One More Minute: A Pebble Count-Up Timer with Roman Numeral Vibrations

harlan.harris@gmail.com (Harlan Harris) — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A couple of months ago I released Almost Five, a fuzzy-text watchface for the reborn Pebble smartwatch. It's been fun hacking on watch faces, but I realized I had a practical gap: I needed a count-up stopwatch I could wear on my wrist while cooking, without pulling out my phone.

There are lots of timer apps on the Pebble App Store, but they're mostly focused on count-down scenarios, where you know exactly when the timer needs to end. But sometimes, especially in cooking, you want to know how long it's been, so that you can adjust as you go. How long has this steak been on the grill? How long have I been reducing this sauce? I don't see great stopwatch-like designs for that use-case.

Introducing Almost Five, a New-ish Pebble Watchface

harlan.harris@gmail.com (Harlan Harris) — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

You might remember the old Pebble smartwatch -- a minimalist e-ink watch that was popular among a certain set ten or so years ago. Well, it's back -- the original creator is manufacturing new hardware, and the software has been open-sourced. I wasn't on the bandwagon when they were originally popular, but I picked up the old/new Pebble 2 Duo recently and have been enjoying it.

Recently I decided to start building apps for it. I have a handy app for putting my grocery list on my wrist, but it's based on a reverse engineered API, which the grocery list company doesn't support, so I can't publish it. What I can publish though is an open-source watch face that I've been hacking on. Based on a couple of iterations of previous work by others (PebbleTextWatch and Fuzzy-Text-Watch-Plus), both last touched in 2016, and with the assistence of an AI agent, I've now released Almost Five!

Pebble on Harlan D. Harris

One More Minute: A Pebble Count-Up Timer with Roman Numeral Vibrations

Introducing Almost Five, a New-ish Pebble Watchface