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Apps Apple Watch SDK
- Thread starter FtrV8
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I think the answer is "almost certainly". The UIs will definitely be more responsive since things won't need to round-trip to the phone. Network connectivity from the watch is an open question. Anything beyond that, though, we won't know until we see the SDK in June.
Hell yes. You know what the current SDK can do? Simple menus. That's it. You can put things like buttons, text, or tables on the screen, in set layouts. You can't detect a screen touch (you can only respond to things like button presses), you can't draw an image at specific coordinates, you cannot detect if the Digital Crown was turned (it automatically controls scrolling if you have a table).
The current SDK is *EXTREMELY* limited and very strange to deal with. The way you pass data back and forth is bizarre to say the least.
I hope iOS 9 brings native apps or at least allows more powerful calls.
I hope iOS 9 brings native apps or at least allows more powerful calls.
not necessarily, the watch does have WiFi. No reason why apps can't use it to gather network data.
That's true, but I'm amazed at how seamless Apple has made things that would otherwise be unnecessarily complicated due to the way these apps run.
Can you imagine having to make the Bluetooth requests yourself every time you want an image or a network call? I'm glad that they were able to make this design decision for the sake of battery life and still manage to make it fairly easy to work with.
I just wish third-party apps would send notifications to my Watch at all, they don't at the moment!
Yes and no ... it's still a giant pain in the ass. I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out this damn obscure error. It said something about the parent app timing out. Attaching a debugger to the parent app is painful and has to be done for EACH execution!
Turns out, it can only serialize very basic data types. NSManagedObject is not one of those types lol. So now, I had to rewrite my results into very basic arrays to pass back. Luckily the app I am working on has very simple data so it wasn't that bad. I can't imagine anything complex.
I can't imagine an SDK forcing you to make raw bluetooth calls. Every platform these days abstracts that away from you.
Long term it isn't a good solution, it's just a bandaid. I would hardly call it seamless.
Are you able to get callback events for when the user spins that dial? Or is that only for scrolling? Also, can you make an app just intended for the watch, or does the app need to have a phone counterpart as well?
Apps require the phone ... that is where all of the heavy lifting happens. The Watch does very little on that, it only handles the view.
You have no control over the crown, you can't even read it. Same goes for drawing on the screen, heart rate, motion, etc. It's exceptionally limited.
In general it's only 1 way communication but with a library called mmwormhole you can do 2 way communication. But only if both are open at the same time by the user. Which has almost no use anyway.