http://www.getinpulse.com/guide/

We are here to answer your questions!

I'm looking through the SDK and the 'cloud compile' concept is a new one to me.

Are there plans to ultimately move towards local compiling? Like just using gcc or that sort of thing? I can see how the cloud compiling allows for platform independance for developers, and I'm a big fan of that, but if there were an option for local compiling (even if it wasn't platform independant) that would be great too.

Like I said, it's a new concept to me and I'm curious in the sense that if the compile server should go away, it sort of leaves us with no way to continue working on apps for our watches.

Thanks!

We'll put together some instructions for compiling locally. Getting started quickly was a priority for us and the cloud compile seemed like a great way to get people going in minutes. Setting up toolchains manually can be time consuming.

Thanks for the info Jon!

I know what you mean about taking time to set up a toolchain. I'm using my iMac / OS X for now but going to a native compile solution, I'd probably switch over to Linux as I've had much more success setting up cross-compile toolchains on there.

Turns out the python cloud compile isn't the quickest way to get started on all distributions.
I tried on Arch Linux, first running into an issue with python 2/3, module version numbers...seems compileandload.py only works with python 2...then when it seemed to be working, compileandload.py told me that the server is down...so I installed Ubuntu on a spare disk and it was able to compile and load.
Yes, I gave up on using it with Arch after a while--I'll try again if someone else is interested or if I get tired of switching between Ubuntu and Arch.

I think a local toolchain of statically linked i386 binaries (and an example Makefile) might be the best alternative--this should be most likely to work across distributions. CodeSourcery has ARM cross-compiler packages like this--some might even be compatible with the inPulse (though compileandrun.py or similar would still have to be used to send the app to the watch).

Seconding a vote for files/instructions to compile locally. I am frequently without a connection, or behind a firewall which disallows connections on anything other than ports 80 or 443. Please let me know when/if this happens, as it would be great news for me!