Pebble Developer Blog

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.

Last weekend, we were so excited to watch a new group of Pebble Developers blossom. Pearl Hacks, an all women’s hackathon hosted at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, served as an incubator for a class of young women who are a testament to the diversity of backgrounds represented by the Pebble Developer community.

Were these women seasoned hackers? Nope, 60% of them had never been to a hackathon before, and the majority of the attendees had been programming for less than a year! Regardless of their previous technical experience, they created spectacular projects, and we were so impressed by their practical, useful hacks. When we started our workshop to help first time developers get started with Pebble, we had no idea just how many projects would be created over the course of the weekend! Only 4 people in the room of about 40 people had ever heard of Pebble before but in just 24 hours we had 15 teams create Pebble projects!

The new timeline interface is a completely new way to have users interact with your app. The Pebble SDK along with timeline web APIs allows you to push pins to your users' Pebbles. Adding pins to timeline is a straightforward process. This guide will walk you through the steps from start to finish.

Many of you have read about smartstraps on our Kickstarter page and contacted us for more details. Today we are releasing mechanical and electrical designs so you can start working on the next generation of straps: Straps that expand the functionality of Pebble Time and Pebble Time Steel.

The smartstrap connector is situated on the back of your new favorite watch. Smartstraps can extend below the watch to reach that connector while Pebble Time is worn. In the 3D files we are releasing today, you will find a generic connector that can work with most straps. Of course, you can also design completely new straps if your project calls for one!

You might have noticed on the Internet that we announced the brand new Pebble Time on Tuesday. Almost 50,000 members of our community have already backed the project on Kickstarter this week.

Most important for all of you is that today we are announcing the first developer preview of Pebble SDK 3.0. This new SDK is available right now to all Pebble developers, via CloudPebble or to install on your computer. Both versions include an emulator with support for the new hardware, and of course the color screen!

Drawing complex paths requires a lot of manual work on Pebble. Here I'll show you how to do this efficiently and quickly using a Pebble-optimized GPath algorithm and Bezier curves.