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Watch Connectivity Framework

How to Communicate Between Devices Using Watch Connectivity

For anyone who doesn’t feel like scrubbing through the “Introduction to Watch Connectivity” WWDC video to find the slides of code that you want to see, this post by Kristina Thai is an excellent introduction to the Watch Connectivity framework. It helped me out enormously today. Honestly, I’m thankful for all the people out there that scramble to put out tutorials and helpful articles right after new APIs are released. #bless

Waiting for Review Day 2: WatchKit & Core Data

Note: This is the second entry in a series of posts about writing my first iOS app. The app is currently in review, and until it is rejected or approved, I plan to write something every day about what I’ve learned.

In my first post, I talked about how I decided to use Core Data to store the verses in my Bible verse app and how I went about seeding that database. The next thing I had to figure out was how in the world my Watch app and iOS app could access the same Core Data model. I learned from a Make & Build tutorial that I needed to create both an App Group and a custom framework that could be shared between the two apps.

After creating a framework, I added two files to it: my Verse class, and a singleton DataManager class that handles all of the Core Data methods. Singletons are still a little confusing to me, so I pretty much just copied the code from this excellent tutorial video. At first I couldn’t figure out why my apps couldn’t seem to “see” anything in the framework, even after linking to it. Then I realized that I forgot to mark everything in the framework as “public.” /facepalm

My DataManager class has three simple methods: a method to fetch all of the verses in the store and place them in an array, a method to fetch only verses marked as a favorite, and a method to select a random verse from the array. Using one of the methods in my WatchKit app was as easy as saying:

var verse:Verse = DataManager.sharedInstance.getRandomVerse(verses)

Tomorrow, I’ll either talk about my app’s visual style (colors, icon, name, etc.), or about Glances and using Handoff.