Use Pebble with an Android device? Install this app

The official Pebble app on Android doesn't send every alert to your watch. Pebble Notifier, on the other hand, does.

(Credit: Jason Tech Digital News)

Now that the masses have the chance to walk into Best Buy and pick up a Pebble watch, the weaknesses of the watch and apps will naturally be front and center. One of the weaknesses of the current official Pebble Android app is lack of support for notifications from third-party apps.

Pebble Notifier, a free app available in the Play Store, will send notifications from any app installed on your device to your Pebble watch. Setup takes little time, and is very straightforward.

To use the app, you're required to grant it accessibility access (the same is required by the official Pebble app), which allows it to interact with notifications on your device. As such, it can then push notifications to your Pebble watch for any and all apps installed on your device.

You can set the app to send notifications for only the apps you've selected, or to exclude certain apps. After you've curated your list of apps, make sure to tap on the menu button and select save.The first time you launch Pebble Notifier you'll be asked to enable its accessibility. After it's enabled you can then decide how you want it to handle notifications. You can either have the app send notifications for every app -- all the time -- or you can customize the settings.

Once it's all set up you can expect any notification that comes to your device (so long as it's for an app you have activated in Pebble Notifier) to show up on your watch.

Falcon Pro updated with workaround for Twitter tokens

A hidden feature in a recent update to Falcon Pro lets anyone use the app. Here's what you'll need to do.

Falcon Pro is a popular Twitter client for Android users. So popular, in fact, it's reached the 100,000-user (or token) limit implemented by Twitter on two separate occasions. The first time the developer, Joaquim Verges, reset the tokens, thus disabling the pirated copies that were a large part of the reason the limit was hit.

The second attempt at resetting the key resulted in Twitter disabling any new users from using the app. Not everyone was able to reauthorize the app after the second token reset before Twitter took action. It wasn't (still isn't) a good situation.

Eventually Falcon Pro was removed from the Play store, leaving plenty of paid users (and users who were willing to pay) without access to the app.

Today Verges posted an update regarding Falcon Pro and its future. In short, the app is now free and available as a direct download from http://getfalcon.pro. You'll need to side load the app if you decide to download it from the site. You can enable side loading of apps by launching your Settings app and going to Security, then checking the box next to "Unknown sources."

Simply making the app free and releasing it for all to download outside of the Play store doesn't solve the token issue, though. In order to get around the limit, you'll need to find a hidden custom log-in screen.

The workaround is brilliant. By allowing users to create their own Twitter application keys and in the process their own tokens, anyone can log in to Falcon Pro and use the app to its full potential. Visit this page on Twitter's developer portal and create your own application. The app name you use will show on every tweet you send through the app, so make sure you pick something that shows off your personality. Before we go on to the next step, e-mail yourself the Consumer Key and Consumer Secret.Start by tapping the falcon on the main page, then tap and shake your way to the custom log-in notification. If you're not patient enough to try and figure it out, or you just want to use the app without jumping through hoops, you can find instructions here.

Once you create your app, you'll need to visit the Settings tab to change the application type. Twitter defaults all apps to read-only permissions, which won't allow you to even send a tweet. As such, change the application type to "Read, Write and Access direct messages" before adding your keys to Falcon Pro.

By now you've unlocked the custom log-in screen, created a Twitter application, and e-mailed yourself the Consumer Key and Secret. The next step is to copy and paste the Key and Secret from the e-mail you sent yourself into the respective fields under the custom log-in screen.

After doing that, log in to Falcon Pro as you normally would and start tweeting away. Pretty sweet, eh?

It's nice to see the developer come up with a selfless way for users to take advantage of a lot of hard work put into such a great Twitter app.