Shaping up

The last few days have been devoted to other things like dental emergencies, but the app continues to shape up.

I discovered that expecting live activities to do much beyond show you something and open the app if you tapped them is quite fragile and can make things very complicated. Switching that over to just an “open the app with a custom URL schema” both made the app a lot simpler and a lot more dependable.

I took a refactoring pass at the code, and I’ve isolated the “what state is the app in now” into a single oracle class that takes in all the data (quiet schedule, interval since last event, current time, and so on) and figures out the state of play. All the other parts of the app just look at the oracle’s computed app state and then proceed based on that.

This means I can mock the oracle and easily test all the rest of the behavior of the app, and I can mock the oracle’s inputs and validate that it makes all the right decisions.

This vastly simplifies the app and makes all of it testable, so I can get a little more ambitious:

• The app can query (if the user permits) HealthKit and get a “quiet time” estimate from collected sleep data
• I can make the quiet-time boundaries a little more squishy to deal with early-morning wakeups and shifting the start of the window to match
• The recording is dead simple and accurate. No more lost events.

So far I’ve got something that does a good job of posting the reminders and recording the data; now I can get after making that recorded data more useful to both the user and to their urologist.

It’s now an app that acknowledges (and explains) that you have two different situations where you do bladder training: going too much (the more common situation) and going too little (the less-common situation I’m in).

It’s still very utilitarian straight-out-of-the-box SwiftUI, but: ship working code, then repackage with beauty.

Very happy with it, it’s working great for my use case now; even if I didn’t refine it further, it’s helping me keep on schedule with my bladder training.

Three months to go!