54: I Don’t Really Know What I’m Doing
Published 6 April 2015 • Hosted by Ben Trengrove, Daniel “Jelly” Farrelly, David Smith and Jake MacMullin
Joining the couch this fortnight is Underscore, a.k.a. David Smith, host of Developing Perspective and independent developer extraordinaire. There’s so much to talk about, but the biggest topic is the Apple Watch, and specifically developing apps for it, which is something that David has some experience with.
To kick things off, Jelly asks David what drew him into developing in the first place. This leads to talking about why he keeps a large catalogue of apps, and how he achieves sustainability through diversity, while also providing him with the ability to satiate his short attention span.
Turning their attention to the Apple Watch, David explains why he’s focusing on developing for Apple’s new device, and how’s he’s managed to create apps he believes are compelling for a device he hasn’t yet been able to fully experience.
The couch then start talking about the actual development process in a bit more detail, discussing things like what methods are called at different points within the app’s lifecycle, and when you should be refreshing the data that’s shown in a glance.
At this point, Ben asks about how David has achieved animations on the Watch, and so David describes how you perform animations, from timers to more complex, image-based animations, like the bar graph in Pedometer++.
From there, they discuss measuring the experience of the app, and how it’s not always the obvious choice, as well as what the balance of complexity should be when it comes to building apps where there is very little as far as input mechanisms.