Jul 24, 2019 • by Joshua Wise

It's Timeline time!

Hi there! Long time, no talk. Sorry for the silence, but I assure you that one year on, we’re alive and well, and we’ve got great things to share! This is the first of two posts coming your way – in the next post, we’ll talk about the shiny future of Rebble , but for now, we have an exciting announcement, and that is:

You guessed it, it’s finally time: Timeline time, to be specific! We’ve been talking about it for a year now, and thanks to the heroic effort of Maxim Teryokhin, Timeline is back up and running! If you loved apps like Note to Self, they’re ready to roll again on your wrist. We’ve spent the last few weeks carefully setting it up and testing it on RWS for everyone to use, and we’re so excited to announce that it’s ready. Timeline by now should have rolled out to all subscribers, and client-side timeline apps should work for you! We’re still rolling it out to non-subscribers – for more information on that, and on timeline apps that depend on a server, and, heck, a few other things we’ve done in the intervening time, read on below the fold.

Timeline rollout

You can tell if Timeline has hit your account yet by checking your account page. If you see a line item, “Timeline sync interval”, your account has Timeline enabled, and the next time your phone updates services, it’ll be ready to go! (If you see the “Timeline sync interval” line, and pins don’t seem to ever make it into your Timeline, you can try rerunning the initial setup. And, if you are getting errors from Timeline apps, then try uninstalling and reinstalling the watchapps in question from inside the Pebble app on your phone, so that you get the patched versions!)

All subscribers should have access to Timeline now. To make sure our servers stay happy and healthy, Timeline will be rolled out to non-subscribers over the course of about a week, so keep checking in periodically! (Of course, if you want access to Timeline right now, subscribing will instantly enable it for your account, and we’d love to have your support!)

Timeline sync

Believe it or not, Timeline is one of the more expensive services we offer, because everybody’s phone has to check in regularly to see if there are new pins. Subscribers get the added benefit of being able to check in every half an hour for new Timeline events, but everybody gets to use Timeline, even if you’re not a subscriber – non-subscriber pins will sync every three hours, instead. We’re working on ways to “opt in” to more frequent Timeline checks for power users – stay tuned for that!

Server-side Timeline apps

There are really two categories of Timeline apps: apps that post pins to your Timeline directly from your phone (“phone-side Timeline apps”), and apps that post pins from the web. We’ve automatically fixed up all the phone-side ones we could find – all 100 or so of them – but for apps that post pins to your Timeline from the web, the developers of those will have to do the patching. Luckily, the change is simple: all a developer has to do is change the endpoint that you post to from https://timeline-api.getpebble.com to https://timeline-api.rebble.io . App developers, get in touch with us if you have any questions – and users, if an app you want doesn’t work yet, gently remind the developer that we’re alive and well, and that we’d love to have them aboard!

One thing that we currently don’t support is Timeline topics. (Topics were a way that a developer could broadcast an event without having to name each of the users that cared about that event, and users could subscribe to an event.) It’s not fundamentally impossible to do that, but we haven’t implemented it yet; if you’re a developer who really wants that functionality again, get in touch and we’ll talk!

Subscription renewal

Some of you might have gotten an e-mail that your credit card has expired, without information on what to do about it. Never fear, Rebble is still here! Go to your account page, and click ‘Unsubscribe’, and then just subscribe again. If you have any time left on your subscription, it’ll automatically carry over until your next subscription begins. If you run into any problems with billing, just reply to the receipt that you got from Stripe, or reach out to us on Discord, and we’ll be happy to get you all squared away!

Dictation on iOS

Now that Note to Self is back, you might be wondering – what ever happened with dictation on iOS 11 and up? The answer is: we have a fix! Now, when you connect your watch to a Rebble-activated phone, a firmware update will get sent to your Pebble that fixes dictation on iOS 11. Hooray! (Note that this still won’t get you “send text” functionality; that requires phone carrier agreements that we’re not quite so keen on. )

Hey, where’d the Android app go?

Some of you may have noticed that the Android app is no longer on the Play Store. That’s true! A while ago, Google changed some requirements around for apps that use SMS on the Play Store, and the Pebble app didn’t make the cut. Don’t worry – the app still works just fine, you just have to download it from somewhere else! You can download it from APKMirror, and you’ll be right as rain to run Rebble on your new Android phone.

Coming up soon

Ok, that’s all from me for right now about the most important updates in the recent past. But what’s that? Are we looking… to the FUTURE?? You bet that there’s more where that came from! Coming up soon: a bright sustainable future for the Rebble Alliance!

And, of course, we enjoy talking to Pebblers who still love their devices just like we do. So if you have any questions, or just want to say hi, come visit us on Discord – we’d love to have you join the party!