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Comment by xavdid | Hacker News Reader

It's great to see them coming back! I adored my Pebble(s). 2 fun stories:

1. Pebble supported 3rd party watch faces based on a file. There was a great little site that let you use a visual UI to build the file and, if done from your phone, upload it right to the watch. Once, when out at midnight beer launch, I made a custom face for the beer and won a little keychain from the brewery. My Apple watch could never.

2. Once time in 2014, I ran into some Pebble engineers at an ice cream shop in Palo Alto, they spotted my watch, they bought my scoop! Fun, weird little Silicon Valley moment.

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> There was a great little site that let you use a visual UI to build the file

Was the site you used "Watchface Generator" (.de -- domain was poached at some point) : https://developer.rebble.io/developer.pebble.com/community/t...

I seem to recall there were a couple of graphic + watch-face only generator sites but think the .de hosted one was most common?

Of particular note in the current context:

There was also the ground-breaking "CloudPebble IDE" by Katharine Berry (subsequently employed by Pebble), who "coincidentally" :) happens to be one of the three authors of the Google blog post about the Pebble OS release: https://opensource.googleblog.com/2025/01/see-code-that-powe...

(And who is apparently also part of the Rebble team.)

For anyone interested here's a couple of related links I encountered while trying to recall what CloudPebble was called :) :

* Write-up of a person's experience of using CloudPebble to write their first Pebble watch face (with no previous C or Linux experience): https://thomasstoeckert.us/project/pebble-sse-classic

* Write-up about Rebble project by iFixIt in 2019: https://www.ifixit.com/News/33398/rebble-with-a-cause-how-pe...

* Source code for CloudPebble: https://github.com/pebble/cloudpebble

We actually had a company tab at that ice cream shop - anyone who had a Pebble on ate for free :)

It's a pity that you didn't have a tab at the bar I bumped into you in in Amsterdam last year, while wearing my PTS, then ;)

I remember you mentioning that there was hope of the firmware being open sourced. Very glad to see that it's happened, and that I might well have a chance to upgrade this 10-year-old but still going strong watch.

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