Pebble Time with Michael
I’ve received so many responses to my previous Day 13 and Day 14 two-part articles on the MyTimeline Tasker Plugin that I’ve decided to do a followup article on this topic. I’m going to answer a few of the questions I’ve received about this exciting piece of software.
Tasker looks awfully hard to use. It looks like a computer programming language. I’m not a programmer!
Tasker has a lot of the power of a computer programming language, and you can do some very sophisticated operations with it, but at it’s core it’s just a matter of filling in some forms to control its operation. If you just stick with basic Profiles and Tasks it’s really pretty simple to use. You can avoid Variables and Scenes completely, if you want, or only tackle them when you get comfortable with Tasker’s basic operation. There are lots of tutorials and examples covering Tasker’s most basic functions available on the Web – two of which I mentioned in the original articles.
Can’t the functionality provided by MyTimeline Tasker just be accomplished through calendar entries that would automatically be synced from my phone to my Pebble Time’s timeline?
The answer to this question is a qualified “Yes”. The qualifications are as follows:
- Calendar entries can only be controlled by time periods and can’t take into account your current context, like your location.
- I personally don’t want to clutter up my phone’s calendar with what are really reminders. I want my master calendar to only contain actual appointments and events.
There must be some way to just use the Pebble Time’s timeline syncing functions for reminders without cluttering my Calendar up! Isn’t there?
If you really want to completely avoid using Tasker and just use your phone’s calendar for posting reminders to your Pebble Time timeline, there is actually a fairly simple way to do it. Use multiple calendars – one for your appointments and one for your reminders. This can be done by using multiple Google calendars, or by using a combination of a Google calendar and your phone’s built-in calendar. Set up your Pebble Time to sync both of these calendars, but only view the appointment calendar when checking your daily schedule. Again, this won’t provide location-based reminders, but short of that it works pretty well for merging events and reminders into your Pebble Time timeline.
Isn’t there some way to get location-based functionality available to iPhone users of the Pebble Time? We’ve been robbed!
It is actually possible to get a subset of this type of functionality using the iPhone. It can be done by using the iPhone Reminder program and having its notifications synced with the Pebble Time. The reminders won’t appear in your Pebble Time timeline, but you will receive them as notifications on your smartwatch. You can have iPhone reminders based on time periods, and with geo-fencing they can also be triggered by location. While this is certainly not as flexible or powerful as the context-based functionality provided by MyTimeline, at least it’s a usable subset of it and you can thus get reminders based on your current location.
I’m really glad my articles on this piece of software have stirred up so much interest. I can’t wait to see some of the great ideas I’m sure will be coming from Pebble Time owners who are using this software to create additional and invaluable functionality for the Pebble Time.
Hey! Have been trying to use this. The phone app says the token was sent but I only get it to show on the phone 30min after!!! Could you do a step-by-step-for-dummies-set-up? 🙂
Rick – I think something is up with the server that Pebble uses to process pins to the Timeline. You aren’t the only person I’ve heard who has run into long delays using MyTimeline. I’ve been lucky myself, but not everyone seems to be getting timely service. My only suggestion at this point is to use Notifications from Tasker instead of the MyTimeline Plugin. Notifications are sent directly from your phone to the Pebble over Bluetooth. That way you’ll at least get Notifications of the events Tasker is creating.