Squintless: A Pebble Watch Face for Eyes Over 40

I have always loved the Pebble because it understands what I want from a watch.

It has an always-on screen, physical buttons, an uncluttered interface and a battery that lasts for weeks. It does a handful of things and does them well. Most importantly, it does not demand much attention. I can put it on, use it when I need it and otherwise forget that it is there.

I backed the original Pebble when it launched on Kickstarter in 2012. It was one of those rare technology products that immediately made sense to me. I loved that first watch and bought each successive version until Pebble was acquired and the company stopped making them.

Over the years, I owned several Apple Watches. They are undoubtedly more capable devices, but I never properly took to them. The need to charge them regularly was always a little too much for me in the end. I already have enough devices and responsibilities that require daily attention. I did not want my watch to become another one.

So I was genuinely excited when Eric Migicovsky, Pebble's founder, announced that he had finally found a way to bring Pebble back. I immediately paid for one of the first Pebble Time 2 watches and waited for its arrival.

My new Pebble finally arrived in May. I put it on and was reminded almost immediately of everything I had missed. The buttons, the always-on display, the simplicity and the feeling that the watch was designed to be useful rather than impressive.

There was, however, one problem I had not accounted for.

My eyesight.

Quite a few years had passed since I wore my first Pebble. Somewhere along the way, small text had become considerably less friendly. I could still read the watch, but doing so required more effort than it should. I found myself holding my wrist at just the right distance, concentrating for an extra moment and, inevitably, squinting.

The Pebble had returned more or less as I remembered it. I had not.

That gave me the idea of building my own watch face, specifically for people over 40 whose eyesight is not quite what it used to be. I wanted something that made the time as large and clear as possible, without filling the remaining space with weather, steps, calendar events or other information I did not need every time I looked at my wrist.

And so, behold: Squintless.

Squintless is a watch face designed to do one thing really well: tell you the time without making you work for it. The numbers are large, bold and designed specifically for the Pebble screen. There is a simple battery indicator, but otherwise the display is deliberately uncluttered.

Building it involved more tinkering than I initially expected. I experimented with the shape and spacing of the numbers, how much of the screen they should occupy and how to make the battery indicator visible without allowing it to compete with the time. There was also a fair amount of moving things around by one or two pixels until everything felt properly balanced.

The final result is intentionally simple. It is a watch face for people who like Pebble partly because Pebble itself is simple: an always-readable screen, physical buttons, weeks of battery life and no unnecessary fuss.

Squintless is now available on the Rebble Store. For screenshots, installation details and a fuller description of its features, you can read the README on the watch face's store page.

For everyone else, the name explains most of it.

Look at your watch. See the time. No squinting required.