After a period of some neglect, Tide Watch v5.3 is now (or about to be) available in the App Store, with the following changes:
- Apple Watch support, which was limited to the now-deprecated Watch SDK v1, has been removed, pending a more modern implementation.
- Moved custom date support (for predictions more than a week into the future) to the main interface, instead of burying it in Settings.
- Fixed a couple of bugs that may have caused the app to display inaccurate results:
- On first use of the app, switching from the default location (Damon Point in Massachusetts) to any other location initially displayed the prediction for Damon Point; an embarrassing first impression.
- Since Watch support was added, the app would ignore updated harmonics data from NOAA and use older data from a previous version. We found no significant variances between old and new data in our testing, but your mileage may have varied. In any case, the app is updated with new data (as of January 2018) and correctly uses it.
- Various other minor bug fixes.
Other than fixes for significant issues, this is the last release of Tide Watch for a while, as we undertake a re-write.
Tide Watch began as a Mac project; much of the Objective-C code pre-dates even "modern" Objective-C, let alone Swift, the new language of choice for iOS development. In fact, very few of the current "best practices" for iOS development were available when the the first version was completed. Although we have modernized parts of the code base, it is clearly ready for a re-write in Swift, along with a re-design and modern implementation of the UI.
We'll be watching the reviews and our in-box, and will maintain the existing app as necessary.
Article originally appeared on Selene Associates (http://www.selene-associates.com/).
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