Count The Days Left v2.0 Summary
17 Oct 2015All done! A final few tweaks and v2.0.0 of Count The Days Left has been submitted to the app store for review.
Things I learnt
Developing for the watch is fiddly
watchOS 2 is a pretty big change from the first version, with the extension code now running on the watch. In theory this should help the performance of watch apps - and I believe it does - but some thought needs to be put into to how you manage your data flow between the phone and the watch to optimise this.
I also struggled for a while understanding the best workflow for testing watch apps, using a combination of the Xcode simulators and the watch itself, but definitely learnt a lot along the way what works best.
Is Swift ready for prime time?
I really like Swift as a language compare to Objective-C (although now I’m used to the crazy square bracket syntax I don’t mind the latter any more), but I don’t feel as though Xcode is quite as reliable when building a Swift project compared to an Objective-C one.
Sometimes the dependency detection on what changed seemed a bit flaky, or the compiler would say a setting is missing from an Info.plist file when it was actually there (and a recompilation “fixed” the issue).
None of the problems are major, and won’t put me off starting a new project using Swift. However I’m hoping things get fixed in later versions of both Xcode and Swift.
What next?
Right now I think I’ve reached the end of features I can add to the app, at least until iOS10/watchOS3 come out and offer some new things to play with.
However I’m always open to suggestions, so drop me a line at johnp@bravelocation.com or reach out on Mastodon to @johnp@bravelocation.com if you have any thoughts.
v2.0 Articles
- App Store Issues with Watch Update
- watchOS 2 Complication update issue
- watchOS 2 Complications complications
- Testing watchOS 2 app directly on watch
- Synching user settings on watchOS 2
- Updating code to watchOS 2
- watchOS Development Phase 2
N.B. All code can be seen on GitHub