AGENT apps on production watches run in AppDomains
Communicating with your phone is as easy as create a SerialPort object and using .Write and .Read calls. If you're written C# code before, you're at home.
Apps are pretty powerful, but in version 1.0 we're trying to keep apps to "foreground" or "unloaded".
AGENT will absolutely allow side-loading of arbitrary apps. That's in our ethos as a company
Right now, apps will need to specify how much room they want. we may be able to make that dynamic in the future, but for a good user experience fixed is much simpler to understand and predict as a user.
You can store apps and data. It's not a hard drive, so you don't have a ton of space. But you can store your images, some data, etc. Some apps will be big, some small. You can of course also shuttle data to/from your phone in connected apps.
Regarding storage, to make this simple, we're allocating "blocks" to apps. We'll have about 50 blocks--although this number may change (possibly going higher and making blocks smaller to be more efficient). We want developers to have an easy way to predict their storage capacity and users to have a simple system for measuring how many apps they can fit onto their wrist-wear.
The watch can keep a constant connection to the phone, albeit preferably one that's a low-power sleepy link.
When you debug your app, you will usually run it in exclusive mode. Debugging takes a bit of extra power, but you can get a good idea for how much power you're using--without anything else going on--while debugging.
Watchfaces will be available for both 24 hour and AM/PM. We'll make 12/24 hour a watch setting, so that watchfaces which support both automatically render as you want
Your watch apps will get access to accelerometer data, either on-demand or via events
Each watch has a 128-bit unique identifier. We're using this to pair your watch with an AGENT account, for potential app store purchases etc. We are not sure yet how best to expose the watch's identification to apps; we need to work through the privacy issues first.
AGENT watch apps are deployed and debugged wirelessly from your PC via Bluetooth.
Generally speaking, we use fonts that are in the 13px to 16px height range. Effectively our maximum is 16 characters wide by 16 characters tall, with whitespace on the characters.