Custom Watchfaces for the Pebble Smartwatch
The Pebble team posted an update yesterday that mentioned that over 500 custom watch faces had been submitted to a new site, My Pebble Faces, that you can now install on the Pebble watch that I reviewed a while back. It’s great to see the real benefits of this kind of device starting to bear fruit.
I’ve just spent a good chunk of time playing with the very simple to use WatchFace Generator and created some simple watchfaces using various images and different date/time elements.
The tool lets you select size, position and brightness of images, the date, the time and any custom text you want to include on the watchface using simple sliders. I was able to throw just about any kind of image at it and was able to resize and center the image with no trouble. You may need to invert the screen or adjust the brightness to get a usable image. As well, you get a live preview on the left and then generate the file. To get it onto your watch, you can either use the QR code on the device that is paired with the Pebble:
or click on the link directly and get a downloadable file:
I found it easier to download the files on my laptop and save them to a folder on Dropbox and then load them on my iPhone directly into the Pebble app from the Dropbox app. This also is a good backup of the generated files since the files aren’t available for very long after generation.
Most of the watchfaces on MyPebbleFaces seem to be generated using the above mentioned web tool but there are also a number of custom coded faces or games mixed in there that were built with the Pebble SDK. The “Nyan Watch” face is a slick, animated watchface although I’m not sure if there are any battery implications with the animations:
There are a number of games as well that you run from the menu on the Pebble. It’s very cool to see the community springing up around the watch…I was skeptical at first but it’s just begun and it’s already pretty impressive considering many people are still waiting for their watches from the initial Kickstarter run.
