With the Microsoft Band 2 officially released and the device in the midst of shipping to early adopters, Microsoft has now provided updates for those seeking to take advantage of the APIs and developer offerings.
Updates to the Band SDK have now been made available, providing support for Band 2. Additionally, Band Web Tiles (web-enabled apps for Band in preview since June) have now been officially released.
Per Microsoft, here are the top Band SDK enhancements:
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Five new sensor-based subscriptions for Microsoft Band 2. In addition to nine sensor-based subscriptions exposed for both Microsoft Band and Microsoft Band 2, the updated SDK exposes five additional subscriptions that are only available for Microsoft Band 2: galvanic skin response (electrical conductivity of the skin in kohms), barometer, altimeter, RR interval (time between heart beat peaks), and ambient light.
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Creation of PDF 417 barcodes with alpha/numeric data on Microsoft Band 2. The previous SDK supported only 0-9 digits. The updated SDK extends support for more ASCII characters. For details, see the Microsoft Band SDK documentation.
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Increased the icon limits for tiles on Microsoft Band 2. The updated SDK increases the icon limit for tiles from 8 to 13 for only Microsoft Band 2.
In addition to providing a stable released, the Web Tile functionalities received the following enhancements:
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Creates simple conditions that trigger sending notification to web tiles. You can now make web tiles more informative for your users by sending notifications to the band whenever the web data meets predefined conditions. Want a weather web tile that notifies you when there’s a high chance of rain? You can create one now.
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Extracts data from a web service that requires basic HTTP authentication. Until now, web tiles supported only publicly available web content. With the new update, web tiles can now support authenticated resources, opening up the opportunity to make the web content more secure and personalized.
Download the new Band SDK: Get started with the Microsoft Band SDK
Read through the documentation: Microsoft Band SDK documentation
Get started with Web Tiles: Microsoft Band with Web Tiles
