Then other wonderful apps such as Google Maps or Citymapper can make use of it to help you find your way around the city.
Luckily, the TFL (organization managing all things Transport For London) does a wonderful job at having real time data for the status of the transport, and not only that, it also exposes that data though an API. Moving around can be a challenge with 11 different underground lines and over 600 bus lines (no joking! ).
WatchDuino now tells you when your bus is coming at 11:33. Now we are able to make progress faster, with better code, and less bugs. So we decided to switch to Apache Cordova ( ) a couple months ago, which is a framework for writing Android apps as if they were web applications, by providing a set of libraries to access the mobile APIs from HTML5 and Javascript.īeing web developers we are much more comfortable with this kind of stack, so we migrated all of the functionality of the companion app to a new one written with Cordova. Android apps need to be programmed in Java, which is not a great language for rapid prototyping. One of our biggest sources of frustration when developing WatchDuino2 has been working on the Android companion app. This companion app contains the messaging framework, plus the bit of logic for every phone app, that usually is in charge of querying some web service and producing a response with data to pass to the watch.įor the sake of debugging and testing, we made a simple interface to the companion app so that we can easily pair the devices, inspect all the messages going through, plus triggering notifications from each of the apps, or simply ping the watch to test the connection. 
We made a framework for serializing and handling the bluetooth communications from and to the watch.įor WatchDuino to work, a companion app needs to be running on Android as a service. As you know, much of the heavy lifting of the WatchDuino apps is actually not done in the watch itself, but on the phone.
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