Notices

Seems like smoku abandoned the project or even the whole Jolla:
http://abadcafe.pl/post/122926111638...ne-post-mortem

I will, once I've gotten my Time Steel And I of course need to find some time (no pun intended) to work on it. But at least for notifications I've did some more investigations past weekend.


I think I've read some comments from Smokku that at least some kind of investigation happened for MeeRun, or there at least was some interest. As he said these apps require some background app running on the Pebble but it was unclear how to do so.


From what I've read it's, at least for public data, quite safe to use. Take the example of some sports app (reporting scores).
Using the Pebble app (on the phone) you'll have to subscribe to a topic on the service. This subscription is then automatically registered by Pebble (probably based on your Pebble account, the id of the watchapp/service, and the subscribed topics). So no data is send to the service provider. The service provider then sends the pins to Pebble (company/website), but the only data it knows are: its own watchapp/service id, and the topic(s) the pin is associated with. Pebble then combines this data to send the pin to the users who subscribed to these topics. The Pebble app on your phone will then periodically query the Pebble servers to get the latest updated pins.

So while Pebble knows which services and topics you are subscribed to, the service itself won't know anything about you. They just push pins to Pebble, and Pebble does all the work to distribute it to the users who subscribed to those topics. So there will never be any direct communication between your Pebble (or app on phone) and the 3th party service.

There are however ways for Pebble (watch)apps to get some unique token, which they can use to create personal pins. But you of course aren't required to use those.

And besides it's not like the timeline won't work without the external services. But then you will need native apps which push the pins to the Pebble watch (using the phone app). And I don't think that's very likely to happen for Sailfish. Although it might well be possible that some developers will put some effort into it. But there will then maybe be like 10 or 20 native apps which can fill the timeline, while there might be hundreds, or thousands of external services which can fill the timeline.

Ouch.... I didn't noticed this before!!

Yugh. That's horrible. But I guess we had it coming. Pebble is very hipster. Development "in the cloud". The configuration-pages for the apps are hosted-only, instead of on-device. Still the phone app must relay those messages to the watch, so if that protocol is available, it's possible to ignore the cloud.

I'm not sure I get the objection. How else would you do it?

This way presumably the updates could be pushed by the server, instead of the watch / phone having to poll it all the time. And the only server you need to talk to is Pebble's, rather than having to trawl through a long list...

Ouch, oh well hopefully RobertMe will be able to pick up where Smoku left off.

For me the priority list would be:

- Notifications
- Push calendar to timeline
- Allow internet access to pebble so apps can connect (weather etc)
- Allow gps access to pebble (again weather etc)
- Install/remove apps
- Integrate other apps in to timeline
- Allow apps to communicate with the watch (running apps etc)

Hopefully most if not all are possible. I've tried other phone and smartwatch combinations, but I'm set to sticking with my Jolla, so the pebble is a real investment. I'm happy to donate what's needed to get this up and running.

Atom/RSS/CalDAV comes to mind. Sure, that's poll instead of push, but still preferable over a centralized service.

That makes sense.

I admit I don't really understand much about the Pebble architecture, but presumably it is possible to have an RSS reader on the phone, then a watch app that mirrors it.

And my understanding of what RobertMe is saying is that calendar events will sync between the watch and the phone without talking to Pebble's servers.

So I suppose all you'd be missing is the mini apps in the timeline?

Yep, in the end there is still a pretty simple protocol between the phone app the watch. So it doesn't really matter where the data is coming from, as long as the phone app understands it and can send it.

The advantage of Pebbles setup is that, as you already set MikeHG, the phone app doesn't need to constantly poll all the services if data has been updated. It just needs to poll the Pebble servers. This makes the communication a lot cleaner, and doesn't drain the battery that much (as there is less chatter over wifi or 3G, and the phone doesn't have to wake up for every individual service). This is kind of the same as the push notifications which you're required to use on iOS, and Googles counterpart which can be used on Android.

And besides the simplified communication it means you don't need a lot of native apps which push all the data to the Pebble. As long as the "data provider" can push the info to Pebbles servers, the watch should be able to show the data, as long as there is a Pebble phone app which supports this. This compared to none strict protocols as Atom/RSS feeds where the data can be put into different fields, and you thus possibly still need support for different Atom/RSS feeds based on the data provider.

And you're right about the calender. This can be handled locally. The phone app just needs to read the calender and send the events to the Pebble. It's not like the watch itself queries the phone app to get the data, but the phone app is always in charge. The phone app just says something like "can you add a pin on 1 sept at 19:45 with subject X and body Y", and were all the data is coming from is up to the phone app. So it could either be read by the phone app from for example the calender, or queried from Pebbles servers, or send by some app which is running on the phone, which would relay the message using the Pebble phone app.

It might be cleaner and easier to route everything through pebble's server, but I think that's a big problem of the internet today: users heavily rely on a single provider. Provider goes belly up? Provider goes stupid? Provider declares your shiny obsolete? Tough luck, throw your shiny away! Buy a new one!

I for one would happily give up a few electrons for a more decentralized option.

Enough of that, pebble is the most open watch on the market anyway. Unfortunately, without and Android-device its quite hard to develop apps for it. So actually, this first bullet on my wish list is support for the developer connection.