Jennifer's 365 Project

It took me the better part of the day, on and off, to figure out notifications on iOS for my pebble. Turns out you have to turn on "Show in History", which was not at all obvious, in order to get notifications from the mail program.

I really like how large a single emoticon will appear on the screen when you get messages. If you scroll back at a later date it's smaller, but the first time it pops up it's big - which makes it easy to see at a glance.

I love this watch. Seriously.

I'm really digging the latest software update on the Pebble. The menu is nice and the little pop up on the watch face when you are close to an event on your timeline (or calendar) is really nice.

I'm still really enjoying the Pebble Time. I'm especially having fun with the holiday watch faces. It's awesome to have a color Pebble.

There's an interesting app in the Pebble Store called Battery+. It basically looks at your usage and tries to predict when you need to charge next, as well as how long it's been since the last charge.

I'd really like it if it could point to which app or watch face had what sort of drain on the life of the Pebble. But it's still neat, even if it doesn't give you that much detail.

What I said was "sock thief". That is most definitely not what the Pebble Time heard...

Kudos to them for having a robust dictionary available. I'm still fighting with my Samsung S5 to learn some words I've been using frequently for the last two years.

the built in music app for the Pebble Time (and Pebble) are one of the weakest features of the watch, in my opinion. So I broke down and picked up Music Boss. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good and it lets me assign a specific app to launch as opposed to trying to launch the default Google Music App. Since my preferred app is Audible, Music Boss is working like a charm.

The interesting feature with Music Boss is you can set it to show the cover art of what you're playing. Since I'm listening to an audiobook, it just shows me half of a book cover.

Amusing.

We went out this afternoon to Best Buy to look at the Pebble Time that was on sale. I wasn't going to get it, even though I've really wanted one, but Chris convinced me to pick it up.

I am not disappointed. It's an amazing upgrade from the Pebble (which I love).

The color is nice, the display is always on (unlike Chris's Samsung Galaxy Gear watch), readable in the sun, and no longer has the app limit that the original Pebble does.

Plus it has a microphone and you can do short dictations. And the notifications are more robust.

I'm really happy it's less bulky than the original Pebble as well. I love that watch but it's a behemoth on my wrist.

I decided it was probably time I find a stop watch so I can measure contractions. That seems to be a thing you're supposed to do. Since you can load apps on the Pebble Watch, I just downloaded one onto that. I mean, it's a watch already. Now it's a stop watch!

While out and about today I tried out the World Cup 2014 app on my Pebble watch. Cute, but obviously when you're in a bad signal area it doesn't stay sync'd with the game.

Most of the time I use Audible on my phone at work and listen to audiobooks. Occasionally I use another program called Smart AudioBook. Unlike Audible, Smart Audiobook will actually send the name of the file playing to the Pebble. That's a nice touch.

It's been awhile since I've had my bike out. Over a year in fact. So in the morning I messed around with it and then took it out for a spin to make sure everything was working. It had trouble shifting gears at first, but eventually everything smoothed out.

I also decided it would be a good opportunity to try out RunKeeper with the Pebble Watch. I don't use RunKeeper at all, but since I know it pairs with the Pebble Watch so you can get starts on your workout, I thought it was worth a shot.

The whole set up was pretty smooth. As long as the Pebble Watch is already paired with the phone, RunKeeper works automatically. As soon as I started up a route the time, distance, and rate (miles/minute) popped up on my watch.

I muted all of the audio updates RunKeeper has on by default since I wanted to listen to an audiobook. Everything worked pretty smoothly between Audible, RunKeeper and the Pebble. I was even able to pause and resume the workout directly from the watch.

I probably wont use RunKeeper a lot since I don't really need the stats it provides or a gps route of the path I take. But I do think it's neat to have that on there. I can see where this would be neat for those people into cycling or running. Especially if you're working to improve your distance or speed.

I also noticed that the RunKeeper app can monitor your heart rate (provided you have a device recording it). I don't think any of that information gets piped to the Pebble, but it would be neat to see that eventually happen for those folks who track that information as well.

I love my Pebble Watch. It's been an awesome gadget to wear on my wrist. But as can sometimes happen, especially with the first run of a new product, there are issues.
In early May I started experiencing some light artifacting on the screen. At first I ignored it since it seemed to go away when I scrolled through text on the screen. Eventually it started to get so bad I couldn't actually read anything.

There would be days where the device would work perfectly fine, and then others where it would not, and the issue was getting gradually worse.

So I submitted a ticket late May through the Pebble Watch website, went through the steps to reboot the device in the hopes that it would clear it, and after a few emails back and forth it was determined that it was an issue with the hardware so Pebble RMA'd it.
They sent me a shipping label and I sent my Pebble back in late June. I received a shipping notice this week that a new Pebble Watch was on it's way and today it arrived.

The whole RMA process from start to finish with Pebble took about seven weeks. For a small company still shipping out Kickstarter Pebbles and just recently launching with Best Buy as a retail partner, I didn't feel that the turn around time was unreasonably long.

I'm excited to have a Pebble Watch back on my wrist! Now to just replace the watch band Chris stole for his watch...

I'm still really enjoying the Pebble Watch. It's nice to get little alerts, like when Chris is on his way to pick me up, without being worried and checking my phone constantly. Since I always leave my phone on silent in public, I' have to actively check my phone to see if any new messages have come through since the last check.

With the Pebble Watch the whole experience is more passive. Any messages that come to my phone get passeed to the watch and then from there I can decide to read more or just ignore it for later. It's not an Earth-shattering difference in my life, but it is nice and does change how I interact with my phone. That is, I check my phone far less now for texts, emails, and other alerts, than I did before having the watch.

It's also still pretty convient to use to stop and start audiobooks. When I'm out walking around on lunch or doing something it's nice to be able to pause the book easily without pulling out the phone, fiddling with the lockscreen, and then navigating to the app to pause the book.

A cute Final Fantasy themed Pebble Watch face.

The Pebble Watch SDK was released today. That means soon there will be an influx of more custom watchfaces and, eventually, applications that run on the Pebble Watch.

Unfortunately there's no emulator yet, which means any watchface or application developed has to be pushed directly to the phone at the risk of potentially bricking the device.

Coding is done in C, which is cool. That's a pretty popular language and easier to learn, I think, than something like Java. But maybe that's just me. It's been a long time since I've done anything directly in C and I certainly wouldn't say I'm fluent in it. Although recently with all the poking around on the Arduino I've certainly brushed up on a few things. I do look forward to learning more so I can create a few random things for the watch. I'll probably be going through articles like this one about writing watchfaces over the next few days.

Still, it's exciting. As you can see, I've already installed a custom watchface (not of my own design) that should look familiar to a lot of people. At least those that are fans of British humor.

I've been enjoying the Pebble Watch so far. It's great to get notifications on it, like the text message forwards when Chris is on his way to pick me up from work, or if I want to pause an audiobook.

But what would really be awesome would be setting up more customer alerts, like say, from the weather.
So I decided to give Tasker for Android a try. It's was a little daunting at first to set up, but I discovered that there are a lot of user created profiles on their wiki that you could download and try. So I decided to snag one that gets and speaks the weather. I figured I could work it backward from there.

I essentially used the information from the example I downloaded and modified it to notify me instead of speaking anything.

Now, in order to get the information passed to the Pebble Watch, I needed to use another application - Pebble Notifier. I've already been using this application to forward notifications that the Pebble application doesn't handle natively, like google talk messages.
Setting up Pebble Notifier is easy, as you can see. Just select what you want and away you go!
Once that was done, the notifications came through without a hitch in both the notification center....
And the watch!

Next will be modifying the script to give me current numbers as opposed to the overall daily forecast. Still, pretty neat.

Today is my first full day with the Pebble Watch.The watch has an e-paper display, which is similar to the e-ink used in Kindle devices (not the Kindle Fire). That means it's easy to read in the sunlight.
The Pebble is a smartwatch that communicates via bluetooth to various devices, like a cell phone. So that means emails, phone calls, music tracks, texts, and all sorts of other information can be sent from the phone to the watch for display. And as you can see, it does still function as a watch.

Each time a notification comes through from the phone to the watch, the watch will vibrate to let you know. Then after a few minutes the notification will auto-dismiss (if it isn't dismissed before) and go back to the watch face. The watch even has a backlight so it can be used in the dark.

The watch is sort of big on my small arm, which I knew was going to happen. But it isn't heavy and aside from getting used to wearing a watch again it's quite comfortable.
You can choose any number of pre-loaded watch faces to display the time. Or you can download new ones from the Pebble app on your smart phone.

I've been playing around with a few different applications to pass information from my android phone to the watch. So far the Pebble app and Pebble Notifier seem to do the trick for everything. It's pretty awesome to get email and twitter notifications on your wrist.
The only odd thing I've noticed is that if I use the Audible app to control music, the Pebble doesn't know the name of the track. I think this is more of an issue with the Audible app than the Pebble, since the watch seems to read from other applications just fine. Also, since this is an audiobook we're talking about, it's not like I'm going to be skipping around to different tracks. It doesn't really bother me, but I did think it was amusing.

All in all I've been pretty impressed with the device. I'm really glad I backed the kickstarter campaign last year.

Finally! The Pebble Watch has arrived!