Unfortunately, the Pebble watch is no more


In November 2016, I was very happy to buy my second pebble, even though my first one, bought in 2013, was still running fine. Here you can see the two side by side:
Indeed a couple of weeks later, Pebble was bought by FitBit, and that is the end of the story for Pebble.
I'm certainly sorry to see it go.
The page will remain as a tribute to the best watch ever.

Fast-forward to November 2020: Pebble is alive and kicking, mostly thanks to 2 projects: GadgetBridge and Rebble.
I use gadgetbridge all the time myself, exceedingly good piece of software !
You can now use it to flash faces to your pebble (1 or 2), and additional good news, the faces made for the pebble 1 also work for the 2!.
The dead links on this page have been removed.


The Pebble watch

is a nice little companion to my android phone (for the record, it also works with an iOS phone). However, I soon realized that the ecosystem, being very young, is not very organized. That's why I decided (in october 2013) to write my own resources page.
However, in January 2014 Pebble announced the creation of a pebble market to centralize all the apps.
This page is therefore losing a lot of its purpose :-)
I'll still keep updating it with the interesting tidbits I find, but probably at a slower pace.

Pebble Time

In December 2015, Pebble ported the operating system of their new line of watches, Pebble Time to the original Pebble. The old android app was replaced by a new one, aptly called Pebble Time (V. 3.8). I upgraded the watch firmware and downloaded the new application. Version 3.8 of the firware was English only, but after a couple of days 3.8.1 came, with French and other languages, and yet after a couple of days 3.8.2 - so support is definitely there.
If you haven't upgraded yet: do it! :-) The new firmware is even better than the old one, with great fun little animations; as far as I could see it is backward compatible - I lost 2 watchfaces in the upgrade, one home made with a picture, and the czech time. I quickly located a new czech time in the app store, and reloaded the pbw with the pic - voilà ! Piece of cake, and well worth it. It took me a couple of days to learn how to navigate the new system, but that's it. The main difference is that by default you can no longer change your watchface by a press on the button. it is now a further level down, but I'm sure you could program the watch to mimick the old behaviour.
Another reason (probably _the_ reason to update is that it break the fatidic barrier of 8 watchfaces/apps. You can now have as many as you want. I don't have many apps, but the ones I have are really useful and convenient for me and do save me a lot of time and aggro.

1.x Firmware deprecated: Firmware 2.X

For those of you who haven't switched to the new firmware yet (2.0, which came out in Jan 2014, now at 2.7 (Oct.2014)), be warned that your 1.0 watchfaces and applications will no longer work with the new one. So if there is something you really need, wait until it comes out before switching. I was able to replace "glance" and my "french" and "czech" time in a couple of hours of browsing. Since Canvas 2.0 was not officially out yet, I joined the beta team :-). I regenerated my two watchface (see below) with the new 2.0 kit and lo and behold! I was almost back where I started from (except for a 5 min timer, but that will come).

Programming

The good news is the Simplyjs interface which allows easy programming of the watch via JavaScript!
There is even better:Cloud Pebble: no need to install anything (gone). Just open an account (or use your pebble one) and start coding. Now supports simplyjs too !
It allowed me to transform my (admittedly very) simple SimplyJS script into a pbw in a matter of minutes:





Decision helper: long press flips the coin, short press casts the dice. Ok, granted, not much, but I didn't have any idea and I wanted to test the system :-) Feel free to test the web prototype or to install the pbw.
My second is a bit more useful, since it simulates a 421 game (get the pbw).

Interesting places if you need some help to start: Tutorial, examples, Rocky JS (SimplyJS on steroids)

It would be nice to be able to access the appstore from the PC rather than from the phone (like google play) and mark the apps you want to download.
Similarly, at the time of this writing when you remove a face from the watch supposedly to the locker, in fact it disappears - so keep your pbw somewhere.
All in all you can see there is a lot of potential building up.[Update: now at firmware 2.7 and app 2.0.17.1 - all problems seem to have disappeared -20141023].

Apps

The (replacement to the) official app is the only one you need. Most other android apps are there only to configure the app runing on the watch, but this one pushes the apps/faces (pbw) from your phone to the watch. In order to do that, make sure the app is running and either point your stock browser to the website to download the pwb, or drop your pwb to the phone internal disk and navigate to it with your file explorer and click on it. The app will take over and push it to the watch.
Old firmware: To erase a face (you are entitled only to 8 on the watch at any time), just go to the list of app in the android apps and press the X on the right hand side (Firmware 1.X), or move it to the locker (Firmware 2.x).
The app you also need (if you get only one, get this one) is Canvas. It enables you to create whatever face you want for your watch (see below).

Android Applications
  • The (replacement of the) official android app.
Watch apps stores

If you sail, I recommend the application FSailor. You enter your waypoints when you prepare your route, and then all you have to do is glance at your watch to see bearing and distance to next waypoint.

At first I must confess I liked the watchface generator. It enabled me to make a face with a picture in the background - simple but nice.
Then I discovered the Android Canvas. It really enables you to design your own Face, with whatever you want ! and by whatever, I mean whatever!.
For my 1.X I had:
  • a ligne with the time (Bold bitham 42)
  • a ligne with the date (Gothic 14 bold)
  • a ligne with my first appointment time and title (Gothic 18 bold)
  • a ligne with my first appointment place (Gothic 14 bold)
  • a ligne with my second appointment time and title(Gothic 14)
  • a ligne with my second appointment place (Gothic 14)
  • a ligne at the bottom with 3 indicators:
    • unread SMS
    • missed calls
    • phone battery charge
All this took about an hour because I experimented with several designs on the fly and did not read any doc or prepare anything.
For my 2.X I did:
As you can see, I added the watch battery state, the network state and ID and BT state. The white bars on the right hand side watchface are battery indicators. The white bar at the top on the right are the seconds, te thin bar on the left is the watch battery indicator and the one on the right is the phone.

Other considerations

Note: this section was written for firmware 1.X. it doesn't seem to be a problem for 2.x
Now the sad part: if you have an S4 or an S4 mini, installing the pebble app will trigger a bug in TouchWiz, causing your browser to start talking (No, it is not funny). Here is what to do:
The "TalkBack" function are active on your phone. Try checking Settings, Accessibility Options to disable it. If turning it off doesn't work, then you might have the "TalkBack" bug. What is this, you ask? Unfortunately there's a bug with TouchWiz (the stock Samsung launcher) that causes TalkBack to, well, talk back, whenever you install an app that uses the Accessibility functions of the phone (for instance, NoLED, LightFlow when you want it to configure notifications for certain apps, etc.) In some cases, the bug only turns TalkBack on but you can turn it off. In some other cases, no matter which setting you have, TalkBack won't shut up.
In case it won't disable with the options, you have three possible roads to follow:
  1. Deactivate all accessibility options for apps that are accessing them (in Settings, Accessibility Options... just untick all apps that are there).
  2. Switch Launchers. This is a TouchWiz-specific bug, so using a different launcher (like GoLauncher or Nova) should clear the issue and allow you to use all other apps. The downside? You lose TouchWiz-specific widgets.
  3. "Freeze" TalkBack. You can go into Settings, App Manager, All tab, and find the TalkBack service. In there, you can select to Disable the app. It won't uninstall it, but it will prevent the app from functioning, effectively shutting your phone up.