Image-based animation is the thing in WatchKit 1.0.
Making them manually is real pain though and there are already multiple ways to create them automatically, from Photoshop scripting to web pages using advanced CSS to some nice iOS hacking.
I feel most at home with iOS thus I did some quick coding few days ago and published WatchRingGenerator. It uses excellent M13ProgressSuite to actually draw the rings.
I spent the last few weeks developing watch companion app for Run 5k. Looking back, I concluded I was surprisingly low-productive in that period. I have started from scratch multiple times, more than it ever happened to me, at any point in the past 5+ years doing iOS apps. This was surprising for such simple app, the kind of projects I usually excel in thus I took some time to think why.
Before iOS, I was a front-end web developer for 15 years. If you do the math, you will realize I started in HTML infancy, in the days of HTML 2.0 (or slightly before). It was the time when books that taught you how to do layout using infinite number of nested tables and spacer GIFs were all the rage.
Making watch layouts feels the same and as someone who hated nested tables to the core, this makes me very, very uneasy.
In upcoming version 4.1 of my Run 5k app, I’m adding support for exporting data out of the app. I strongly believe that data liberation should exist in all applications and services despite the fact it can require significant amount of time to do properly. In 4.1, you will be able to export complete GPX file for each run you did with Run 5k.
GPX is de-facto standard for exchanging GPS tracks, waypoints, and similar GPS related data between applications and services. It stands for GPS Exchange Format and was created by Topografix. Current version of the specification is 1.1.
Over time, companies like Garmin have added Extensions to the original specification – thus you can include things like heart rate to it. Which all later lead them to create an expanded format called TCX which allows you to transfer many fitness-related bits of information.
The blog post published by Gedeon Maheux and short discussion with Joe Cieplinski on Twitter got me thinking a lot about the state of the App Store. This happens often and for good reason: Apple infamously stomped out all apps that attempted to create their own storefronts thus we are left with just the official app.
The most important issue is searching as research shows most customers find apps that way. The way search works now, it’s best suited for one-off free apps backed by huge marketing push to drive up the downloads, then switch to paid model and just leave it be, with infrequent compatibility updates. There are quite a few apps that did this in the top free and top paid lists.
But improving search is not and should not be enough. That’s why I first lay down some talking points on improving the browsing experience, customer engagement and thus app discoverability.
I have sent enhancement radars about all this and I encourage all developers to do the same. My radars are all marked as duplicates, some of them even years ago.