Wearables & IBM MobileFirst – Video & Sample Code

Last week I attended IBM Insight in Las Vegas. It was a great event, with tons of great information for attendees. I had a few sessions on mobile applications. In particular, my dev@Insight session on Wearables powered by IBM MobileFirst was recorded. You can check it out here:

https://youtu.be/d4AEwCOmvug

Sorry it’s not in HD, but the content is still great! (Yes, I am biased.)

In this session I showed how you can power wearable apps, specifically those on smart watch devices, using either the MobileFirst Platform Foundation Server, or the MobileFirst offerings on IBM Bluemix (cloud).

Key takeaways from the session:

Wearables are the most personal computing devices ever. Your users can use them to be notified of information, search/consume data, or even collect environmental data for reporting or actionable analysis.
Regardless of whether developing for a peripheral device like the Apple Watch or Microsoft Band, or a standalone device like Android Wear, you are developing an app that runs in an environment that mirrors that of a a native app. So, the fundamental development principles are exactly the same. You write native code, that uses standard protocols and common conventions to interact with the back-end.
Caveat to #1: You user interface is much smaller. You should design the user interface and services to acomodate for the reduced amount of information that can be displayed.
You can share code across both the phone/tablet and watch/wearable experience (depending on the target device).
Using IBM MobileFirst you can easily expose data, add authentication, and capture analytics for both the mobile and wearable solutions.

Demos/Code Samples:

In the session I showed 3 sample wearable apps. Full source code and setup instructions for each app is available at: https://github.com/triceam/MobileFirst-Wearables/