I’ve been wearing a Pebble watch for a couple of months now. I really like it but, to be honest, it’s the potential that has me most excited. The number of apps currently available is a bit disappointing and the API is taking its time appearing.
But even when the API is published, I wonder if I’ll have the time to learn all the necessary technologies in order to write Pebble-aware apps. All I want is to have some way to send a notification that pops up on the phone. Surely there must be an easy way to achieve that. Preferably one that I can use from Perl.
Of course, it turns out that there is. The secret is an app called Pushover. Pushover is a web service that sends notifications to your Android (or iOS if you’re that way inclined) device. There’s an app that you install on your device (it’s not free – I think it cost me £3.30) and you need to sign up for a free account. Then you can send notifications to your device either from their web site or using their API. The API is a simple HTTP request-based system. There’s an example on the Pushover web site that uses LWP::UserAgent, but you can make it even simpler using WebService::Pushover.
That’s all well and good. We can now send arbitrary notification from to our phone. How do we get from there to the watch?
The standard Pebble Android app is currently a little disappointing. In particular, it only supports pushing notifications from a tiny number of apps from the phone to the watch. But there’s another alternative. There’s an app called Pebble Notifier which will forward notifications from any app on the phone to the watch. When you install Pebble Notifier you can choose which apps you want to forward notifications for.
So, in summary, sign up for a Pushover account and install Pushover and Pebble Notifier on your phone. Then install WebService::Pushover on your computer. Then you can write code like this:
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use WebService::Pushover; my $push = WebService::Pushover->new or die( "Can't create Pushover interface.\n" ); my $status = $push->message( message => 'Hello Pebble', # Signing up to Pushover gives you these tokens token => 'PUSHOVER API TOKEN', user => 'PUSHOVER USER TOKEN', ); |
And that will send a message to your Pebble.
Now all I need is something useful to do with it.
Update: I’ve just noticed that there’s also an IFTTT channel for Pushover. It has nothing to do with Perl, obviously, but would be an easy way to trigger Pebble notifications for certain triggers.
Actually, I don’t think you need Pebble Notifier – if you look in the Pushover settings you’ll find a check box to forward messages to your Pebble.