Pebble Developer Blog

With the upcoming release of firmware 3.8 on Pebble and Pebble Steel, and the associated SDK 3.8, we have decided to redesign how image resources work in Pebble apps.

I am pleased to today announce that version 4.0-rc4 of the pebble tool is now available. The key new feature is a new paradigm for dealing with firmware and SDK versions. This makes it much easier to deal with differing SDK versions, or to test code on multiple (emulated) firmware versions.

A note: while the tool is now at version 4.0, the SDK, firmware and mobile apps will not be following. Pebble tool versioning is now completely independent of the rest of the Pebble ecosystem.

In October, we gave developers access to the microphone in the Pebble Time via our new Dictation API, and almost instantly we began seeing awesome projects utilising speech input. Voice recognition is an exciting new method of interaction for Pebble and it has created an opportunity for developers to enhance their existing applications, or create highly engaging new applications designed around the spoken word.

Speech-to-text has been integrated with Pebble by using the Recognizer cloud service from Nuance, a leading provider of voice and language solutions.

Starting with Pebble Time Round, we are moving towards communicating with Bluetooth Low-Energy only. This means there are some updates to PebbleKit iOS to support this. Here are the major changes and steps to take to support the new BLE connection.

What's New

• Companion apps have dedicated, persistent communication channels
• Start mobile apps from Pebble
• 8K AppMessage buffers
• Swift support

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:

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.

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.