Pebble Developer Blog

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.

Just a few days ago, we released beta version 2.3 of our Android Application with support for actionable notifications. If you have not tested it already, enroll in our beta channel and try it out for yourself!

Notifications have always been a key use case for Pebble, and we are excited by this new feature which is going to change the way you look at notifications. With actionable notifications Pebble not only informs you about relevant events, users can now interact with them and choose from actions you as an Android developer attach to them.

When connected to an Android device, Pebble will show all wearable actions, just like any Android Wear device. While supporting wearable notifications is easy we have found that there are still a number of mobile apps who miss the opportunity to extend their reach to the wrist. Don't let your app be one of those!

In this post, we will describe what you can do with actions on wearable devices and how to add them to your Android notifications.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

The old adage applies just as well to your Pebble apps! One of the most common requests when we attend hackathons is "How do I transfer an image from the Internet to my Pebble app?".

Today we introduce a new example that demonstrates downloading a PNG file from the Internet and loading it on Pebble. We will also cover how to prepare your images so that they take as little memory as possible and load quickly on Pebble.

The code is available in our pebble-examples github account. Continue reading for more details!

In our post on JavaScript Tips and Tricks we strongly recommended the use of JSLint or JSHint to help you detect JavaScript problems at compile time.

We believe JSHint can really increase the quality of your code and we will probably enforce JSHint correct-ness for all the apps on the appstore very soon. In this post we show you how to setup jshint and integrate it in your Pebble development process.

(2014 09: This article was updated to add links for SDK 2.0 users and add the resource identifier of the fonts as suggested by Timothy Gray in the comments.)

Just like any modern platform, typography is a very important element of Pebble user interface. As Designers and Developers, you have the choice to use one of Pebble system fonts or to embed your own.

Pebble system fonts were chosen for their readability and excellent quality on Pebble black & white display, it's a good idea to know them well before choosing to embed your own.