Pebble Developer Blog

Almost two months ago the XDA Forums and Pebble set out on a mission to find three amazing apps/watchfaces and their developers. We called it the XDA - Pebble Developer Challenge and last Friday it all came to a close! These three developers have taken the Pebble and truly stretched its limits to create some amazing products and we want to show them to you!

The XDA - Pebble Developer Challenge was a 3-week competition - your opportunity to pitch your proposal for the best Pebble app and bring it to life with a Pebble of your own. Of the 20 proposals that we selected for the second phase, the developers of the best three Pebble apps have been invited to attend the 2014 Pebble Developer Retreat in October. We also gave each of them a Pebble Steel to flaunt!

There were a lot of really great entries to the second phase of the competition and all of them deserve a quick download! Check out the complete list of apps and watchfaces that were made during the competition on the XDA forums.

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 are pleased to announce that we will soon be automatically updating apps installed from the Pebble appstore. We believe this will be a significant improvement to your ability to get your work into the hands of your users, as well as to the user experience.

However, as developers, you need to make sure that your app is ready for these updates. In particular, you will need to make sure that your app conforms to our new version numbering, and that it can tolerate persistent storage left over from old app versions.

Today we're adding a new feature to CloudPebble that will make it easier than ever to build your watchfaces and watchapps! The new UI Editor will let you graphically build the user interface for your C app; you can then use the generated C to build anything you like.

Can you #MakeAwesomeHappen? Your app idea could win a Pebble and a trip to our 2nd Annual Pebble Developer Retreat in Mountain View, CA!

The XDA - Pebble Developer Challenge is a 3-week competition - your opportunity to pitch your proposal for the best Pebble app and bring it to life with a Pebble of your own. We'll be awarding Pebbles to the 20 best app proposals to give even first time developers a chance to work on our platform. Of the 20 proposals that we select the best 3 Pebble apps created will be invited to attend the 2014 Pebble Developer Retreat in October and we'll give them each a Pebble Steel.

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.

We'd like to share with you a blog post written by our friends at KimonoLabs. Their service allows you to build a JSON API from any website. In this guest- post, they show you how to create a stocker tracker watchapp in less than 10 minutes! This was originally posted here (http://blog.kimonolabs.com/).