There are times where Objective-C is still necessary for Swift development. For instance, with one such app I’ve built in Swift, Speculid, I needed to bring Objective-C code in. With the introduction of C++ libraries in version 2.0, Objective-C became necessary. Luckily there are ways to make both Objective-C and Swift work together in a friendly fashion.
As I have been working on Speculid, I have found some the interesting idiosyncrasies which come with Asset Catalogs. Basically, asset catalogs are collections of specialized files (such as graphics files) as well JSON files containing metadata. The metadata from the JSON files is used for organizing the specialized files and denoting their purpose within the set. In case of graphic sets like Image Sets, they contain several pieces of information.
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Asset Catalogs are the key component in
Next Thursday on October 11, I’ll be speaking at the Ann Arbor Cocoaheads at ArborMoon on developing Speculid for macOS as well as my thoughts from Try!Swift New York.
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I have to say I had a great time at try!Swift New York this year. I have been to many developer conferences over the years but lately I have been attending mostly business and startup conferences (i.e. MicroConf and Release Notes).
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Leo Dion from BrightDigit was recently a guest on the podcast iPhreaks discussing MicroConf, customer discovery, info products, meetups, and building an exercise app for the Apple Watch.
In today’s episode, the iPhreaks panel talk to Leo Dion about MicroConf and writing apps for Apple Watch. Leo has been a developer for almost two decades and six years ago he created his own company called BrightDigit. He mostly focuses his time and energy to the Apple space and enjoys developing apps for the iPhone, iPad, and the Apple Watch. They talk about what happens at MicroConf, what he is working on now, tips for starting a meetup, and more!
You can check out the episode here.
We have setup the iPhone to request authorization and the Apple Watch. Let’s begin a workout and track the user’s heart rate and how the APIs have changed in watchOS 5 after WWDC 2018.
Specifically we’ll look at the power of HKLiveWorkoutBuilder, which simplifies the way we track health data during workouts.
The Apple Watch has become the premier device for health, fitness, and workout tracking. So now that authorization is setup on the iPhone, let’s take a look at how get authorization setup on the Apple Watch.
With WWDC 2018, Swift 4.2 has introduced new ways to generate and access random values from a collection. Often times, app developers will do this when building games or creating test data. Let’s take a look at the old way and the new way to access random items.
HealthKit is the most important API when it comes to building health, fitness and workout apps. HealthKit also has many intricacies and details which need introduction when getting started.
The data structures encourage precision while having the flexibility to store a variety of values. The way it asks users give app access HealthKit will probably be similar with many iOS developers. HealthKit follows many patterns in other iOS APIs such as Core Location or Core Data. At the same time it uses newer programming techniques and newer technology.