Watchapp Review: Pebble Music Player

One of the best stock benefits of a Pebble smartwatch is being able to control you music or other audio from your wrist. In fact I find this so useful that I have it set as one of my two shortcut buttons on my Pebble watch. I use it when I am exercising, walking, or doing chores around the house to control my audio without pulling out my phone.

The music app hooks in directly to your iPhone's regular music controls, which gives it the ability to control almost any app that does audio playback, this includes the iPhone music app, the Podcast app, iTunes U, as well as tons of third party apps.

The watchapp's interface is simple. It will display as much information as it knows about the track being played. At the top it will have the artist's name, then the name of the track, and then how far you listened. Below that you can see the album information.

I have however found the time indicator to be fairly inaccurate so I wouldn't rely on it, particularly when listening to longer tracks like podcasts or audiobooks.

This image from the Pebble website shows the music app:

The controls run along the right hand side. In the picture above you can see volume up, play/pause, and volume down. By doing a long press on the middle button you can toggle between volume controls and skip forward/backward track controls.

One thing the app is lacking that would be really helpful for spoken audio content especially is a skip 15 seconds forward/backward option. It would also be nice if you got a visual representation of how high the volume was when you adjust it. I would also love to see the options of scrolling through tracks to select the one you want.

Those are my suggestions that would make the app better, but even lacking those it is still one of the most useful apps on the Pebble and since it comes preinstalled it is one that you should be taking advantage of.

I hope you enjoyed this post, and remember, live better.

Pebbledoro, a Pebble Watchapp review

Having a Pebble smartwatch is a fun and nostalgic experience for me. Why? The joy of having a grayscale screen that only a few other nerds have and trying to find extremely useful apps in a very simple interface reminds me so much of my early days using the Palm IIIxe. You never really know if an app will work or not, and there is a small group of mostly volunteer open source developers working on it. 

Pebbledoro is a great example of this feeling. It is an extremely simple but very useful app. The app was created by developer mertdikmen, and is an app for implementing the pomodoro method.

Essentially the entire app can be seen in this screen shot: 

If you are not familiar with the pomodoro method it involves a productivity system of working for 25 minutes and then breaking for 5 minutes, and then working for 25 minutes and then breaking for 5 minutes. It is a great system to help you increase focus. Orthodox pomodoro practitioners use a tomato timer, but pebbledoro replaces that with a simple app on you wrist.

As you can see in the screenshot there are just three controls: Start, stats, and stop. When you start the little black square will begin to appear at a rate of 1 per minute. When it is done you will feel a small buzz on you wrist. The break will not start immediately so you can finish up whatever you are doing that moment, and then push play again to start the break. During the break the black squares will disappear at a rate of 5 per minute.

The stats button will tell you how many pomodoro cycles you have completed using the app, which is not incredibly useful but might be fun to know.

The stop button will cancel the pomodoro.

You can still receive notifications on the watch while using this app, although that might throw off you focus.

Well that is about it. A simple but useful app for the Pebble or Pebble Steel. 

Thanks for reading, and remember, live better.