Wow, it’s been a hassle during and after the holidays. Between family and my regular work, I have not had as much time as I would have liked to keep up with the blog and still continue deveoping apps. But I’ve been working on them and also a new app for WearOS.

Like the previous apps, idea for it is from my own needs. I have a tendency to get stuck working for long periods of time without taking short breaks, feeling groggy and tired afterwards with a sore neck. So I wanted to create a simple WearOS app that would give me a nudge every now and then to get up and move around a bit.

Primary idea is that the app would give distinct notifications when it’s time to change your posture, take a break or have a drink, fully customizable. Also, you can trigger the events easily by yourself by just tapping the control icon.

I know almost all wearable devices have this kind of feature built in, but they are often not very customizable and they just feel like bit of a plastered on feature. I wanted to be able to set my own rythm (based on just my own feeling) and also have a bit more fun with it. I was kind of surprised how much work it actually was to make something this simple.

Mostly it was again fighting for the way to keep the app running in the background without it being killed by the system. I know that mobile devices should have agressive battery saving for reason, but you would not think how much work is involved in just keeping a simple notifications sheduled and showing them at the right time.

I’ve been running it now on my own test device and it seems to be working pretty well. Though I have a worry that it might not work yet on all devices, since my wife’s watch seems to still clear out the app alarms after every night. Still trying to figure out if there is a workaround for that.

At the moment, I am trying to create an optional watchface for the app, which would show the app status and have a simple launcher for it on the watchface. I like using very minimalistic and maybe bit untraditional watch faces, so it’s maybe not for everyone. Might do couple different ones though.

But that is not the only project I’m working on at the moment. I finally got around to progress the note/todo list app running over SSH that I planned already last year and even started a bit. I want to try to make it as a Kotlin multiplatform project, so there has been some learning curve to get over, and I still don’t have a way to develop it on iOS. But now I have been able to progress it a bit now and the Android side might be coming toghether pretty soon. I still have to jump through the iOS development hoops, but it’s in the pipeline now.