[Announce] Pebble Watch Connector daemon - Page 55 - maemo.org

abranson | # 541 | 2016-02-09, 00:49 | Report

Originally Posted by javispedro View Post

That is actually a tradition of most "app-store-first" platforms. I have plenty of experience here with the Nokia/Ovi store.... and "rewrite" is being too generous here.

That said, we cannot really compete with a full-time employee working on it. "Rewriting" it back from their version should be considered an option. For me at least it looks easier than writing a store UI.

The best source for documentation at this point is pebbled, and the fact that Ubuntu guys decided to rip it off entirely and even Pebble employees themselves are using parts of it now should be kind of proof...

I've been watching Rockwork a fair bit lately, and spoken to the author Michael on the Jolla Fan Club Telegram group. He is a Canonical employee, but this isn't his day job - he writes rockwork in his spare time.

Yes it started off with the pebbled code, but he's done a really nice job expanding and refactoring it. He's added a large amount of new support, and kept all of the Ubuntu specific stuff separate leaving a core libpebble that's really comprehensive. I believe we could add Sailfish support around it and even share a common codebase in the future, and Michael was keen on collaborating on that. Pebbled has stalled a bit lately since Smokku gave up on his Jolla, so Sailfish rockwork (Rockpool?) would be able to keep the flow of code coming and keep up to date.

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mzanetti | # 542 | 2016-02-09, 09:34 | Report

Originally Posted by smoku View Post

Yup. It is a rewrite of pebbled. You can see that if you follow the codebase from revision 1. ;-)
As with a long tradition of Ubuntu apps it does not credit the authors of code being rewritten. ;-)

Dude, we don't even have a release yet, and by the time you wrote this, I didn't even have my own name and no about dialog or something. I don't think that's the most important part. What went wrong in FOSS that everyone starts off with hating every other project? If you don't want other people to look at your code, don't publish it, it's as simple at that.

Originally Posted by smoku View Post

Nope.
The best source for Pebble documentation are official libpebble and libpebble2.

Actually in some areas Rockwork supports more stuff than libpebble2 by now.. I'd say the best documentation available is a combination of the two.

EDIT: fixed typo

Last edited by mzanetti; 2016-02-09 at 09:53.

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mzanetti | # 543 | 2016-02-09, 09:43 | Report

Originally Posted by javispedro View Post

That said, we cannot really compete with a full-time employee working on it. "Rewriting" it back from their version should be considered an option. For me at least it looks easier than writing a store UI.

If you look at the commit times of RockWork you'll notice that all of them are late night, mostly weekends. RockWork is really a spare time project. That said, how did this become about competition? I've intentionally made the platform integration very sparated from the rest of the code.

Actually in the beginning I started off trying to port the sailfish pebble directly, but then, all the SFOS specific parts were deeply integrated all over the place. After the 100th #ifdef I gave up and started from scratch, trying to avoid this mistake.

EDIT: Also, writing the store UI is super simple, that's a matter of an afternoon or so. Maintaining a WebView with all the hacks that integrates with the pebble store website is IMO *much* more hard work.

Originally Posted by javispedro View Post

They also removed support for the pre-3.0 firmware on the original models, btw.

Sadly no, their "documentation"/implementation is far from complete. Like every other smartwatch, I had to sniff their protocol out, otherwise I still wouldn't know how to upload a binary. Almost nothing of BlobDB is documented there.

The best source for documentation at this point is pebbled, and the fact that Ubuntu guys decided to rip it off entirely and even Pebble employees themselves are using parts of it now should be kind of proof...

Yes, pebbled has been a pleasure to "rip off". At this point there is nothing useful for me in it any more, especially since support for watch firmware >= 3.0 is quite poor. Anyhow, the offer still stands, I'd be happy to accept a SFOS backend in RockWork.

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javispedro | # 544 | 2016-02-09, 09:54 | Report

Originally Posted by mzanetti View Post

What went wrong in FOSS that everyone starts off with hating every other project?

A more appropriate question would be: what went wrong in FOSS that everyone starts with forking, renaming the project, wrapping behind their doors, refactoring, rewriting, and only then offering to maybe, you know, actually share code and avoid a fork?

Specially when upstream is still quite alive with plenty of contributors, if only slow?

The sad part is that we had the same discussion like, less than a few months ago..

But oh well, that opportunity is lost already, so let's center on the future. I personally agree on the store UI changes and dropping pre3.0 support. Slots are too annoying either way.

EDIT:

Originally Posted by mzanetti View Post

That said, how did this become about competition?

In the sense of evaluating what will be the best option ahead for users (and developers) of Pebble and Sailfish, and at this point, I believe it's 'embracing your fork'.

But no need to "act surprised" when meeting resistance after taking over the reins of still-alive project.

Last edited by javispedro; 2016-02-09 at 10:12.

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smoku | # 545 | 2016-02-09, 10:18 | Report

Originally Posted by abranson View Post

[...] since Smokku gave up on his Jolla,

I didn't completely give up on SailfishOS though.
I'm still hoping that SFOS port for OnePlus One reaches the state that it could replace Android as my daily driver.
I bought OnePlus One exactly because it looked like it would be any day now... and after a year - still big NOPE...

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mzanetti | # 546 | 2016-02-09, 10:46 | Report

Originally Posted by javispedro View Post

A more appropriate question would be: what went wrong in FOSS that everyone starts with forking, renaming the project, wrapping behind their doors, refactoring, rewriting, and only then offering to maybe, you know, actually share code and avoid a fork?

Specially when upstream is still quite alive with plenty of contributors, if only slow?

The sad part is that we had the same discussion like, less than a few months ago..

But oh well, that opportunity is lost already, so let's center on the future. I personally agree on the store UI changes and dropping pre3.0 support. Slots are too annoying either way.

I really wanted to reuse pebbled as it was, I think I even still have a directory on my disk where all the SFOS stuff is #ifdef'ed out and replaced with ubuntu specific things. It just wasn't feasible any more at some point. Reusing software is a hard thing if it hasn't been created with platform abstraction in mind. I really hope I did a decent job with that in RockWork (as I've only ran it on Ubuntu so far, this part yet has to be proven).

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abranson | # 547 | 2016-02-14, 00:02 | Report

I've been having a lot of fun trying to port Rockwork back over to Sailfish. The daemon's running, and connecting to the pebble (v3 firmware). Music/volume control works, and notifications, which have lots more flavours than the old v2: telegram, whatsapp, hangouts, which i've mapped over to the android and native apps where present. I also managed to find a bit of code to decode the notification actions, so you can now open the email on the phone from the watch.

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Feathers McGraw | # 548 | 2016-02-14, 13:00 | Report

Originally Posted by abranson View Post

I've been having a lot of fun trying to port Rockwork back over to Sailfish. The daemon's running, and connecting to the pebble (v3 firmware). Music/volume control works, and notifications, which have lots more flavours than the old v2: telegram, whatsapp, hangouts, which i've mapped over to the android and native apps where present. I also managed to find a bit of code to decode the notification actions, so you can now open the email on the phone from the watch.

This is awesome

despite some initial misunderstandings, it looks like things are progressing to the point where the fork will contribute some useful enhancements back to the original project.

There's so much overlap between people interested in Sailfish and Ubuntu Touch, that it makes a lot of sense to collaborate on this!

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ClumsyRooster | # 549 | 2016-02-17, 13:15 | Report

Originally Posted by abranson View Post

I've been having a lot of fun trying to port Rockwork back over to Sailfish. The daemon's running, and connecting to the pebble (v3 firmware). Music/volume control works, and notifications, which have lots more flavours than the old v2: telegram, whatsapp, hangouts, which i've mapped over to the android and native apps where present. I also managed to find a bit of code to decode the notification actions, so you can now open the email on the phone from the watch.

Awesome news! With the authorization of mzanetti or smoku (if necessary, I don't know), is that something you can publish at some point ?

Thanks!

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abranson | # 550 | 2016-02-17, 14:47 | Report

Originally Posted by ClumsyRooster View Post

Awesome news! With the authorization of mzanetti or smoku (if necessary, I don't know), is that something you can publish at some point ?

Oh certainly. I've got it installing as an rpm now, but diving into the QML has been tricky so far, especially seeing as I don't really know much about that. The Rockwork QML looks much more complex than anything I've seen in Sailfish so far, and my usual technique of cobbling it together using other projects as example isn't really working - there are just too many elements and attributes

.

What I might do is get the platform integration for the daemon mostly together, then pop it up on Github and see if anyone else fancies looking after the UI. If not, then I'll just have to get a book or something and learn it properly.

Mzanetti has been giving me tips, and I'm pretty sure smoku is aware and ok with it.

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