Almost Five

Overview

This is a watch face for the Pebble smartwatch. It is based on the PebbleTextWatch by waerewip, and Fuzzy-Text-Watch-Plus by Sarastro72.

Compared to Fuzzy-Text-Watch-Plus, this fork adds day-of-month and day-of-week display, upcoming-meeting flags and Bluetooth and battery indicators, additional languages, fixed backlight on gestures, on-watch weather phrasing (Open-Meteo), and other small changes.

Current app version: 1.3.0 (see package.json and RELEASE_NOTES.md).

For users

Features

• Fuzzy time in natural language with 5 minute precision.
• Current languages: Swedish, English (US, default), English (UK), Norwegian, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, German (east), German (west), French, Japanese (romaji)
• The large and easy to read fonts of the original Text Watch
• Buzz and message when bluetooth connection is lost
• Top status row: meeting alerts, Bluetooth disconnect, low battery (below 40%), and localized weather (sky + spelled temperature band); on supported color watches you can tap to cycle what is highlighted when multiple items are active
• Localized strings for meeting alerts, spelled day-of-month (no day digits), and low-battery label
• Weather (companion): fetches Open-Meteo; watch shows a short phrase (for example clear / partly cloudy + “high teens”, “twenties”, etc.) with no numeric temperature in the line
• Configurable colors
• Supports all pebble models up to and including Pebble Time Round
• Configurable time offset for when each fuzzy phrase changes
• Gesture-triggered backlight pulse (on/off; when on, tap also toggles day-of-week display)
• Bottom spelled day-of-month text (per language, from strings/ui.yaml on the watch)
• Day-of-week toggle: tap (gesture) to show the day name on the bottom line; gesture backlight setting simplified to on/off
• Nice staggered animation
• Between one and four lines of text, depending on need.
• The text rows are always centered vertically
• Smaller words may share a single line (such as "ten to")
• Refactored code for better flexibility/rewriteability

Getting the watchface

This watchface is available on the Pebble App store as (pending).

Screenshots

Filenames describe the scenario (platform, language, time of day, flags). Regenerate with npm run screenshots:store after pebble build (uses screenshots/capture-config-*.yml and pebble emu-button on aplite so the watchface is visible, not the timeline idle screen).

Platform	Preview
Aplite (English, ~08:58 "almost nine", low battery)
Basalt (English, 09:05)
Diorite (English, 09:40, Bluetooth disconnected)
Diorite (English, ~04:58 "almost five")
Diorite (English, ~04:58 "almost five", low battery)
Flint (Japanese, 10:05)

The diorite-en-940-nobt frame is recorded on the basalt emulator: both Pebble Time and Time Steel use the same 144×168 color layout, and some SDK installs cannot complete pebble screenshot against the diorite QEMU target even though the PNG is labeled for the Steel listing.

Screenshot limitations (what the CLI often cannot do reliably)

Automation and emulator bugs matter as much as the watchface:

• Diorite (Time Steel) QEMU: On many hosts, pebble screenshot and pebble repl never finish the initial WatchVersion handshake and raise TimeoutError. There is no fix in this repo—use the basalt emulator for the same 144×168 color framebuffer, or capture on a real Time Steel over the phone/dev bridge.
• Aplite (OG Pebble) after pebble install: The emulator may stay on the system “install an app / timeline” text even though the install succeeded. The app is not broken; send Back a few times (as scripts/capture-store-screenshots.sh does) until the watchface is visible, then shoot.
• QEMU never becomes ready: If pebble install spins in _wait_for_qemu past ~10 minutes with no qemu-system CPU use, something is wrong with the SDK emulator on that host (stale lock, missing deps). pebble kill --force, reboot, or capture on a phone instead.
• Stale or wrong framebuffer: If QEMU was left in a bad state or the wrong platform was last connected, pebble screenshot can produce a tiny PNG or nonsense (for example a single word). Run pebble kill --force, reinstall the face, wait for it to draw, then capture. npm run screenshots:store waits a long fixed delay after install (instead of trusting pebble ping), rejects shots under ~900 bytes, retries up to three times, uses one emu:apply-config per shot, and pebble kill --force with an 8s sleep after every capture so the next pebble install is not racing a wedged QEMU.
• pebble repl / emu:apply-config: Repeated Python repl sessions can wedge libpebble until the emulator is killed. The store script only opens repl once per frame. If tuple push fails, kill, reinstall, and retry once; worst case set options on a phone and screenshot there.
• Platforms not in the store script: Chalk, Emery, Gabbro, etc. are not automated here; add manual steps or extend the script if you need those store slots.
• States that need a real watch: Quiet-mode “SHH”, exact meeting banners, or carrier-specific notification stacks are easier to validate on hardware than in QEMU.

Settings

Open this watch face’s settings in the Pebble / Rebble app to change appearance, language, time offset, backlight-on-gesture behavior, Bluetooth disconnect alerts, and Google Calendar iCal URLs.

The companion app uses an embedded data: URL for the configuration page, so no external hosted config site is required.

Calendar and meeting status

• Add up to three Google Calendar iCal URLs in settings.
• Events with TRANSP:TRANSPARENT or X-MICROSOFT-CDO-BUSYSTATUS:FREE are ignored.
• Meeting status is shown in the top row (meeting soon / meeting now) and localized with the active watch language.
• Calendar polling is aligned to real 5-minute boundaries (:00, :05, :10, etc.) with minute boundary status checks to avoid delayed state transitions.

Possible future features

• Japanese in kana/kanji: system fonts lack CJK glyphs; bundle a subset font and load it for the text layers that show time strings.
• More languages, better translations
• Configurable and improved text alignment
• Better support for round watch designs
• Test suite with screenshot review
• handle timeline notifications https://developer.repebble.com/tutorials/watchface-tutorial/part5/

For developers

Prerequisites

• Rebble/Pebble SDK tooling with the pebble CLI available in your shell.
• Node.js 18+ if you want to run PKJS regression tests (npm test).

Build and install (examples)

• pebble build — compile the app; the bundle is written under build/ (for example build/Almost-Five.pbw).
• pebble install --phone 192.168.0.218 — install to a watch on the LAN; replace the IP with your phone’s address (Pebble app must allow developer connection).
• pebble install --emulator flint — install to a running emulator; replace flint with your target (for example basalt, chalk, aplite).

To remove build artifacts, run pebble clean or delete the build/ directory.

String codegen (weather + UI)

• Weather: edit strings/weather.yaml, then npm run codegen:weather (writes src/generated/weather_i18n_gen.{h,c}).
• Day ordinals + low-battery label: edit strings/ui.yaml, then npm run codegen:ui (writes src/generated/ui_i18n_gen.{h,c}).

See AGENTS.md for a concise command reference.

Local emulator config (YAML, no config webview)

The emulator config webview callback can be unreliable on some platforms. For local iteration, this repo includes a YAML-driven path that sends settings directly as AppMessage tuples (bypassing HTML/webview callbacks).

1. Edit dev-config.yml with the values you want (for example language, offset, gesture, bt_notification, strict_hour_phrases). Optionally add weather_code and weather_temp_f (integers) to mimic PKJS weather tuples for screenshots or layout tests.
2. Install/run the watchface on your emulator target.
3. Apply settings:
   • npm run emu:apply-config -- --emulator flint

This command reads dev-config.yml, maps values to the app's message keys from package.json, and sends them directly to the running watch app over the Pebble transport.

Current limitation: this direct local config flow is not yet reliable on every supported emulator platform. If one platform fails to connect or apply, try another target (for example flint) for settings iteration, or use phone-side config for final validation.

Store / README screenshots

Run npm run screenshots:store from the project root (after pebble build). That script installs to each emulator, applies screenshots/capture-config-en.yml or capture-config-ja.yml, on aplite sends several Back button presses so the face is shown instead of the system “install an app / timeline” prompt, and captures the diorite-named PNG using basalt (same color resolution as Time Steel).

pebble install looks stuck: The SDK may sit in _wait_for_qemu() with no new output for many minutes on a cold QEMU start—that is normal. Check Activity Monitor for qemu-system-* using CPU; give it time before Ctrl-C. If it never finishes, run pebble kill --force, look for zombie QEMU, then retry. Optional: PEBBLE_INSTALL_TIMEOUT=600 npm run screenshots:store aborts each install after 600 seconds so you get a clear error instead of an infinite wait.

Remaining screenshot TODOs (known follow-ups):

• Add an optional hardware capture path for true diorite shots so the labeled Steel frame is not emulator-substituted.
• Add automated validation beyond file size (for example image-diff or OCR smoke checks) to catch wrong-frame captures.
• Decide whether to include additional store targets (for example chalk/emery/gabbro) in the scripted flow.

Troubleshooting

• If pebble build fails because pebble is missing, install or re-link your Pebble/Rebble SDK tooling.
• If configuration fails to open, inspect PKJS logs from the phone/emulator runtime.
• If settings save but do not apply, inspect phone logs for PKJS AppMessage payloads and ensure message keys match package.json.