So ... Pebble is still a thing?
Posted on 04 December, 2017
To my surprise, had an email on Friday afternoon asking me about my 7S26 watchface for the Pebble watch. Hadn't realised that Fitbit were still running the Pebble back-end, although now that I think about it they did promise to maintain it through 2017.
If the first link isn't working, it's because (at long last) Fitbit have pulled their support for the Pebble entirely ... which is kind of the point of this post ...
The email pointed out that the 'settings' for my app weren't working any more. As was the standard at the time, I'd written the app to open a remote webpage to handle settings, and at some point in the last 12 months I'd deleted said page!
My first thought was to simply re-provide the page (at a new address) but for some reason it didn't want to work — I had to compile a new version of the app to accommodate the revised address, which meant using a new(er) version of the SDK, and my suspicion is that the SDK broke something.
Second thought — and this one worked — was to use the Clay framework to write a new settings page which runs entirely in the Pebble app on your mobile phone (no webpages involved). And what this reminded me of was how easy it was to write code for Pebble, how well supported it was by its developer community, and what a shame it is that they're not around any more. I know there are options like the Raspberry Pi and BBC micro:bit (to name just two) but getting a watchface to work on the Pebble was pretty simple and just looked more polished!
Ah well ...
