Learning Swift - learning the quirks of Swift

iPhreaks Guest – Microconf and Writing Health Apps

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.

WWDC 2018 and HealthKit – Workouts – Introducing HKLiveWorkoutBuilder

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.

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HealthKit – Apple Watch – Data and Authorization

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.

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WWDC 2018 – Swift 4.2 and “Random” Changes

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.

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HealthKit – Getting Started – HKObjectType and Authorization

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.

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Understanding Optionals in Swift

Optionals are a fairly unique concept in Swift. While Objective-C used pointers which could be nil and C# had a Nullable generics type for value types, Swift has an inherent syntax for optionals as well as wrapping and unwrapping them.

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