Weekend Update - The Workout Builder

It's early days here working on Atlas. One of the first pieces of functionality I wanted to tackle was the workout editor. It's a complicated interaction model, but it's also, at least on a first iteration, one of the main features that's mostly aligned with standard iOS interaction design.

I spent much of the weekend getting myself re-familiarized with TableView controllers and delegate and data source protocols, learning the most basic concepts of auto layout, and spent a little time implementing a segment control selector on top of the table view. Not the fanciest of features, to be sure, but it was gratifying to implement an enhancement on top of the work I did.

I finished Sunday afternoon by designing out table cells for different types of workouts. I'm anticipating that workouts are going to describe different aspects of their data models, and I want to make those distinctions known. How exactly? Well, I'm not yet entirely sure, but I quickly prototyped out a layout that would expose just that.

I liked how the quick take turned out, and I really like that I got to dig into auto layout, interface builder, and table views without having my data model fully fleshed out. But, I'm quickly starting to see how complicated this could get. I took the good enough for now approach of a quick mock, but the approach is quickly going to cause either massive view controller bloat, or dependency hell between the model and the view. I spent some time thinking of a simple but flexible way to configure these views in a way that lets me pass particular model traits and a unified, branded theme easily across the application. That's a story for a different post though.

Before the afternoon completely slipped away, I also got started on a New Workout controller, laying the groundwork to create and name a workout and get started building it.

This is all pretty basic stuff, so I'm not going to dig into most of the details. But, I'm excited to share and explain my approach as we go on to complex layouts, animations, and designs.

I'll finish with a few screenshots- by no means a finished product, but it's so satisfying to have what feels like (at least part of) an app after only a couple hours of work. And, purple is becoming my favorite color to build interfaces in, but that doesn't mean Atlas is going to be released with shades of purple.