First, Pebble had evolved their SDK and the original app I’d created was no longer a good fit. I had good reasons for breaking both rules.
#EVERNOTE ANDROID WEAR HOW TO#
I created a generic watch app that knew next-to-nothing about Evernote: it just knew how to display and navigate menus, text, images, checkboxes, etc. The result is often an over-engineered solution that takes longer to write, test and maintain than simply focusing on solving the problem at hand.
#EVERNOTE ANDROID WEAR SOFTWARE#
Software engineers are forever trying to solve a specific problem by creating a generic solution, imagining all kinds of scenarios in which their software might be re-used. The second rule I broke is YAGNI, short for you aren’t gonna need it. Instead of reusing the Pebble app I’d previously demo-ed to my boss, I rewrote a new one from scratch. The first is that it is almost always a bad idea to rewrite software - we vastly underestimate the complexity involved in reproducing the behavior of the original software, and we upset existing customers in the process. When I started working in earnest on Evernote for the Pebble, I immediately broke two cardinal rules of software engineering. I want to share with you a couple of things I’ve learned as I’ve worked to create Evernote experiences for a number of wearable platforms, including the Samsung Galaxy Gear, the Sony Smartwatch 2, the Pebble Smartwatch, and Android Wear. The only way to find out what makes sense is to try stuff out. So it makes sense to think about extending the Evernote experience to wearable devices. Part of the answer lies in Evernote’s promise of ubiquity: You can use it no matter what desktop or mobile device you use. I’m trying to figure out what Evernote experience makes sense on a wearable device, initially a watch. Why indeed? It's a great question, and that's part of my job. So that’s how I came to be focused on wearables at Evernote: I did something purely for the pleasure of doing it, in an area in which I felt inspired and which excited me, and I shared my work with others.Ī step back: So why Evernote and Wearables?
#EVERNOTE ANDROID WEAR FULL#
I was instead asked whether I wanted to work full time on thinking about and working on Evernote and wearables. Working for Evernote, I should have known better. Once I received my Pebble Kickstarter edition watch, I wrote a small Evernote client for it, and sent a demo video to my boss, fully expecting the reply to be “ that’s nice, but don’t you have real work to do?“ Instead of raising their original goal of $100,000, the campaign raised more than $10 million dollars. I backed the Pebble Kickstarter campaign, even though it totally failed to meet its objective. Although I’d joined Evernote to build our Windows Phone client, and later worked on our Android products, I was fascinated by the thought of a digital watch for which I could write software.