Pebble Founder Eric Migicovsky Is Bringing It Back – Daring Fireball
By John GruberWorkOS Radar:Protect your app against AI bots, free-tier abuse, and brute-force attacks.David Pierce, writing at The Verge, “The Pebble Smartwatch Is Making a Comeback”:Rather than buy another smartwatch, Migicovsky decided to try and
get Pebble going again. He sold his most recent startup, a
messaging app called Beeper, to Automattic last year and
left the company in the fall. Since then, he’d thought about
starting a Pebble-like product from scratch, figuring it’d be
easier to do the same thing again a second time. “But then I was
like, what if I just asked Google to open-source the operating
system?” he says. It felt like a long shot, but he knew the code
was just sitting dormant inside Mountain View somewhere. So he
asked. A few times.To Migicovsky’s surprise, Google agreed to release Pebble OS to
the public. As of Monday, all the Pebble firmware is available on
GitHub, and Migicovsky is starting a company to pick up
where he left off.The company — which can’t be named Pebble because Google still
owns that — doesn’t have a name yet.My first idea for a new name: Rebble — a rebellious return of Pebble. My second idea: Quixote — because this isn’t going to be a hit this time either. (Quixote also would have been a good name for Beeper Mini’s attempt to backwards engineer access as an unsanctioned iMessage client for Android.) But, thankfully, it doesn’t sound to me like Migicovsky’s goal is to boil the ocean. (Update: Turns out, Rebble is the name of a community project to write new firmware to keep old Pebble watches running.)Migicovsky, on his blog:You’d imagine that smartwatches have evolved considerably since
2012. I’ve tried every single smart watch out there, but none do
it for me. No one makes a smartwatch with the core set of
features I want:If their goal is to be to smartwatches what Playdate is to handheld gaming, that’s definitely achievable, and if they succeed, will by definition be a lot of fun.The whole tech world needs more projects that aren’t trying to become billion- (let alone trillion‑) dollar ideas, but are happily shooting for success as million-dollar ideas (or less!). Many of the best and most beloved movies ever made weren’t big-budget Hollywood blockbusters. If your list of all-time favorite movies doesn’t include a bunch that were made on shoestring budgets, your whole list probably sucks, because you have no taste. The same is of course true for music, games, and everything else. Indie art is often great art, imbued by the souls and obsessions of its creators, and blockbuster art is often garbage art, imbued only by soulless corporate bureaucracies.Computer hardware and software can be — ought to be — attempts at creating art.
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