Introduction to KKBOX's Apple Watch App

1. KKBOX
Apple Watch App
Jacky Wang

2. Agenda
• Introduction of
KKBOX Watch App
• Interesting things
• Apple Watch Lab
Challenges &
Solutions
• What did we learn?

3. Introduction

4. App Store
• Launched on April 21

5. Functionalities
• Play Control
• Lyrics
• Playlists
• Radio

6. DEMO

7. Interesting things
during development

8. Context Menu

9. Context Menu
• Original Design
• Use force touch to show menu
Force Touch
Rejected by Apple

10. Context Menu
• Menu options have to be directly related to content on
screen
• Cannot be used as segue to other InterfaceControllers
Force
Touch

11. Animation

12. Animation
• Only support GIF
• Play Pause
• Next Previous
song

13. Communication
WatchPhone ?

14. Communication -
Shared Data
• NSUserDefault
• App groups must be
enabled
• Commands, Data are
stored in Shared Data
• Shared Data changed
Notification is sent
WatchPhone
SD
notification
data

15. Communication -
OpenParentApplication
• Main method of Data
exchange
• No more sharedData
• One direction
• Watch needs to check and
sync everything.
• Too expensive
WatchPhone
openParent
data
notification

16. Communication -
WatchAppNotificationCenter
• CFNotification Center &
Darwin Notification Center
• Allows adding specific
observers and keys
• Only updates what is
necessary
• Better performance
WatchPhone
openParent
data
Notification Center

17. Apple Watch Lab
Time Square, Hong Kong

18. Apple Watch Lab
• Invited to test our app on real device for 2 days

19. Challenges

20. Challenges
• Everything was perfect on the
simulator.
• Everything is different on the
real device.

21. Debugging
• Need to manually attach process to
iPhone and Apple Watch on
simulator
• Xcode crashes when attaching
process on real device
• Could only debug with NSLog

22. Launching in
background
• Crash every time we launched app from
watch
• Because app is only launched in
background
• Be careful with what you do in the
background
• Doesn’t show on simulator.

23. Cache Images
• WatchKit Extension is slower than
simulator and unstable sometimes
• Cache any static images you can as
early as possible
• A simple menu could cause
unexpected lag

24. Creating Tables
• 2 out of 10 times, tables won’t load
• Task finished in code but screen only
shows a loading indicator
• System bug?
• Left lab without a solution :(

25. Creating Tables
• Last resort was keeping only Now Playing
• UX > Functionality
• Apple suggested maybe try using SharedData
• Rebuilt the communication infrastructure.
• Solved the problem.

26. Solution
• Instant status updates
• OpenParentApplication
• Data transfer
• SharedData
WatchPhone
SD
data
openParent
data
Notification Center

27. Creating Tables -
Instagram
https://github.com/Instagram/IGInterfaceDataTable

28. What did we learn?

29. Never trust the
simulator 100%
Always test on real device before shipping…

30. Never trust
Apple 100%
Sometimes, they don’t even know what is best…

31. Thank you
JackyWangDeveloper@gmail.com