ARAVINDA VISHWANATHAPURA

Pebble Watchface development experiences

Apr 22, 2015
2 minutes read.
pebble

I fell in love with the Pebble Smart watch after reading Thejesh's blog about Pebble. I was about to get Pebble Steel, but that time they announced Pebble Time Steel with color epaper display and many more features. Now I am eagerly waiting for Pebble Time Steel :)

After seeing lots of videos and awesome watch faces, I wanted a watchface in my language. I created a sample app by embedding the Kannada Unicode font and ASCII font to test the Unicode support in Pebble. It has basic support for Unicode, but no support for complex rendering :(

Pebble Unicode Kannada
First one is Unicode and second one using ASCII font

So I started developing digital watchface using Kannada ASCII font and it worked! Developing digital watchface is very simple, Pebble has very good documentation. I created a native app using C language. I published Kannada watchface in Pebble appstore named kannadatime. I tested only on emulator. But I was curious to see how it looks in real Pebble watch(I don’t have a watch yet)

Thejesh installed app on his Pebble and shared screenshot, looking awesome in real Pebble. Fonts looking smaller than I see on emulator. Thanks Thejesh :)

If anybody interested in this watchface, do try and let me know if useful. I have some plans to improve this watchface by adding animation on minute change and adding color for Pebble Time.

If you don’t know about Pebble, visit https://getpebble.com/ to know more.

About Aravinda Vishwanathapura

Co-Founder & CTO at Kadalu Technologies, Creator of Sanka, Creator of Chitra, GlusterFS core team member, Maintainer of Kadalu Storage
Contact: Linkedin | Twitter | Facebook | Github | mail@aravindavk.in