(Cross post with my personal blog)
Earlier this year I announced the release of an app I had been working on for Android called PaceMaker.
Finally, I have succeeded in porting the application over to iPhone and it was definitely much harder than I had anticipated.
But I am glad to announce that as of today you can find PaceMaker for iPhone in the Apple App Store.
If you don?t know what PaceMaker is, you can read about it in my original post above or in the description in the app store, but to sum it up briefly, it helps you run at a desired pace by telling you to speed up or slow down when you are running too fast or too slow.
A unique perspective
Having originally written the application and then porting it over to iPhone gives me a kind of unique perspective on mobile development platforms.
Although it was a bit painful at times to basically recreate the same thing I already spent so much time and energy creating, I was able to very realistically contrast the two development platforms in many areas.
One of the major pain points I experienced was in documentation. Google?s documentation on the Android platform is sometimes lacking, but is much more complete and descriptive than Apple?s iOS documentation.
I am still quite a bit torn on which platform I like more and which platform I think will win out in the end. I do believe that if Apple improved their developer tools and moved to a new, more modern development language, that they would have a distinct advantage.
It seems to me though that whoever integrates the best across multiple devices and gets the highest quality applications built for their platform will be the winner. iCloud could be a huge step in that direction for Apple.
Sharing the knowledge
I?ve just talked with my curriculum director at Pluralsight and I will be doing a beginning iPhone development for .NET developers course just like the Android Development for .NET Developers course I did earlier this year.
I?m pretty excited to do this because I am going to try and draw some major parallels between the two platforms and also from the .NET perspective.
I hope to create the course just like the Android one, where we will step by step create an application from scratch and then publish it to the Apple App Store.
Look for that in the next few months on Pluralsight.net.
Dailymile.com integration
Also included with this release for iPhone and Android is Dailymile.com integration. I think this feature is pretty cool! So I am really excited about it!
Dailymile.com is basically a social site for runners and cyclists. It is basically a Facebook for runners.
I have added a feature to the Android and iPhone versions of PaceMaker to allow you to post your run details, including the GPX map of your run, up to the Dailymile.com server on your wall.
So when you go for a run you can capture all the information from your run and see it on Dailymile.com.
This was quite a pain to implement as I had to implement OAuth2 authentication in both platforms and integrate with a REST API. But what a great learning experience!
Anyway, if you are a runner out there and you get PaceMaker, feel free to send me an email or drop me a comment. I am always looking for feedback so I can improve the app.
What I’d really love is one that kept me on a specific heart rate, but what with the apple bluetooth restrictions I suppose it’s going to be a long wait for that one…