Pebble Timeline Challenge Week 11 Winner - WatchPop!
At its core, Pebble is personal and customizable: with thousands of apps and watchfaces to choose from, it's likely that no two Pebblers have the same experience. Now, with the 11th winner of the Pebble Timeline Challenge, you have the opportunity to personalize your Pebble even further: add your beloved pictures, and show off your customized, beautiful watchfaces!
WatchPop gives users the chance to make a watchface out of their personal pictures. The attention to detail is what has set this app apart and made it a favorite among Pebblers. With features like color matching, WatchPop's watchfaces are well designed and aesthetically pleasing.
A group of three developers (Adam Fourney, Mike Terry, and Kent Lyons) met through the computer science research community and worked in tandem on this app. Adam and Mike also work together in their professional lives: Mike is Adam's PhD advisor! Here are some of the features and frameworks they used to make WatchPop a reality:
- PebbleKit JS
- PebbleKit Android
- ImageMagick to create, edit, compose, or convert bitmap images.
Read on to hear more about WatchPop and its developers!
Q&A with WatchPop
Tell us about your experiences as Pebble developers.
We've been developing for the Pebble for about 8 months now. We've found the Pebble development environment to be really easy to work with, especially given PebbleKit JS and CloudPebble. With these tools, you can quickly prototype and test out new ideas, which is great.
We're also huge fans of the Pebble platform itself - it is a very open platform. This openness really encourages experimentation, letting you explore all the ways smart watches can fit into people's lives.
What spurred the development of WatchPop?
Our first watch face was Sunshine, which shows the latest solar flare images captured by NASA. Almost as soon as we released it, people started asking about how they could put other pictures on their watch.
In retrospect this was the obvious thing to do -- if we could deliver satellite imagery to your watch, we should be able to put pictures from your phone on your watch. So we created WatchPop.
Tell us a bit about developing WatchPop.
WatchPop really pushes the limits of the platform in a lot of ways — especially on Aplite. We move a lot of bytes around to make pictures appear on your wrist, and we have to do it without a lot of memory, bandwidth, or CPU to spare. This forces you to get creative, which can be fun in its own right. Working within those constraints was challenging at times, but the dev community really provided great advice to help us when we hit roadblocks.
What was your favorite part about making the app?
Our favorite part of making the app has been the feedback we've received from our users. People really seem to cherish the ability to have pictures of their loved ones on their Pebble. It seems to make the Pebble that much more personal for them.
We've also been surprised at some of the creative uses of WatchPop. We've had a user put his company logo on his wrist using WatchPop, and a tattoo artist put a mini portfolio of her work on her Pebble with WatchPop. We also attended a wedding where a common graphic appeared on the invitation and program. We took a picture of it, and it became our new watch face. People seemed to think that it was a nice way to celebrate the event. In all these cases the common element is that it's a relatively instant process -- you take a picture, and it shows up on your watch -- so it makes it easy to use it in creative ways.
Do you have any other app ideas that you're planning on exploring in the future?
One of the features we've been working on are picture feeds. We already have one feed, which spotlights cool pictures we come across.
A couple of weeks ago, we realized we had an opportunity to do something cool with the feed: we could rebroadcast images of the New Horizons Pluto fly-by to peoples' Pebbles, so we've been doing that for the past week.
This took off! (forgive the pun, but we are huge space nerds) We've received a lot of positive feedback, with requests for a permanent space-themed feed. There's just something about cool about images being captured billions of miles away, and showing up on your wrist.
Given this experience, we're really interested in other types of content or feeds that people would like to have on their Pebble. We think there is a huge space of content that people would like to see updated on a regular basis on their Pebble.
To support this, we've started exploring an API that lets developers send pictures or other content to people's watches using the WatchPop backend. We'd love to talk to people who'd be interested in using such a service.
Anything else you’d like to tell us?
We're really honored and excited to have received this award! We're big fans of Pebble and this platform!
The Final Countdown
The timeline challenge has almost wrapped up, but there's still ONE chance left to win! Make sure you submit your apps by 11:59 pm PST this Sunday, July 19th, and show the world how you #makeawesomehappen.
Past Winners
- Week 1: Battery+
- Week 2: FitCat
- Week 3: Leaf
- Week 4: Pushbutton
- Week 5: Flights
- Week 6: Meetup
- Week 7: Greeney's Run
- Week 8: Pokedex Challenge
- Week 9: Tideline
- Week 10: 8-A-Day
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