App Gallery

[N8teGee]

As apps begin to populate the app gallery I imagine they will occupy the "All Apps" tab like in the screenshot below. Is there going to be any sort of order in this section like categories, or even a search bar? I can't imagine having to scroll through hundreds of apps just to find something I'm looking for. That would be a nightmare... 

[John-21]

Hi,

yeah I thought the same... I'm pretty sure they'll change it when we'll start to get apps from third parties devs.

By the way, I hope we'll get more apps from next week, but maybe that's too optimistic. I'm tempted to try out fitbit studio. I saw that when you try to enable it, it asks you to download version 1.1 of fitbit os that it's in beta.

[datalore]

If you go to https://twitter.com/FitbitDev you can see some cool apps developers are already working on. I think the app gallery will be stocked soon. They will most definitely have to organize the apps by categories. There's already a home automation app that's working. Right now you just control lights, but the fun stuff is coming. This watch is going to be pretty cool when they work out the kinks. 

[N8teGee]

@John-21 I do hope so. Maybe they left it like that for now so it doesn't look so empty, lots of empty categories etc.

Thanks for the link @datalore, I'm just checking that out now. How is your app coming along? I'm sure you said you had started on something? 

[datalore]

I've just started and it's going well so far. I'm loving the SDK and I think it's fitbits secret weapon. My app will only be for me and a few friends, but I already have some new ideas. I just need to find the time lol. 

[N8teGee]

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@datalore wrote:

I've just started and it's going well so far. I'm loving the SDK and I think it's fitbits secret weapon. My app will only be for me and a few friends, but I already have some new ideas. I just need to find the time lol. 

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Glad it's going well and you are finding the SDK a pleasant experience. That's definitely a good sign and will hopefully encourage more developers to do what they do best. Thanks for the feedback. 

[minigno]

I decided to experiment myself...I'm a complete js noob who has poked around a little in the past, a few online courses over the years, and has various poking around and school experience in programming in a number of languages (oh god, that was so long ago and it's been so many "hello worlds" since then).

I was nervous about having to download the developer firmware, but it seems more stable than the last version anyway and doesn't seem to change anything but adding the developer bridge.

I haven't done anything useful yet, but experimenting with the tutorial apps, modifying them, playing with the interface components and seeing what doing X does to Y, etc, has been a lot easier to do than I had expected it would be, especially with building and getting each experiment to the watch...it is really a breeze to get started.

[ratcityrain]

This is a great idea. Being able to categorize the apps would be nice, otherwise like you said the list will get long.

Or even if they added a search feature to look for specific app

[N8teGee]

Any news on when we might expect to see 3rd party apps and watch faces?

I've seen plenty of interesting and finished watch faces on Twitter, so at this point I suspect the holdup is completely down to fitbit. I have a feeling we won't see anything until the developer beta becomes the public build. 

[Ozzie65]

Hi @N8teGee - This is obviously a work in progress. I would agree with you, that when this begins to be populated with additional apps, there will need to be some type of search/sort ability to make it more useful. 

[datalore]

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@N8teGee wrote:

Any news on when we might expect to see 3rd party apps and watch faces?

I've seen plenty of interesting and finished watch faces on Twitter, so at this point I suspect the holdup is completely down to fitbit. I have a feeling we won't see anything until the developer beta becomes the public build. 

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I think you're absolutely right; fitbit is waiting on the software being sorted. I can't see them opening an app gallery without some way to search and index apps. I'll just say that developing software is hard. Even established software companies have to constantly update. My team at work is developing some software and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Fitbit, of course, has more people and money to throw at the problem, but software is still software. Having said all that; I'd expect the app gallery to be ready sometime in mid to late November. I have no inside information, but looking at the developer firmware they seem to be close. 

[lmunnerlyn77]

Hi developers! could you please work with Napster to add the Napster app to the Ionic.