someone who's doing some things
At times wonderful, and at times totally frustrating too. That’s technology, my experience of it anyway. I do a lot of stuff with technology and I suspect I will continue to do that.
I’d sort of forgotten about funding this on Kickstarter until it arrived. I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do with it. I did have a couple of ideas, and I’m sure I wrote them down somewhere, so I’ll have to look them out and see what I can do with it.
I’m sure it’ll find a place and I’m sure I’ll have some fun with it too.
I really can’t get over how lovely these little kits from Boldport are. The attention to detail and design are just beautiful. I do think they’re amazing.
I got this after a meeting with Boldport (with whom I was really impressed by the way), and just love the design behind it completely. So I had to share a couple of pictures.
What I really wanted to do was to be able to use my Pebble Time with two devices simultaneously. However, it appears that this is just not possible at all. The reason? Simple really, but the smart watch uses bluetooth LE in slave mode and not in host mode. Host mode would allow you to connect to up to 7 other devices. However, it doesn’t look like you can do that easily with an iPhone, and, the Pebble doesn’t have that enabled as yet, and it appears that there is little or no demand for it. Trust me to be looking for something that no one else wants.
So, why did I want it? Well, I thought it would be useful to be able to get it to have notifications from both my iPhone and my Nexus tablet at the same time. Android has a few things that iOS doesn’t, and whilst the same is true in the other direction, from my perspective that’s quite minimal.
However, it isn’t the end of the world at all. I can live without it, but perhaps I may have to think of a different way of doing things in order to achieve what I wanted.
I’ll give that some thought.
So this is the second year I’ve been at the Liberty Festival with SoundLab. This year was a bit damp and wet, but fun nevertheless. We still had a lot of people come along and play and enjoy themselves, so it was a good day all in all. I’m glad that I was able to be a part of it.
Even though it was wet we had a steady stream of people wanting to try out new ways to make music, and experiment.
I’ve been a fan of what you do for a long time now so please take this the right way. I think what you do is great, but there are just a few things I think you should do sooner rather than later, and, if the truth be known, you probably should’ve done them some time ago. At least you should’ve in my opinion anyway.
So, just some functionality that you should have in as standard, or, if you prefer, as part of an advanced or paid for service even.
Here’s what I’d like to see:
See, it isn’t a lot to ask really is it?
Now that would be super useful. I’m sure that it was promised a long time ago, possibly when the first Pebble watch came out, but it never really happened. Well, it didn’t happen at all.
The nearest thing to it is an app called This Button for Pebble, which allows an HTTP push from your Pebble. That’s really useful, but I’ve only been able to get it to work intermittently so far. Perhaps I need to persevere with it.
Of course, a real IFTTT channel would be better. Ideally for me it would have:
That lot would do for a start anyway. That would be fun to play with and create recipes with on IFTTT. I’d like to see that.
I wonder if it’ll come about?
I’ve liked IFTTT (or IF as apparently they’re now called) since right back when they started. They’ve gone from strength and delivered some really interesting and useful functionality for connecting the internet in simple ways. They’ve also supported a lot of IoT (internet of things) devices, and now, with the new Maker channel they’re supporting anything you want to use to connect to the internet.
This is a big deal I think. It means all manner of devices can use the IFTTT service with an HTTP post request. I’ve already tried it with my twine device and it works really well. I’m thinking about how to use it with my Pebble Time too. The possibilities are limitless. However, for me, what will be really important is how to make it truly useful. Without that, it is just tinkering for tinkerings sake, and whilst that’s fun, from my perspective it doesn’t get you anywhere.
So, whilst I’ll be trying it out, I’ll mainly be looking for some really useful ways to use the new channel. If I find any that I think are worth sharing, I will.
So, a couple of days into my use of the Pebble Time, how’s it going? Well so far so good. Today I was interested to see how the constant bluetooth LE connection would drain my iPhone 6. It seemed to add an additional drain, but not too much. So that’s a good sign, a good step forward.
Notifications are pretty good though. I quite like them even though they get a little bit annoying at times, but I think that’s more to do with my having too many on my iPhone anyway, so perhaps it’s a good prompt to clear those up.
Next I’m interested to see how I can do more with the Pebble and get it working for me in the way I’d really like it to. More of that soon though.
So the first step of getting the device sync’d up and updated is easy to do and all goes well. We’ll see how things pan out with the old Pebble. Or rather the new Pebble that is.
I am Ashley Elsdon 