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7 Useful Beginner Resources for Apple Watch App Development

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Introduction

Wearable devices such as smart watches are not just fitness or medical gadgets. With Apple Watch, you can easily check your messages and other notifications. It is designed so you can also potentially pay for groceries or unlock a hotel room by just a wave of you wrist in the future. Since there is a lot of possible ways Apple Watch can be used to improve people’s life and make things easier, more and more apps have their own Watch app extension. If you want to start to build your own Apple Watch App and don’t know where to start, check these resources. 

What is WatchKit?

Get Started with Apple Watch and WatchKit

If you’re not sure what you can do with Apple’s WatchKit, you should read this article. The post also goes with a beginner-friendly video that explains how WatchKit works on both iPhone and Apple Watch. 

NShipster

NS Hipster is a great resource for iOS development in general. Matt has gathered helpful articles you might need to read about WatchKit, including the developer resources from Apple, an introduction to WatchKit Programming, and the Lister Sample App.  Matt also compares WatchKit and the UIKit in easy to understand words, so definitely check out this article if you haven’t already. 

4 Apple Watch Tutorials for Beginners

As there are plenty of available online Apple WatchKit tutorials and courses, you are likely to feel lost about where to start out. Here are some beginner-friendly resources for you to get started with a WatchKit development. 

Learn How to Make a Simple Apple Watch App

This Apple Watch video tutorial will teach you the details of how to build a simple app so you can understand the basics of Apple Watch layout and environment. The tutorial will then   walk you through a more complex project.

Make Your First Apple Watch App in 11 minutes

This live coding video by Ravin Sardal will walk you through the procedure of creating Watch app from the ground-up, including how to setup your developing environment. Before you start this project on Xcode, you can find the code for it on Github(https://github.com/randomite/AppleWatchTutorialSeries/tree/master/GettingStartedTutorial).  You can also check out the intermediate tutorial on “Sharing Data Between the Watch and the Phone”.

How to Five’s WatchKit Tutorials

The goal of this series of WatchKit video tutorials is to help you learn how to develop WatchKit apps in simple steps. It has less live coding and teaches you how to build specific things such as auto-layouting and page-based navigation. As the tutorial is broken down into bite-sized videos, you can go straight to the topic you’re interested in  and learn how to develop WatchKit apps with more efficiency.

 iPhoneDev.TV

Paul Solt is a former Apple employee who now teaches beginners how to program iOS games and apps online. This article consists of a few free videos on how to connect the Apple Watch user interface to your code and how to set up NSTimer. He has also rolled out a full course on how to build Apple Watch apps with Swift. His blog is also a nice place to find some general Swift tips and tricks.

Thinkapps for Watch

ThinkApps for Watch is a neat tool you can use to easily prototype your Apple Watch App. The company’s blog (http://thinkapps.com/blog/) also has several useful articles such as 5 Important Design Principles for Apple Watch Apps among other case-studies to help you get inspiration.

Conclusion

The best way to learn is through building your own object. If you run into difficulties, don’t give up. A big part of becoming a developer is to make mistakes and learn how to fix those mistakes through googling solutions online. If you really get stuck and don’t know how to solve your problem, you can get instant 1:1 help from WatchKit experts on Codementor who will guide you through any development obstacles you have.




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