One of the new features in the inPulse Android app 1.3.0 that may be useful to developers is the ability to install inPulse apps from sources other than the inPulse App Store. We built this to support beta testing of apps but it may also be useful as a workaround for anyone who's still having trouble establishing bluetooth connections from Windows 7.

The first step is to create an "inpulseapp" package file. This is just a ZIP file with specific contents located at the root level of the archive (i.e. not inside a directory within the ZIP):

• info.json (required, described below)
• pulse_app.bin (required)
• inpulse_resources.bin (optional)
• ss.png (optional)

info.json is a JSON text file with this format:

All keys except "packageversion" are optional. The packageversion must be 1.

Once you have created the zip file, put it on a web server or use some other way to make it accessible from your phone (we like Dropbox for this). When you try to download or open a .inpulseapp file, Android should present the option to have the inPulse app open it. Then you can install the contained app onto your inPulse watch.

If you want to try it out, here is a package containing the Calculator app: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/19757853/calculator.inpulseapp

Is the 1.3 beta app Eric sent me the same app that is in the Play Store?

Yes

Just making sure, but it is just the version number that changed when I updated from 1.3a11 to 1.3 through the Play Store?

1.3a11 was the last build before 1.3. There may have been a few minor changes but they should be substantially identical.

I've tried using this method several times. While the app gets sent to the watch successfully, resources appear to be corrupt when they arrive. "Real" apps from the app store do not have this issue. If I upload the resources via a mac then everything works, but not sure what the problem is as it's quite hard to diagnose :-/