Two Way Communication on the Pebble

IMG_6746Regular readers will know that I am a big fan of my Pebble watch, warts and all.

While there are still some parts of the basic functionality that don’t work as advertised (notifications for example) some of the promise that attracted me to the project in the first place is now beginning to be realised.

The Runkeeper integration works well and I have managed to compile the authenticator app and get that working (in parts) too.

However, to date, all interactions have been one way from the phone to the Pebble but now with an update two way communications are possible. This should allow developers to create apps that are much more interesting.

To that end an new iPhone app, htpebble, has been released that allows watch apps to make requests for information from the web. A great example of this is the watch face that is shown in the image above which polls for a weather update at your current location every fifteen minutes. You get a really nice display with the current temperature along with an icon showing the weather. By and large it works well, although it does seem to lose connection with the phone quite often.

Given that if I want to know the weather it is probably just as easy to look out of the window as it is to look at my watch this little more than an interesting starting point for what could be achieved with the watch.

I am guessing that functionality such as that provided by htpebble will eventually be offered by the native Pebble app as it seems a fairly obvious thing for the devs to offer and means you only need one app installed and running.

I’m excited to see what just what people come up with now that this is available. Any other Pebble users out there and what would you like to see implemented?

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