The 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
kumarvvr 2 hours ago [-]
> there is no 1st party Apple made hiking and topography map on the Apple Watch is such a failure
I remember a time when Apple was chided for integrating functionalities of popular apps into its OS.
Apple created an incredibly awesome device, and its up to the market to make full use of its potential. Why would it be a failure for Apple to not make such an app?
rjzzleep 30 minutes ago [-]
That is quite literally how every part of Cocoa was polished. Things such as sidebars, notifications, came from third party libraries, Growl, etc. were all design patterns from the community. Isn't that also how iTunes came to be? Apple trying to acquire the best music players to integrate into its ecosystem? It's somewhat sad to observe what become of apple.
interstice 2 hours ago [-]
Because they don't allow deeper integrations maybe? I still don't have a watch face layout I like.
interstice 2 hours ago [-]
Oh and while I'm here the single layer non editable menu / weird grid is also the worst. I grew up texting under the desk on a nine key and only checking after I'd selected the contact to send to. Give me that level of muscle memory again someone, anyone, please.
modeless 2 hours ago [-]
Pebble watches are operated with physical buttons and you can definitely take advantage of muscle memory.
caycep 37 minutes ago [-]
maybe the culture should be for them to contract with popular app makers to be "The" default app for x amount of years or such, vs sherlocking.
refulgentis 1 hours ago [-]
That’s a somewhat obvious flattening of perspective. While it’s clever we can make both positions sound silly, it illuminates nothing while throwing shade.
Centigonal 4 hours ago [-]
I trust people like David Smith and companies like onX more than Apple when it comes to creating and supporting a top tier outdoor mapping app.
dylan604 18 minutes ago [-]
Maybe some people are too young to remember Apple's Maps v1. Even Tim Apple recently mentioned that debacle in what was essentially an exit interview.
jsbisviewtiful 2 hours ago [-]
Apple is so intent on making the Apple Watch a catch-all that it doesn’t necessarily do any specific activity amazingly. After three Apple Watches over many years I finally sold my 10 last year and won’t be buying another. I bought a Coros and am pretty pleased with it, would consider a Garmin in the future. Coros and Garmin devices are built with activity in mind and not unneeded apps, like Uber. Garmin and Coros both have maps too.
cromka 6 hours ago [-]
Honestly, 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 5 hours ago [-]
Not 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 4 hours ago [-]
I 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.
coldtea 4 hours ago [-]
Can you describe that utility?
Schiendelman 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah! I mean I published it on the app store, too. It does three core things:
1) Makes sure every reminder gets a date and time if it doesn't have one
2) Snowplows them ahead of you, so if you go on vacation they're still in the near future
3) Moves reminders out of the way if you accept or create a calendar event conflicting with it
It also preserves ordering when moving things (hence my snowplow approach).
Soon it'll summarize what you did that day so you can feel good about what you get done - that's coming shortly, I'm testing the feature for another few days.
There are a bunch of settings to tweak this - picking what reminder lists to include, setting a time window for when it'll reschedule things, etc.
Is that meant to be a joke? I've been on HN for over a decade. Closer to ELIZA's era than that of LLMs.
I'm curious because I'm also interested in hacking the Reminders app via its API, to add some features in a side app
Schiendelman 2 hours ago [-]
If you try it out, I'm curious what you'd add! I'd be happy to make improvements.
SllX 5 hours ago [-]
Generally speaking, Apple should be improving and adding to the base operating system all the time, including new apps. It is better for their users including new users if the phone itself is capable of more out of the box.
Where they fall short though, the App Store is right there. There’s almost always a better alternative for those who value having something better.
5 hours ago [-]
coldtea 4 hours ago [-]
Is it? They have a platform you can run other apps on, and this one in TFA and others provides this functionality.
joe_mamba 5 hours ago [-]
Didn't it take them 10+ years to make a calculator app for the iPad?
bcraven 1 hours ago [-]
I 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 9 minutes ago [-]
It is just Pedometer++
The 8 is the version number that launched yesterday with this feature
som 6 hours ago [-]
Great 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.
apt-apt-apt-apt 7 hours ago [-]
For 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.
n8cpdx 5 hours ago [-]
The use of the cartographer to generate separate designs and the technology used to render/deliver those designs are two entirely separate concerns.
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 4 hours ago [-]
Good 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.
dzogchen 6 hours ago [-]
I 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.
SpyCoder77 7 hours ago [-]
As a pedometer++ user, it is amazing the attention to detail David has maintained over the years. The evolution is crazy.
Amorymeltzer 7 hours ago [-]
He 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.
monk_grilla 5 hours ago [-]
I’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 4 hours ago [-]
Yes, 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.
brcmthrowaway 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dmd 5 hours ago [-]
?? what does claude have to do with this?
kobieps 2 hours ago [-]
I 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:
kweiza 6 hours ago [-]
Static tiles on a watch is the right call. Tried dynamic rendering on a constrained device once and pan/zoom got eaten by GC pauses every frame.
timojaask 5 hours ago [-]
There’s no GC on watchOS, it uses ARC
arjie 6 hours ago [-]
Apple 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 6 hours ago [-]
You 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"
maz1b 5 hours ago [-]
Really 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 :~)
Razengan 2 hours ago [-]
While 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
mrcwinn 1 hours ago [-]
Awesome work, truly. (But I'll stick with my Garmin.)
Let'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'.
rogerrogerr 7 hours ago [-]
We 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)
7 hours ago [-]
puttycat 6 hours ago [-]
Can we also not ban people for pointing out an evidently funny naming?
phainopepla2 5 hours ago [-]
Who was banned?
blairbeckwith 7 hours ago [-]
I can’t believe you made me sign in just to downvote this.
Rendered at 05:00:53 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
It’s a lifestyle device after all but still
I remember a time when Apple was chided for integrating functionalities of popular apps into its OS.
Apple created an incredibly awesome device, and its up to the market to make full use of its potential. Why would it be a failure for Apple to not make such an app?
It also preserves ordering when moving things (hence my snowplow approach).
Soon it'll summarize what you did that day so you can feel good about what you get done - that's coming shortly, I'm testing the feature for another few days.
There are a bunch of settings to tweak this - picking what reminder lists to include, setting a time window for when it'll reschedule things, etc.
This should link to it:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reminder-wrangler/id6759400510
I'm curious because I'm also interested in hacking the Reminders app via its API, to add some features in a side app
Where they fall short though, the App Store is right there. There’s almost always a better alternative for those who value having something better.
The 8 is the version number that launched yesterday with this feature
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.
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.
His original map provider offers both vector and raster tile services: 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.
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.
BTW, that last line about hiring/commissioning a cartographer, very rad and cool :~)
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
(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)