Today I’m proud to introduce to the world my newest iOS app, it’s called Hidgets, and it’s for displaying your health information on widgets.

It’s probably not new to you as an iPhone user that iOS14 brings, amongst other features, the widgets for your home screen.

Since iOS launched, many people that I know and also read on Reddit and Twitter that it would be cool to have some of the health related data collected by the Health app as widgets on our home screens. So I just went ahead and grabbed the bull by the horns (that’s SwiftUI), and fought myself into my newest and freshest release since the release of DuetCam last year.

Funny enough, DuetCam was also released at the launch of iOS 13 and explored a recently added feature into the operating system that enabled the use of multiple cameras at the same time, which is basically what Hidgets is doing now for iOS 14, adding health to the widget’s family.

Development started only 3 weeks ago, when I first read about the idea online, and after some friends asked me naturally: “remind me again how I can add the Health widget on my home screen”, which triggered me to reply: “you can’t, hold my beer”. Codename: HealthMe. My first SwiftUI project.

For now, you can add widgets related to your mobility, steps counter, your heart, heart beat, your body measurement, body mass and your sleep chicly, time in bed.

You can also customise them to look the way you love them the most, with a lot of information or very minimal, with colours or monochromatic. More configurations and styles coming soon.

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The plan is now to add more widgets as we go, expand their information, utility and also provide data in ways you couldn’t see before. The plan is to enjoy the ride, provide quality applications and learn from it as much as I can.

Hidgets is available on the App Store as of today. Let me know if you have any suggestions or questions in general about the app.

Happy “widgetting” everyone!

It’s been a while (again) since my last blog post, and also since my last release on the App Store as an independent developer, but I’m determined to change those two situations in the coming months.

As you probably already know, I’ve released a new app on the App Store called DuetCam, that allows you to record a video with two cameras of your iPhone simultaneously. What you provably don’t know is that this is my fifth app so far, since I started iOS development back in 2011.

Well, it’s actually my sixth, there’s WP Camps, an app made for WordPress professionals and enthusiasts that attend local conferences, but that was done for a specific event that got later converted to a broader audience, not something that is on general interest. But yes, it is nevertheless an app I’ve made.

My previous apps

But my previous apps back in the days were called Heliog, the first Dropbox client app that allowed you to upload and download photos and manage them online in the cloud, pretty much like Google Photos do it nowadays, HelloLab allowed you to edit photos with multiple film emulation, FlickrBoard was the first Flickr client for iOS, and InstaRectangle allowed you to add a white border around your pictures to post them online without resizing them, before Instagram allowed to post other formats than a square.

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These apps eventually died, after getting referred by the major online blogs at the time because I had then recently launched my WordPress agency called hellodev and gave up hope in continuing developing them, trading my attention towards the company. A decision that I now (deeply) regret.

So, what’s the plan?

So my plan is to come back to an era of developing apps and turning ideas that I have that might help others and get some return out of it, but the main reason why I really want to come back is for the joy, that little force that lives inside you, that a mobile developer feels when it has an idea that he that brings to life and share it worldwide.

It’s pretty much like a photographer that publishes a series of photos that are a collection of his view on a matter, or a musician that has this message to get out and publishes a record and builds an audience, coding and releasing an app is very similar. From the concept, to design, to development, marketing and promoting it, all this process simply fascinates me.

The launch of DuetCam allowed me to rethink my strategy and focus even harder on developing apps and regaining the trust and joy that was once lost, to build an audience and improve my coding skills.

Follow me on Twitter for more info on my next releases ??.