Introducing Almost Five, a New-ish Pebble Watchface

calendar Apr 30, 2026 · 2 min read · pebble smartwatch watchface design  ·
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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!

The watch spells out the time, just as you'd normally say it in conversation. Ten til Twelve, Almost Three, etc.

The previous developers made a great start, but I've made a number of enhancements:

  • Added informal American English, as well as French and (romanji) Japanese. (Generating translations is now literally the easiest thing in the world to do.)
  • Added the day of month to the bottom of the screen.
  • Added no-bluetooth and low-battery indicators.
  • Added support for iCal calendars to remind you "Meeting Soon!"
  • Improved layout algorithm.
  • Improved development workflows.

It's been a fun little side project over the past few days. If you have an old (or new!) Pebble watch, please try it out. I need testers!

The app is listed on my software page and the MIT-licensed source is available on github.