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!

After many morning coding sessions on the weekends, Pebble.js has been updated to support the Chalk platform (Pebble Time Round). This update is available in CloudPebble, and ready for you to work with right in your browser with no setup!

Supporting Chalk required a ton of bug crushing to become compatible with the new 3.0 style status bar, changes to accommodate reduced memory on the 3.x Aplite platform, adding new features such as text flow and paging, and making it easier to target multiple platforms by adding a feature detection API.

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!

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!

I've been desperate to write a blog post about the Pebble HealthService API since it's initial release last month, and now I can finally share its awesomeness with you. I'm also going to show you how you can use this exciting new API to build an ultra-cool clone of the Stride watchface by Pebble.