The days have gotten cold, the nights colder and with them, the pace of progress on my app has gone glacial. I wanted to achieve two goals in the last two weeks, 1. To design v1 of my app and 2. To whip up a widget showing the number of users visiting this website. I have failed to achieve both.
I did download a few apps from the App Store that are doing what I want to do, Apps that a predominantly widget-based. I understand how they allow the users to customize the widgets they want and show them as options in the edit menu. I’ve also watched tutorials on how to execute it using intents but, I have not gotten down to actually programming them.
I do have a fair idea of what my v1 is going to be. I want to keep it simple and provide a straightforward screen for the user to choose the Google Analytics account, property, and views. I will then build widget views that work for a variety of statistics, e.g users, page views, new users. The user can then chose to add these statistic views to their portfolio and I will provide the portfolio as edit options on the widget in the home screen. There are intricacies still to be worked out but, I believe I have the framework.
A couple more things that really helped me out in this journey over the past couple of weeks. OneTab has really helped me organize my tabs in a collection to be visited later. This code along (parts 1, 2, 3) has been a really helpful way to learn WidgetKit, Kudos Apple.
Finally, I love this time of year. The Christmas – New Year week is a wonderful time for a staycation. As such, I will not be working on anything for the next couple of weeks. My goal will still be to achieve the two things I mentioned above, see you in 2021.
Wish you a Merry Christmas 🎄 and a Happy New Year 🍾