It occurs to me that I completely neglected to write a post about the Apple TV app I wrote last year, called Telescope.
The app connects to the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day API to download beautiful high-res space images and videos, for display on your Apple TV.
It was a fun little app to get started learning about Apple TV development, as well as my first attempt at publishing a fully-Swift app.
Telescope is available for purchase now on the Apple TV App Store.
I mentioned this briefly in my Apple Watch mini-review. I finally got around to finishing it this weekend.
Hearty is an iOS app that lets you sync your Apple Watch / Health.app heart rate with RunKeeper.
Some great suggestions on how Apple can improve the Workout app on the Apple Watch. Radars filed.
This weekend, I built a little web app that notifies you when a particular Beats One show is about to start. Only works on Mac running Safari.
It’s called BeatsMe and it’s available here: https://beatsmeapp.herokuapp.com/
I’ve had an Apple Watch for a few weeks now. It’s a funny little device. Its utility and wow-factor aren’t immediately apparent, and my first reaction after booting it up for the first time was “Okay, that’s cool. Now what?” There’s no flashy demos or life-changing features, but it slowly worms its way into your routine as an alternative means of interacting with your iPhone*.
Fashionably, late, as usual, but at least this year I have an excuse. More on that later…
We found out last night that Barack Obama uses our GAME GOLF device. GolfWRX has a few more pics and info, and the Irish Times has a nice follow-up piece about the company.
MotionBlur allows you to add motion blur effect to iOS animations.
Pretty slick implementation of a motion blur effect for use with your iOS animations.
And here’s the science behind it, if you’re so inclined.
The rtpi.ie website has access to real-time data for the Galway Bus Éireann transit system. Unfortunately, this data is not officially accessible to developers, and is in a weird, proprietary, JSON-ish format. The aim of this project is to provide a simple API to access this data, returning it in a valid JSON format. It was also a good excuse to finally learn how to use node.js :)
A couple of notes/caveats:
Live demo available at http://galwaybus.herokuapp.com
Source code available on Github. Please feel free to send pull requests!
The Swift language lets the compiler do more work for the programmer. This is great—less typing for the programmer, right?—but it means that when you look at a line of code, it won’t mean much without a deep understanding of the context in which that line lives. Explicit languages are easier for beginners to understand.
So far, I’ve found Swift to be a tricky language to grasp from reading code samples alone. However, writing Swift code against frameworks I’m already familiar with through Objective-C, has proven much easier.
Aaron Hillegass literally wrote the book on Objective-C, so he should know.
