At some point during the winter, I thought to myself, I wish I could do [x] on my phone, and, in a departure from norm, I didn’t go searching in the App Store, but rather thought, I bet I could make that. And so, for the past several months, I’ve been working my way through a course on SwiftUI development from the website Hacking With Swift (the misuse of the term “hacking” aside, the website is terrific!).
The course I’ve been following leads through programming fundamentals for iOS by building small sample apps, which not only is a great way to see how apps come together, but gives you a library of examples that you can quite literally copy-and-paste from when it comes time to build something new. I’m getting close to the end of the course, and I am champing at the bit to start building my idea. So I started.
I’m not gonna tell you what the whole idea is, but SPOILER ALERT it involves gathering data from Apple’s Health app - the place where various health and fitness related apps can read and share data. Apple provides a means of interacting with the Health app, an API in nerd-speak, called HealthKit. Over the weekend, I was finally able to send a request for data through HealthKit and received data in my app! This is a big deal for me!
Real, actual data!
Yeah, it’s ugly. But, it’s a major step, as workout information is at the core of what I want to do with this app. I don’t know if I will ever get to the point where I put this in the App Store for others to use, but if it proves to be functional and useful, I probably will! So, hopefully, much more to come!