the Pebble Developer Meetup Ottawa, PebbleOTT.

April 2012 seems like such a long time ago. My first born is three years older, and now has a younger sibling. It also means that it has been three years since I contributed to the original Kickstarter campaign for Pebble. I was in the first batch of backers and received my Black Pebble early February 2013. This was the beginning of something special for me.

This is a guest blog post by Arnoud Buzing at Wolfram Research about how to use the power of the Wolfram Cloud in a Pebble watchapp. You can find out more information about the Wolfram Cloud in the links posted throughout the post. Enjoy!

Greetings!

In this post I will describe how to create an app for the Pebble watch that uses the Wolfram Cloud.

The Wolfram Cloud offers an integrated solution for data storage and knowledge-based computing using the Wolfram Language, a high level programming language. Specifically in this post, I will use so-called 'instant APIs' which allows you to associate an arbitrary Wolfram Language computation with a uniquely generated URL (we call them 'Cloud Objects'). This means that you can use any function from the Wolfram Language (over 5,000 high level functions) and any Wolfram|Alpha functionality (including all data from its underlying Wolfram Knowledgebase) and expose this in your Pebble app.

So let's get started by making a sample app!

This is a guest post by Chris Ismael, Senior Developer Evangelist at Concur. Developers use Concur's APIs to reinvent their travel apps into time and money-saving tools for the business traveler. Concur and Pebble are sponsoring the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon 2014 in San Francisco. You can also get a shot at $100K prize for the best travel app at The Perfect Trip Fund Awards. (Special thanks to Ethan Fan and Gabi Zuniga for the source code).

The Pebble SDK makes it easy to build Pebble apps that call cloud APIs. It also facilitates communication between your Pebble smartwatch app and your smartphone. Add to this the fact that your development environment is run from the browser (no installation horror!) - you know you've got a winner.

We'd like to share a blog post from our friends at Strap on how to add analytics to your Pebble app. Strap is an analytics platform targeted at wearables and helps to gather valuable metrics to help developers with their projects. We hope you find this valuable and follow the links below to try it out:

There are an increasing number of users downloading your Pebble watchfaces and watchapps, but there is really no good way for you to figure out where those users are coming from, how long they stay, and what they do with your app. You can now gain these insights and more with Strap Metrics, the world's first analytics platform built for wearable developers. Strap Metrics has spent the past couple of months in private beta, and we are excited to go public today with support for both PebbleKit JS apps and Pebble companion apps on iOS and Android.

Where can you find a good tutorial on how to program your Pebble? That question pops up frequently among readers on Pebble Developer Forums. Fortunately, a Pebble developer has provided the answer. In the Pebble community, Chris Lewis, a UK-based developer, has produced, beginning with Pebble SDK 1.x and recently with SDK 2.0, that essential tutorial for newbies coming to the platform on his blog: —try { work(); } finally { code(); } . You may want to check it out!

The last Developer Blog post introduced the JS configuration utility, and included some screenshots from SetPebble.com. Thomas and Cherie of Pebble asked me to guest blog about SetPebble and JS configuration, so here goes.