InfiniTime 1.8 "Fuzzy Kiwifruit": BLE secure pairing, Shake to wake, Trip meter
This release adds the long-awaited BLE secure pairing, and a couple of other nice features, improvements and bug fixes. Follow me!
BLE Secure Pairing
So far, pairing your PineTime with your phone (or PC) was not secured at all:
anyone could do it (as long as the person was close enough) - not really great,
both in terms of privacy and security.
Also, the communications between the watch and the phone were unencrypted,
meaning anyone sniffing could see your notifications and basically any exchange
happening.
Now with Secure Pairing, once your PineTime is paired with your phone, it is no longer possible for another device to pair, making it properly secure.
The way it works is super simple: when pairing from a compatible companion app (only GadgetBridge as of writing this article), InfiniTime will display a passkey that has to be entered in the companion app.
🍒 Cherry on the cake 🍒: the communication between your PineTime and your phone/PC is now fully encrypted - JF did a quick proof of concept here.
Shake to wake
Waking up your PineTime is possible:
- either by pushing the button,
- single tap on the screen,
- double tap,
- raising your wrist.
This release adds a "shake wake"
method: as the name
suggests, you have to shake your wrist to wake up your PineTime.
And there's a "Wake Sense" section in the Settings, allowing to calibrate how
much you want to shake.
Trip meter
InfiniTime already had a way to define a steps daily goal.
This PR adds a "Trip"
option, which basically adds the cumulated number of steps in the "Steps" app.
For instance, if you walk 5000 steps on Monday, and 3000 on Tuesday, then the
"Trip" section will indicate 8000.
You can hit the Reset button to have the Trip meter come back to 0 - the
current daily number of steps will be unaffected.
Other features
Chimes
A nice addition: as with your old Casio watch, it is now possible to have your PineTime vibrate every hour or half hour. This is controled from the Settings:
Weather Service
This feature is super nice: companion apps will be able to send weather data to
InfiniTime, which can then display it in a watchface.
The "plumbing" is ready, however only GadgetBridge supports it today, and
there's no integration in the watchfaces yet.
Improvements
As usual, I'm focusing on the most interesting improvements, for a full list, please see the Release Notes.
Digital watchface: color of the BLE icon
A small detail, but the Bluetooth icon has now the official "Bluetooth™ blue".
PineTimeStyle: Integrated color picker into the watchface
The PineTimeStyle watchface can be customised by changing various colours.
Before 1.8, there was a dedicated section in the Settings - now to access this
"color picker", you just need to long tap on the PineTimeStyle watchface, then
tap on the gear icon, and choose your colors.
Settings: Styled checkboxes as radio buttons
Small cosmetic change:
InfiniPaint: Vibration on colour change
The Paint app allows drawing on the screen. I wasn't even aware that you could change the colors!!!
You just need to tap the screen - which now vibrates to "confirm" that the colour has changed.
Wrap Up
Fuzzy Kiwifruit is the first release of 2022, and we're off to a good start!!!
The Secure pairing is a huge milestone in terms of security/privacy, and the other features/improvements make InfiniTime once again even better and stable.
I can't wait for the next versions, the community keeps growing and I'm still amazed by all the new ideas coming in!
Tags: PineTime