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Comment by harlanlewis | Hacker News Reader

Enjoyed the read, thanks for sharing. The 'decorum' bit made me chuckle, though - checking your watch while someone's talking is hardly the height of etiquette!

I'm not too familiar with Pebble's interactions and content display - can you really just glance at it after your pocket buzzes, or is there any cycling through display modes to see notifications? If notifications take over display, how long do they persist? What default content gets hidden to show the notification? Or does it work a completely different way?

I'm looking forward to playing with one myself but for now am reduced to eager fanboi questions...

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So, when a notification hits your phone, the Pebble immediately buzzes and lights its screen, displaying the content of that notification. It'll sit there for three minutes, then go back to whatever you were doing.

So if you were in the Music controller, you would hit the Pebble's back button to dismiss the notification and you'd see your current track again. If you were on a watch app, you'll see the watch.

Fair point about manners! The fact that the device rather noticeably lights up gives you a bit of cover though.

As someone who already dreads smartphones coming out at lunch or dinner outings with friends, I already hate the idea of people's wrists lighting up and distracting from conversation. :)

Believe me, this is better. The curiosity urge is what gets the phone pulled out of the pocket. From there, it's very low friction to decide to open it up and start screwing around. Separating the two acts has, for me, been an improvement.

...or you could just set custom notification tones and vibrate patterns/intensity levels for specific apps/contacts/labels/anything (on android)

It's not the same as reading, though. I've done that in the past and it worked out like this:

"Oh, I know exactly who is texting me. They are a high priority person in my life. Let's make sure they're okay...

Aaand it's a cat gif."

The text display is the game-changer here.

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