Re: WatchKit Baby Apps
Re: WatchKit Baby Apps
- Subject: Re: WatchKit Baby Apps
- From: Charles Jenkins <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2018 07:50:39 -0500
The things you are describing are paths I already followed to dead ends.
WKInterfaceTimer is truly and completely bogus. It just shows a
countdown/count-up UI label while the app is onscreen. You have to pair it
with an NSTimer set to count down to the same time in to make your program
react in any way when the time period elapses. But lower your wrist, and
the app and NSTimer are soon killed. I think WKInterfaceTimer is just there
because someone though it could be used to make a cool demo app, not to use
for any actual purpose. You could use both these objects in a game, when
you’d know the user would be constantly interacting with the game and thus
keeping the app alive. But they’re no good for any non-frivolous use.
I already described my reason for not trusting local notifications: you
can’t specify that they’ll alert you on the Watch, and you can’t be 100%
sure they’ll alert you at all. What we need is a call to programmatically
set the actual timer used by the Timer app, a way to schedule the app to be
awakened at a specific time so it can play a haptic or do whatever it wants
to get attention, or a way to set a local notification that will definitely
always truly for sure be handled by the watch. WatchKit doesn’t give us
those things because of Apple’s philosophical desire to prevent Watch apps
that annoy the user. The very purpose of a timer is to annoy the user so
he’ll be sure to notice and deal with something, so in my opinion it’s
simultaneously the most useful kind of app you might want to create and
exactly the kind of app WatchKit effectively prevents.
On Thu, Mar 1, 2018 at 9:50 PM, J. Scott Tury <email@hidden> wrote:
> Creating a WatchKit app with Timers should be fairly easy. There’s a nice
> interface object called *WKInterfaceTimer* which should do the trick -
> at least for the UI interface. Here’s a link to the documentation:
>
> https://developer.apple.com/documentation/watchkit/wkinterfacetimer
>
> You might also be interested in reading the WatchKit Programming Guide.
> It explains that WatchKit apps, are quite different from iOS applications.
> The Interface is running in a separate process from your actual code -
> which is running in a watch extension.
>
> https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/
> General/Conceptual/WatchKitProgrammingGuide/index.html
>
> Your extension does not run for very long. Apple is extremely aggressive
> about how much time a watch extension will run. Running for a long period
> of time is useful if you are collecting biometric data (heart rate, etc).
>
> A simple Timer application should be doable. One of the challenges will
> be how to tell your user that the timer has finished. The simplest thing I
> can think of is to schedule a *Local Notification*. That should be able
> to get your user’s attention!
>
> Hopefully this helps you move in the right direction.
>
> Scott
>
--
Charles
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