Pebble smart watch to get watchface SDK mid-April
The Pebble smart watch may have survived a successful round of crowd-sourced funding on Kickstarter and made its way to market in a timely fashion, but not all of the watch’s features were immediately available upon launch. One of the biggest features touted was the ability for developers to create their own custom watch faces, giving users many different choices to fit their styles, mood, and need.
Pebble says it understands developers are frustrated that official support for custom watch faces is taking so long to come, but the company assures it’s still coming — in fact, it’ll be here quite soon. Pebble has announced that the watch face SDK will launch in the second week of April.
The main reason it’s taking so long is because they wanted to make sure everything was proper and clean instead of leaving it up to developers to create their own solutions for custom watch faces. In the end, it should mean easier development for anyone who wants to create a custom watch face.
Pebble also makes it a point to mention that even when the SDK launches, as much as 99% of the APIs may change, and wants to remind everyone that the “first pass SDK” will be considered a work-in-progress. A work-in-progress SDK is better than no SDK at all, I’d say, so no developers should have many qualms with that.
Alongside all of that, a new update will be headed to Pebble that will change up the user experience flow a bit. One of the biggest changes will be putting the watchface app at the end of the stack, so in order to get to your main watchface all you have to do is keep pressing the back button. The update will also let you cycle through watchfaces easily using the up and down buttons. It all sounds great to me, and it sounds like this particular smart watch is coming along quite nicely. Should things pan out in terms of developer support we imagine the “purchase” button at Pebble’s website will soon get a nice workout. Watch the video above for the full details.
[via Kickstarter]