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Six years perfecting maps on watchOS
- SpyCoder77 5mo agoAs a pedometer++ user, it is amazing the attention to detail David has maintained over the years. The evolution is crazy.
- Amorymeltzer 5mo agoHe really is such a committed and dedicated developer. This here is of course a perfect example—"So… I commissioned a custom map" aka hiring a cartographer—but it was really cool how he blew up with Widgetsmith because he put in the effort with Watchsmith before, and was basically the world's expert on widgets? Couldn't happen to a better guy.
- brcmthrowaway 5mo ago[flagged]
- dmd 5mo ago?? what does claude have to do with this?
- monk_grilla 5mo agoI’m interested since it’s clear this is a passionate and talented developer, but it seems the primary feature is step tracking, which iPhone already does by default. Is Pedometer++’s step counting somehow more accurate?
- SpyCoder77 5mo agoYes, the primary feature that is being marketed is step tracking, but the app in general is much more than that. It's like how flighty just is a wrapper for the flights API that you could access through Google, yet flighty is the best app for flight tracking nonetheless and is a really cool app.
- tomaskafka 5mo agoI think it is long overdue for rebrand, as right now the marketing is "it's a simple utility to show the daily step counts Apple is already collecting anyway, oh and by the way it has awesome offline maps almost no other apps offer", which is a bit of a weird sell.
- tomduncalf 5mo agoI have been using the app for years but literally just because I like the step counter widget. I had no idea it did all this! Will try it for sure. Cool read.
- thrownawaysz 5mo agoThe fact that there is no 1st party Apple made hiking and topography map on the Apple Watch is such a failure, not even on the most expensive “made for explorers” Watch Ultra. And things like gpx import is just a mere dream It’s a lifestyle device after all but still
- cromka 5mo agoHonestly, the less Apple made apps, the better for the ecosystem and the quality of the apps in general. Apple's recent "sherlocked" apps are not good quality at all, but they make it substantially more difficult for 3rd parties to compete with the now default offerings.
- Sir_Twist 5mo agoNot a developer, but I feel like Apple improving the defaults has been good for the ecosystem. The Reminders app is an example of this, because as it has gotten better over the years, the baseline for a good iOS to-do app has been raised, without reducing the market.
- Schiendelman 5mo agoI agree 100%. I ended up building myself a utility to wrangle my reminders (like keep them from getting missed/lost) instead of using a third-party app.
- eckelhesten 5mo ago[flagged]
- blairbeckwith 5mo agoI can’t believe you made me sign in just to downvote this.
- rogerrogerr 5mo agoWe really can't afford to keep blacklisting words for reasons that have no basis in reality. We're gonna run out of words. (parent edited their comment - the suggestion was that "pedometer" is a bad name because of the first four letters being reminiscent of pedophiles and Epstein)
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- puttycat 5mo agoCan we also not ban people for pointing out an evidently funny naming?
- phainopepla2 5mo agoWho was banned?
- unpopularopp 5mo agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/im14andthisisdeep/ https://www.reddit.com/r/im14andthisisdeep/
- apt-apt-apt-apt 5mo agoLet's start by banning words like 'pediatric' instead, which directly reference children and are thus more related to pedophiles. We can just call people 'doctor/dentist for small people'.
- apt-apt-apt-apt 5mo agoFor others curious like I was, it seems he hired a cartographer to render essentially a set of huge, nice-looking, custom map images with details like hiking trails that Apple Maps doesn't have. So unlike Apple Maps, which is dynamically rendered, it basically shows image tiles. It allows for a nicer-looking, more detailed map, but affects things like needing separate downloads for different zoom levels, rotation, updatability.
- dzogchen 5mo agoI think this may not even be possible because Apple does not give access to the Metal graphics API on Apple Watch to third-party developers.
- n8cpdx 5mo agoThe use of the cartographer to generate separate designs and the technology used to render/deliver those designs are two entirely separate concerns. His original map provider offers both vector and raster tile services: https://www.thunderforest.com/maps/outdoors/ https://www.thunderforest.com/maps/outdoors/ A common pattern is to use a vector tile service + style definition directly or to generate raster tiles if those are desired.
- apt-apt-apt-apt 5mo agoGood point, I assumed he was using images because his screenshots show text perfectly following the curves of rivers, which seems hard to do with dynamic rendering.
- agilek 5mo agoThat’s the point of a vector (not raster) tiles. Wh do you say it is hard to do with dynamic rendering? With Maplibre or any modern map SDK this this is standard…
- mootothemax 5mo ago> With Maplibre or any modern map SDK this this is standard… In practise, this doesn’t work out as visually pleasing as you’d like; labels repeat, or render partially or not at all, or become interfered with by other labels, or only work well at one given zoom. It’s easy to end up in a visually dissatisfying place that’s taking an unfathomable number of magic rules to get to. The secret sauce to fixing this is creating separate label layers of perfect point locations or lines for labels to follow in advance. Added bonus is faster render and interaction times due to fewer rules.
- arjie 5mo agoApple Maps on WatchOS is pretty good but the usual routine is that I get on my bike with a route set and 3 minutes in the “are you working out?” screen takes over and I can’t see the maps without stopping to turn it off. Surely that screen should turn into a notification or silently record after some time without taking over the screen. I’m surprised to hear people at Apple work on this because surely they must encounter this issue. If this guys maps can somehow take the screen and hold it, I think he’s got a killer feature for me. Though I glanced at the App Store page and it wasn’t clear to me which features are subscription gated and which ones aren’t and I despise apps that won’t tell me till I’ve set everything up (it just feels so frustrating that it wasn’t clear ahead of time) so I’ll probably just endure and try to remember to start a workout manually so it won’t take over.
- Dork_Sider 5mo agoYou can also turn off the "are you working out" feature. It's in the settings of the workout part. Just turn off "Check In Reminders"
- NetMageSCW 5mo agoThat’s a bad name.
- arjie 5mo agoThat is one functionality, but there is also the "Start Workout" reminder / "Pause Workout" reminder / "End Workout" reminder. These are the ones that I'd have to change, particularly the "Start Workout" reminder. However, I do want that, I just don't want it to be a persistent screen takeover.
- a10c 5mo agoYou can toggle all three independently via the Watch App > Workout > Reminders
- sobjornstad 5mo ago
- som 5mo agoGreat evolution story. Also love seeing what can be achieved by stepping outside design lines, re. centred, symmetrical UIs. Makes me want an apple watch ;) As an aside there's a screenshot in the article showing the Hidden Valley at Glen Coe, which happens to be one of my favourite short walks in Scotland. A less happy aside of that aside is the house at the base of the valley. I used to look at it dreamily as we drove past, always closed up, nestled by itself in a remote nook between the mountains. What an extraordinary place it would be to live. The park for the hike was only a couple of hundred metres up the road. A few years later I recognised the house in a Louis Theroux doco, when he travelled there with its owner - TV personality Jimmy Saville. Wow. And then a few years later again, after I'd returned to Australia, it came out, posthumous, that Saville was one of the UK's most prolific child and sexual predators. Horrific stuff. The name and outline of the cottage structure can actually be seen at the top of the map in the screenshot.
- simonklitj 5mo agoIn happier news, that house is being demolished: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gqqv17v1vo https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gqqv17v1vo
- ColinEberhardt 5mo agoFunny coincidence - I visited that valley for the first time just last week, on my way to the Isle of Skye. And as a further coincidence, I met Jimmy Saville about 25 years ago. I was in Leeds hospital after a heart operation, and this old and somewhat scruffy track suited guy just walks in to the ward and starts talking to me. I had no idea who he was. After he left, a nurse asked “did you speak to Jimmy?”. It was creepy and unnerving seeing first hand how he just got to roam around. I can confirm, the graffiti-covered Saville residence has almost completely been demolished.
- kweiza 5mo ago[flagged]
- timojaask 5mo agoThere’s no GC on watchOS, it uses ARC
- tomaskafka 5mo agoThat might be right - Garmin is doing the best they can with vector maps, but in Apple land, 3 fps rendering wouldn't fly.
- maz1b 5mo agoReally enjoyed reading this. A lot. Reminds me when I was a teenager reading technical blogs in the earlier days of the internet. BTW, that last line about hiring/commissioning a cartographer, very rad and cool :~)
- kobieps 5mo agoI spend a lot of time in wilderness areas that I don't know, and I simply pull my phone out of my pocket to see where I am. My watch measures my heart rate and that's it. While I have no doubt that pedometer++ is great and the work that went into it is impressive, I can't really see myself switching away from a big screen workflow to see exactly where I am. And I don't need to check where I am every 5 minutes. Typically only every 30 minutes or longer. Dunno, maybe I'm missing something :shrug:
- Razengan 5mo agoWhile traveling in another country, I once forgot my iPhone passcode (don't ask, I'm autistic like that) After a few retries it put me on a 2 hour timeout. I had to get back to my room. I knew the way back on foot well enough, about 30 minutes away, but I wanted to take a look at the map anyway. I thought I'd try it on my Apple Watch Ultra 3. It was a few months ago so it was the latest OS. There were a few bugs in trying to do that simple task, like when typing out the name of a location the keyboard kept disappearing as if the UI was crashing or something. I sighed, muttered a few curses at the state of things and the people in charge who let it get this way, and lowered my wrist and just enjoyed the stroll. Like so many things in Apple software since the past 5 or so years, so much shit just doesn't work when you REALLY need it. F'n hell
- NetMageSCW 5mo agoOn the watch it can be better to dictate than type anyway.
- Razengan 5mo agoDictation like Siri is another one of those Apple things that you know will suck so you never try using it. Certainly not going to hold my wrist up to my mouth on a noisy street and yell at my watch until it gets the names of foreign streets right lol
- mrcwinn 5mo agoAwesome work, truly. (But I'll stick with my Garmin.)
- bcraven 5mo agoI appreciate this comes from an outside perspective as I've not heard of this before, but "Pedometer++ 8" sounds like "Dissertation_final_final_v8.docx" to me.
- AbuAssar 5mo agoIt is just Pedometer++ The 8 is the version number that launched yesterday with this feature
- aucisson_masque 5mo agoYeah, I'd rather have pedometer pro max ++ or something like that. Make it more apple like.
- necovek 5mo agoWhat I find curious is that the entire article seems to be framed in responding to the needs of a single user of the app — the author themselves. Yet the app is published and has a great App Store review score of 4.8 with 170k+ reviews, and same score with 35k+ reviews for the Watch. How does the author get feedback and respond to other customers? Or is this simply scratching one's own itch demonstrating its usefulness for others once again?
- bwb 5mo agoMost likely both :)
- opentokix 5mo agoAnd it's a f:ing subscription delete
- davidkuennen 5mo agoHow do you expect the developers to pay for the service? Map tiles alone are already very expensive and data heavy.
- rob 5mo agohttps://openfreemap.org https://openfreemap.org
- dewey 5mo agoThis is just outsourcing the payment to donations...that may or may not arrive ("We aim to cover the running costs of our public instance through donations.").
- mft_ 5mo agoThank you for sharing this; however, given a significant piece of the author's journey was hiring a cartographer to create custom map designs for his use case, I suspect that this might not be directly suitable for him, any more than Apple Maps was. This would presumably transfer the need to host map data back to the author, which would represent an ongoing cost, and therefore maybe justify a modest subscription?
- petu 5mo agoRender tiles locally on iOS companion app side
- saagarjha 5mo agoThat's not what they were talking about
- y0ink 5mo agoThe monthly and yearly subscriptions are fine, and merited given the time and effort that went into this product, but offer a lifetime subscription.
- ndr42 5mo agoI don't know if anybody else is so petty like me regarding installing new apps but while I can't say anything about the app itself, I just wanted to know how much it would cost, if it is an subscription and so on. But it was not possible from the app store page itself. Have a look, how confusing it is: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@ndr/116483475865871622 https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@ndr/116483475865871622 It shows a lot of price points from 1€ all up to 45€ without saying if its a subscription or a one-time payment. Maybe the author should include the pricing clearly somewhere else on the app store page as apple is not able to do so. edit: spelling
- tomaskafka 5mo agoThis is Apple's work - they show all enabled purchases/subscriptions author have enabled for price testing. And once you add one, removing it would mean the user's subscriptions auto-renew would get canceled, so they stay and accumulate. And there is no way for the app to mark "this is the current pricing".
- ndr42 5mo agoDoes that mean if I subscribed for 22.99€ it would stay that way year after year? What could be the reason that Apple designed it this way? The only reason I can think of is customer protection (say 1€ a month changes to 100€ a month and you user does not pay attention).
- toasty228 5mo agoYour question implies someone "designs" things and given the state of the apple app store I'm not sure any form of conscious life is in charge of it
- valzevul 5mo agoGenerally it means that yes, the price will stay as-is. When the developer increases the price (versus introducing a different payment tier), they have two options: either keep all existing subscribers at the current price, or offer them to agree with the price bump (users can decline though). Reducing the price affects all existing users automatically.
- GRMPZ23 5mo ago[dead]
- qzgrid37 5mo ago[dead]
- ModernMech 5mo agoMaps has really come a long way since the icon depicted a route driving off a bridge.
- hyraki 5mo agoI have been using WorkOutDoors for awhile. I’ll check this out.
- maelito 5mo agoVery interesting ! About the map itself, here's a comparison with our own base style on the location in Scotland of the last capture. Normal style : https://cartes.app/#16.13/57.290344/-6.171279 https://cartes.app/#16.13/57.290344/-6.171279 Outdoor style : https://cartes.app/?style=outdoors&terrain=oui#16.13/57.290344/-6.171279 https://cartes.app/?style=outdoors&terrain=oui#16.13/57.2903... It's interesting to see the wide variations that can be designed. May styling is choosing between an infinity of possibilities !
- haozes 5mo ago[dead]