So as you might already know, it has been all about THE Watch these past days.
So having this new toy in my wrist made me want to explore the possibilities. So I set myself to push my skill boundaries and dove right into WatchKit development. To kick off the wheels I spent this past weekend doing what I like to call “Noel’s Apple Watch weekend hackathon,” my favorite kind of event, because somehow I always end up as a finalist.
So as the title suggests, I focused in watch-first design (remember mobile-first? thats so 2014!) My goal was to start with a Watch app as the main feature and not even worry about a mobile companion app. As it stands now, Apple Watch, as well as Android Wear rely on “parent” mobile apps.
The result of my weekend fun was an app that I simply called “MyFamily”. The ideas is to add simple reminders, tasks, goals, etc., based on each individual member of my little family (which btw, names have been changed.) The app include an Apple Watch “Glance” which is some sort of a widget, or live tile with very limited dynamic content and interactions.
Having so limited real-estate and features really makes you think twice on how you want to present your data. The WatchKit interface objects are limited to a few subset of their parent iOS counterparts. Most of the design layout can be done by grouping labels (WKInterfaceLabel), images (WKInterfaceImage), and a couple other interface objects available (table, separator, and buttons.)
Having no keyboard (thank goodness!) one needs to rely in voice input to insert new data. During my test the voice recognition worked as advertised. Also during this exercise I finally realized that apps can display a “contextual” menu by “force touching” the screen. I opted to put a text hint (to delete item) , because even after a couple weeks of wearing the watch I didn’t realize this feature was available.
After creating my Storyboard layouts, it was almost trivial to add data to them. I created custom classes to bind each Interface Controller. Override lifecycle events (awakeWithContext,willActivate,didDeactivate). Created a “member” object and an “event” object. And finally added data to the the tables with something like this:
- (void)setupTable
{
_membersData = [Member membersList];
[tableView setNumberOfRows:_membersData.count withRowType:@"MemberRow"];
for (NSInteger i = 0; i < tableView.numberOfRows; i++)
{
NSObject *row = [tableView rowControllerAtIndex:i];
Member *member = _membersData[i];
MemberRow *memberRow = (MemberRow *) row;
[memberRow.memberImage setImage:[UIImage imageNamed:member.memberImage]];
[memberRow.memberName setText:member.memberName];
[memberRow.memberEventCount setText:member.memberEventCount];
}
}
In conclusion, the WatchKit DX (development experience) is pretty smooth. This is due the the limited and minimalistic set of tools available to you. I suspect I will add more functionality to this app in the future by adding “Mobile-second, and Web-third” design. Oh, and maybe even going “public” and put it in the App Store.
Photo Proof