Laurie Wired (tweet, Hacker News):
Malimite is an iOS and macOS decompiler designed to help researchers analyze and decode IPA files and Application Bundles.
Built on top of Ghidra decompilation to offer direct support for Swift, Objective-C, and Apple resources.
Previously:
We are excited to announce that the source code that powered Pebble smartwatches is now available for download.
This is part of an effort from Google to help and support the volunteers who have come together to maintain functionality for Pebble watches after the original company ceased operations in 2016.
[…]
In 2016, Fitbit acquired Pebble, including Pebble’s intellectual property. Later on, Fitbit itself was acquired by Google, taking the Pebble OS with it.
[…]
This repository contains the entire OS, which provides all the standard smartwatch functionality – notifications, media controls, fitness tracking, and support for custom apps and watchfaces – on tiny ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers. Built with FreeRTOS, it contains multiple modules for memory management, graphics, and timekeeping, as well as an extensive framework to load and run custom applications written in C, as well as in Javascript via the Jerryscript Javascript engine. The Pebble architecture allowed for a lightweight system delivering a rich user experience as well as a very long battery life.
We were an awesome, inexperienced, but determined and optimistic team of software developers that made this happen. This photo was from our firmware offsite in early 2016, and there’s just so much talent here.
[…]
The solution? Purposefully clock the RTC 1024x faster than real time, so every second on the RTC (which was broken into hour, minute and second fields) was actually only 1/1024th of a second. Call these “ticks” and you’ve made a high resolution clock that worked in stop mode.
[…]
This required some other hacks to handle “rollovers” because you could lose track of the real time with your RTC running so quickly, but it worked and a going into stop mode for fractions of a second with accurate timing saved a ton of battery life.
Eric Migicovsky (via Hacker News):
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:
- Always-on e-paper screen (it’s reflective rather than emissive. Sunlight readable. Glanceable. Not distracting to others like a bright wrist)
- Long battery life (one less thing to charge. It’s annoying to need extra cables when traveling)
- Simple and beautiful user experience around a core set of features I use regularly (telling time, notifications, music control, alarms, weather, calendar, sleep/step tracking)
- Buttons! (to play/pause/skip music on my phone without looking at the screen)
- Hackable (apparently you can’t even write your own watchfaces for Apple Watch? That is wild. There were >16k watchfaces on the Pebble appstore!)
[…]
I had really, really, really hoped that someone else would come along and build a Pebble replacement. But no one has. So… a small team and I are diving back into the world of hardware to bring Pebble back!
Previously:
Update (2025-01-30): John Gruber:
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!).
This is the final episode of our podcast. Thank you so much to everyone who has listened and supported us over the years! We’ve loved doing the show.
Thanks and congratulations on 16 years of podcasting. Perhaps this will lead to more time for blogging.
See also: Isaiah Carew.
