Introducing Activity Stats

Last Wednesday, April 29, 2020, Ian Blackburn tweeted a screenshot of his Total Apple Watch Activity numbers. He calculated the totals on a spreadsheet, by exporting the data from the Health app on his iPhone.

Ian’s data made me curious about my totals and it seemed really easy to put together an app for it. And so I started building Activity Stats. With all the work I have been doing with HealthKit in Tempo, it was really straightforward to get the data out of the Health app. My recent learning/playing with SwiftUI made it extremely fast and easy to put together a nice looking UI.

I shared the app with Ian and few other friends via TestFlight, and everyone found it interesting and thought it looked good. Even my 10 year old wanted it on her iPhone. That seemed adequate amount of validation for me to polish up and launch a quick v1.0 of the app. So today, 7 days after starting it as a brand new project in Xcode, I am excited to be releasing Activity Stats in the App Store! 🚀

Activity Stats is a simple app that displays your lifetime totals of various types of fitness and workout data stored in the Health app on your iPhone. Here's the list of totals it currently supports,

• Total active calories

• Total exercise time

• Total steps count

• Total walking and running distance

• Total walking and running distance

• Total walking distance from workouts

• Total swimming distance

• Total cycling distance

• Total indoor cycling time

• Total elliptical time

• Total workout time

• Total workouts

Activity Stats is available for free in the App Store. If you are curious about your totals, please do check it out.

Freemium, Patronage & Subscription

With the recent release of version 1.3.1, Tempo is now free to download from the App Store.  

My goal for Tempo is to make it the best training companion app for myself and other runners. That means building it with utmost care and detail, and also maintain our privacy. It requires a lot of time and effort, both in running miles and thorough product development, to test, validate and support such a top quality running app. I love running and working on Tempo, and wish I could do it all the time, but I also have to make sure it is financially sustainable for me. So Tempo will always have a payment model around its usage.

The reality of current App Store economy is that users prefer trying before paying for apps. To allow that, I am making Tempo free to download with all the features enabled. Tempo 2.0 will introduce a subscription model for exclusive access to more advanced features. Subscription will cost at least $3.99 per year to start with.

I am grateful to everyone who bought Tempo on launch. Your feedback, adoption and support has brought us this far. As my thanks to you, when 2.0 arrives, you will have full access to all the advanced features for the first 2 years without requiring any subscription.

Until 2.0 arrives, there is also an option to become an early patron via in-app purchase. This option will also enable full access to advanced features in version 2.0; features that will be otherwise exclusive to subscribed users and original buyers. So if you downloaded Tempo for free, you can still benefit from saving on subscription by becoming an early patron now.

I hope you find Tempo useful in achieving your running goals.

Keep Running!

New Apps We Love

New Apps We Love is the very first section of the Featured tab in the App Store. On Sunday, May 29th, Tempo showed up as the first app listed there.

I ran a marathon on May 28th and was still high from the 26.2 mile run on Sunday evening, when Tempo was featured. Words can not describe the feeling of getting featured in the App Store while already in an elevated state of runner's high. The fact that Tempo is all about running made it even sweeter.

To say that it was really amazing would be an understatement. I was ecstatic! Tempo is a labor of love. Love for the sport of running. Love for building quality software. Software to help me become a better runner. To see that it can be useful for other runners and getting recognized in the App Store is not only gratifying and exhilarating, but also inspiring.

Getting featured has helped Tempo to be noticed by more runners. Runners have been sending e-mails of appreciation - claiming Tempo to be exactly the app they have needed for a while. Some runners have also been gracious to rate Tempo in the App Store. This is very encouraging. It's fuel for me to keep making Tempo better. I am very grateful for all of it.

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Thank you, App Store team, for featuring Tempo and allowing it to be discovered by runners all around the world. ❤️

Tempo v1.0

Tempo is now available in the App Store. If you run with your Apple Watch, please do check it out.

You can read Tempo’s story here. To celebrate the launch, here are some more fun facts that I edited out of the original story,

• I sketched up Tempo’s original screen last year, during a sleepy morning, while staying up with my newborn. It was probably around 5 AM.
• That sort of got me into the sketching habit during early morning hours. Most of them now are before my long runs on the weekends.
• Many Tempo features have been devised during miles and miles of training on Newton hills and other parts of the Boston marathon course along Comm. Ave.
• During its initial prototyping phase, Tempo was called Runlog.
• Tempo has been my only running log for my last 2 marathon training cycles.
• I have been building it for almost a year, crafting it slowly and carefully as my go-to running log. As I have said before, I love running and building software, and building Tempo is now my favorite way to enjoy both!
• Tempo is the very first project launched under Indie Computing Labs, LLC.

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Hello, world!

“ With self-discipline most anything is possible. ”

— Theodore Roosevelt

Slowly and steadily, I am almost ready to launch Indie. So I figured I should say hello here.

What does launch mean? It's launching Indie's first project: Tempo. It is code complete, tested and ready to ship. Approved and ready to be released in the App Store.

You can read more about Indie here. 

Here's why I built Tempo.

Looking forward to this journey!