Smart Wrist gets a little smarter

A while back, I wrote about my Pebble smartwatch. Since then, I've been teaching the watch some new tricks.

I updated to the Pebble SDK 2.0 Beta so that I could get more notifications from the watch OS. I changed my watchface to show the watch's battery charge percent on the lower left. That was pretty straight-forward; a new text layer, a few new Pebble OS calls, and I was done.

Today, I made the more complicated change: the temperature in the lower right of the watchface. That involves a companion Android app to get the phone's current location, get the weather for that location, and send the temperature to the watch. Someone familiar with Android app programming would probably find this trivial, but this is the first thing beyond "Hello, World!" I've tried to do with Android. And, I think it's the first time I've used Java since the late 90s. (And then, I was using NetRexx more often than Java anyway.) But honestly, Eclipse and the Android framework were more daunting than the language.

There is still a lot to do with my shiny new Android app (like all of the error handling ;) ), but I almost forgot how much fun it is to learn something new and make it do something useful. There's a certain thrill to working through errors, figuring out where things are going wrong, and finally seeing the results on the screen (or the watchface in this case). With that attitude and the number of devices in our lives today, I'll never be bored. :)