pebble

-especially when Engadget subsequently said it was "...sure to make minimalists happy" which was what I was aiming for. (I seem to recall it also gave me the opportunity to say "Hey, I designed that watch face!" when I saw a Pebble watch on display at an airport duty free store once. :D ) Anyway, I should probably get this memoir off to the publishers[3]. :) ---- [0] Oh, sorry, apparently it's cranberry. :) [1] I helped develop & support the very well-received initial SDK that enabled "Hacker Backers" and others to create their first Pebble watch faces & watch apps. It was quite an experience to be working on the SDK remotely from New Zealand[1a] and then have the initial public SDK release immediately covered by the likes of TechCrunch[1b], The Verge[1c] and Engadget. (An SDK! :D ) There was a lot of pent-up interest/demand for the SDK so it was really great to see how excited people were when they successfully implemented their first watch face or (later) watch app. In many/most cases this was the person's first experience of anything approaching "embedded" programming--there was a lot of effort put into removing as many barriers from the development experience as possible, so it was really rewarding to see people succeed. (Initially the process still required a locally installed embedded development environment, so even with all the effort invested to reduce barriers it still wasn't a simple process but turns out people were really motivated. :) It also turned out that I was really motivated to script/automate & simplify the process simply to avoid having to write documentation covering a more manual process. :D ) It was also super cool to see people then develop other (particularly web-based) tools to enable people with even less technical experience/skill to still create e.g. a custom watch face with their favourite sports team logo or the family dog featured on it. I mention all this in part to reminisce and in part to convey some of what the mood around Pebble was at the time for those who may not have been around *cough* nearly fifteen years ago and were wondering what (part of) the "big deal" was... An early version of the SDK documentation is archived here: https://web.archive.org/web/20130415083512/http://developer.... [1a] via this HN Jobs post IIRC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4132957 [1b] https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/12/pebble-watchface-sdk-now-a... [1c] https://www.theverge.com/2013/4/15/4228700/pebble-tetris-clo... [2] https://github.com/google/pebble/blob/3b927684809fba173ee540... [3] Okay, one last note: interesting to observe it was suddenly a lot more difficult to find Pebble/SDK related links from ~2012/2013 due to the amount of coverage the PebbleOS/RePebble announcements seem to have received. Read into that what you wish. :)