If you recall we recently did a story on the new Pebble smartwatch. Ive been using it since then and it has practically become indispensable. I absolutely love it. There is however one tiny nagging issue.
Because of Apple’s guidelines for how things talk back and forth over bluetooth, and I suppose the fact that we are still in “1.x land”, there are some issues with notifications coming through to the watch.
FSM EXCLUSIVE DEAL Phone calls and SMS alerts come across just as they should, but everything else remains silent unless you manually go into Notification Center and toggle each item off and on. While this may be a viable solution for some, its a royal PITA. This is of coarse because you have to manually do this EVERY time it connects via bluetooth. Meaning if it’s working and you walk out of range for a second, then back… your screwed and have to do it again. Add the recently released jailbreak, with all its resprings and such and you have a veritable nightmare on your hands. Its really frustrating. Thankfully someone out there in jailbreak dev land loves us.
Two days ago a tweak called “BTNotificationEnabler” hit Cydia for the low low price of free that solves our problems quite nicely. As a matter of fact, the solution is so well done that if you didn’t know any better, you would think apple did it themselves. Its a fairly simple app, there is nothing to configure. Every application is turned on for notifications by default and can be individually toggled off in NC settings with a handy toggle switch in exactly the place you would expect it to be. Once installed, simply re-pair your pebble and you will instantly be receiving a handy buzz on your wrist with every push your phone receives, completely eliminating the need for pull your phone from your pocket every 5 seconds. The best part, all settings survive resprings, so its literally “set and forget”. Truly magical.
One last thing. It should be noted that this tweak enables BT notifications for ALL smart watches that support such things, not just the pebble. Thanks for the tip @ass from App.net!