RK03 - ResearchKit "Hello World" with Instruction Step

"Hello World" with Instruction Step

No software can go forward without a simple "Hello World" application.
If we break this rule, the Gods of "Programming for Dummies" will crush us !
So without any further due lets do some coding !!!

https://gist.github.com/bishalg/c5268460b81344451e44


// 1

   @IBOutlet weak var gettingStartedButton: UIButton!   

// 2

    @IBAction func gettingStartedAction(sender: UIButton) {        self.sayHellowToTheWorld()    }        func sayHellowToTheWorld() {        // Make Steps         let step1 = ORKInstructionStep(identifier: "step1")        step1.title = "Hello World!"                let step2 = ORKInstructionStep(identifier: "step2")        step2.title = "That is it ! :] Thanks"        

                 // Make a Ordered Task of steps

        let task = ORKOrderedTask(identifier: "ourFirstTask", steps: [step1, step2])

                  // Present the ViewController of hence made Task !

        let taskVC = ORKTaskViewController(task: task, taskRunUUID: nil)        taskVC.delegate = self        presentViewController(taskVC, animated: true, completion: nil)    }

// 3

extension HomeVC: ORKTaskViewControllerDelegate {

   func taskViewController(taskViewController: ORKTaskViewController, didFinishWithReason reason: ORKTaskViewControllerFinishReason, error: NSError?) {        self.dismissViewControllerAnimated(true, completion: nil)        let buttonTitle: String?        switch reason {        case .Completed:            buttonTitle = "Completed"        case .Discarded:            buttonTitle = "Discarded"        case .Failed:            buttonTitle = "Failed"        case .Saved:            buttonTitle = "Saved"        }
        gettingStartedButton.setTitle(buttonTitle, forState: .Normal)    }

} 

// 1 - Getting Started -
In our VC we have a button which will start a ResearchKit survey and will change based on our action

// 2 - Action on button will start the survey

If we do "Next" and "Done" after  we started from "Getting Started" button it would present us a Task-ViewController which will make a delegate at the end of it step.

// 3
// Extend out View Controller so that it handles the Delegate of TaskVC
// Once the task is completed we will update our button to reflect the result !
// And finally its our responsibility to dismiss the VC we presented.

Here is one of the expected flow -

1. Home Screen


2. Research Kit - TaskVC presented with "Hello World" Instruction Step ( ORKInstructionStep )



3. Second Instruction Step with "DONE" button - 2/ 2



Finally if we will get any one of the following result ( ORKTaskViewControllerFinishReason ) -
In this case we will have either Completed or Discarded result.

    

RK 02 - ResearchKit - Native App on HTML ?

As an iOS developer you would tend to think that Framework that Apple has developed must be on native Objective-C or Swift. The ResearchKit framework itself may be on Objective-C but the Architecture of the App development includes lots and lots of HTML and JSON files.

So you might need to revise your HTML / CSS skills before we proceed further.

If we dig inside "Resources" folder for the sample app for Parkison.



The major of contents are in HTMLContent folder, and  JSON is used to map the those HTML to each Views or ViewControllers.

Now lets examine  StudyOverview.json -

"questions":

    [

     {

     "title":"Welcome to mPower",

     "details":"A Parkinson Disease Research Study",

     },

     

     {

     "title":"About this Study",

     "details":"AboutStudy_intro",

    

     },

     

     {

     "title":"About the App",

     "details":"Please tap on the image below to watch a short video introduction to mPower.",

     "video_name" : "Intro",

     },

     

     {

     "title":"How this Study works",

     "details":"howstudyworks_intro",

     

     },

Hence the app framework binds your HTML via JSON files -
for example to bind your AboutStudy_intro.html file you have following JSON -

{

     "title":"About this Study",

     "details":"AboutStudy_intro",

 }

Which has the content like this -

Links -

https://github.com/ResearchKit/mPower/tree/master/Parkinson/Resources
www.w3schools.com/html/

www.w3schools.com/css/

www.w3schools.com/json/

RK01 - ResearchKit - App Store Apps - diagnostic

As our tutorial is more focused towards making an app lets start from AppStore itself !



There are many app right now in App Store which are based on ResearchKit and the number is increasing day by day !




Following are the apps features by apple right now -

Asthma Health by Mount Sinai

By Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=972625668&mt=8&ls=1&v0=www-us-researchkit-itms-asthma-health

Autism & Beyond

By Duke Health

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/autism-beyond/id1025327516?mt=8

Breast Cancer: Share the Journey study

By Sage Bionetworks, a Not-For-Profit Research Organization

https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=972180604&mt=8&ls=1&v0=www-us-researchkit-itms-Sage-Bionetworks

EpiWatch

By Johns Hopkins Digital

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/epiwatch/id1047757228?mt=8

Mole Mapper Melanoma Study

By Sage Bionetworks, a Not-For-Profit Research Organization

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mole-mapper-melanoma-study/id1048337814?mt=8

MyHeart Counts

By Stanford University

https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=972189947&mt=8&ls=1&v0=www-us-researchkit-itms-my-heart

Parkinson mPower study app

By Sage Bionetworks, a Not-For-Profit Research Organization

https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=972191200&mt=8&ls=1&v0=www-us-researchkit-itms-mpower


GlucoSuccess

https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=972143976&mt=8&ls=1&v0=www-us-researchkit-itms-Glucosuccess

RK00 - Getting Started with ResearchKit

RK00 - Getting Started with ResearchKit

Published On - 2/25/16, 4:52 AM
Updated On - 3/30/16

I guess as you have already searched for ResearchKit, you need no introduction to it !
But if you really don't know what it is here is an intro for you -

ResearchKit is an open source software framework that makes it easy to create apps for medical research or for other research projects.

Normally when we start to develop iOS app the first place we start to search for tutorial is Raywenderlich. No wonder there is already one on ResearchKit ! Believe me only other place to learn about ResearchKit is one WWDC video from apple and that is it :[.

Other learning resources we should follow is the ResearchKit blog. And as always there is StackOverflow to get around.

But in this tutorial series I would not use conventional tutorial.  Like intro to ResearchKit, for which you can always follow apple documentation. Rather I would make you go thought the app that is already on App Store and hence at the end you can make your own app ;]. For which I would use open Gluco Sucess app. But the fun part is I wont make you follow same app ! Instead we would make a app for COPD called StopCOPD which isnt OpenSource app.

So lets get started !

RK01 - ResearchKit - App Store Apps - diagnostic
RK 02 - ResearchKit - Native App on HTML ?
RK03 - ResearchKit "Hello World" with Instruction Step

Links -

http://www.apple.com/researchkit/
http://www.raywenderlich.com/104575/researchkit-tutorial-with-swift
http://researchkit.org
http://researchkit.org/blog.html
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2015/213/
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/researchkit?sort=newest&pageSize=50
http://researchkit.org/docs/docs/Overview/GuideOverview.html

https://github.com/researchkit/researchkit
https://github.com/ResearchKit/GlucoSuccess
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/stopcopd/id1020845469?mt=8

Swift 2.0 Strings

After functional coding I feel the biggest change from Obj-C world to Swift was in support of Unicode string.

Then again the huge change from Swift 1.2 to Swift 2.0 might be in String.
In someway its a dramatic change !
As stated in Swift Blog

Swift provides a performant, Unicode-compliant string implementation as part of its Standard Library. In Swift 2, theString type no longer conforms to the CollectionType protocol, where String was previously a collection of Character values, similar to an array. Now, String provides a characters property that exposes a character collection view.

var letters: [Character] = ["c", "a", "f", "e"]
var string: String = String(letters)

print(letters.count) // 4
print(string) // cafe
print(string.characters.count) // 4

let acuteAccent: Character = "\u{0301}" // ´ COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT' (U+0301)

string.append(acuteAccent)
print(string.characters.count) // 4
print(string.characters.last!) // é

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Swift/Conceptual/Swift_Programming_Language/StringsAndCharacters.html

NOTE

Extended grapheme clusters can be composed of one or more Unicode scalars. This means that different characters—and different representations of the same character—can require different amounts of memory to store. Because of this, characters in Swift do not each take up the same amount of memory within a string’s representation. As a result, the number of characters in a string cannot be calculated without iterating through the string to determine its extended grapheme cluster boundaries. If you are working with particularly long string values, be aware that the count(_:) function must iterate over the Unicode scalars in the entire string in order to calculate an accurate character count for that string.

The character count returned by the count(_:) function is not always the same as the length property of an NSString that contains the same characters. The length of an NSString is based on the number of 16-bit code units within the string’s UTF-16 rpresentation and not the number of Unicode extended grapheme clusters within the string. To reflect this fact, the length property from NSString is called utf16Count when it is accessed on a Swift String value.

Reference - 

Swift Standard Library Reference.

Catching generic Exceptions in Swift 2.0

Erro handeling is always a chalange in any development enviroment.


In general, we will never spot an error if we log or catch. Only developers will see those, and if you're muffling to avoid user-visible behavior, succeeding means nobody will notice!

So our guideline is: 

"if it's something wrong that we want to fix, let it crash, find and fix before release. "

If it's something wrong that might seriously impact the user experience, or is not indicative of a programming error, then muffle but make sure we have a test or some other way to find the problem. 

Or make sure that failure propagates around the application through some other kind of logic — return values, fall through, whatever. 

Also: if you write 'catch Exception', consider writing 'Throwable' instead. I often see this:

  // This might run out of memory. 

  catch (Exception e) {

which won't work — Exception and Error are siblings, and OOMs are OutOfMemoryErrors. That'll catch everything but an Error!

I am a huge fan of open source Firefox iOS Developed in Swift and consider it as an inspiration.
I found the following discussion on bugzilla 

Inspired by buzilla form - 

Richard Newman

https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/mobile-firefox-dev/2015-August/001451.html

Bugzilla - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1191067#c25

Github - https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-ios

Windows Bridge - Objective-C iOS app Development in Microsoft Windows

The most popular question you get asked as an iOS developer is - "Is it possible to make iOS app in Windows ?" :[

But the sad and short answer was always NO !
Now if the question is "Is is possible to develop in Windows using Objective-C ?", the answer will be "Yes !" :]

There are other options like using virtual machine or running www.hackintosh.com

But Now there is a better way around, No ! I'm now talking about open source Swift coming to Linux later this year.

But today Microsoft has open sourced WinObjC.

NOTE :  That this is to help and expand develop app on Windows Platform not to develop iOS app ! 

Rather it is developed as helper to convert existing iOS app to Windows Platform.

Email Newsletter -

Windows Bridge for iOS: Initial preview now on GitHub!

We have great news to share about Windows Bridge for iOS ('Project Islandwood').

We just made a few big announcements about the bridge, and we wanted to be sure you were among the first to find out. First, we announced availability of an initial preview release of the technology to target Windows PCs running Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. Secondly, we announced that we are targeting fall for a full release, in conjunction with the update to Visual Studio 2015.

But the biggest announcement is that we are releasing the bridge as an open source project under the MIT license, and making it available on GitHub. We invite you to check out the project on GitHub and follow our progress as we work towards our fall release. The team is very excited to share the iOS bridge with you, and we hope you'll follow along with us.

For additional information, check out the detailed Windows Bridge for iOS blog post and be sure to check us out at GitHub.

Thank you, The Windows Bridge for iOS Team

And the GitHub description -

Welcome to the Windows Bridge for iOS project preview

What is WinObjC?

Windows Bridge for iOS (also referred to as WinObjC) is a Microsoft open source project that provides an Objective-C development environment for Visual Studio/Windows. In addition, WinObjC provides support for iOS API compatibility.

The following sections will help you get started and you can view our wiki for more detailed information.

Where to get it

Download the Windows Bridge for iOS SDK here

Getting started with WinObjC

To use WinObjC, there are a few requirements. You need:

• Windows 10
• Visual Studio 2015 with Windows developer tools. Visual Studio 2015 Community is available for free here. Select (at least) the following components during installation:
  1. Programming Languages -> Visual C++
  2. Universal Windows App Development Tools (all)
  3. Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.0/8.1 Tools (all)

The best way to get started with WinObjC is to run one of the samples. We recommend starting with the WOCCatalog sample app, which demonstrates an assortment of iOS and XAML UI controls. To run the sample:

1. Extract the SDK zip file to a local directory
2. Navigate to winobjc/samples/WOCCatalog in the extracted directory
3. Double-click on WOCCatalog-WinStore10.sln to open in VS2015
4. In VS2015 right-click on the WOCCatalog (Universal Windows) project
5. Select Set as StartUp project
6. Use Ctrl-F5 to build and run the app

For guidance about importing your own Xcode project and other Windows Bridge for iOS SDK details, see the wiki

Contributions

There are many ways that you can contribute to the WinObjC project:

• Submit a bug
• Verify fixes for bugs
• Submit a code fix for a bug
• Submit a feature request
• Submit a unit test
• Tell others about the WinObjC project
• Tell the developers how much you appreciate the project

Pull requests

You will need to sign a Contribution License Agreement (CLA) before submitting your pull request. To complete the CLA, you will need to submit the request via the form and then electronically sign the CLA when you receive an email containing a link to the document.

This process needs to only be done once for any Microsoft open source project.

Contributing to README and Wiki

You do not need to sign a Contribution License Agreement if you are just contributing to the README or the Wiki. However, by submitting a contribution to the README or the Wiki, you are contributing it under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

What's still under development?

As this project is still under active development, there are a few features that are not yet built out:

1. x86 only today ARM support coming soon
2. Compiler optimizations will not work and will likely crash clang, debug builds only
3. Autolayout
4. Storyboard support
5. MapKit
6. AssetsLibrary
7. AddressBook
8. Ads
9. Objective-C annotations
10. Media Capture and Playback

Problems?

If you have any questions, we're listening and will do our best to help. Just go tohttp://stackoverflow.com/ and tag your questions with WinObjC. You can also get more information at our wiki

Directory structure

• bin/ : Various prebuilt tools
• build/ : Projects/solutions to build the SDK
• deps/ : Open source dependencies
  • prebuilt/ : Prebuilt binaries for various architectures
• Frameworks/ : Implementation of iOS-style Frameworks
• include/ : SDK headers (including headers for iOS-style Frameworks)
  • Platform/ : Headers for Windows Objective-C bindings for various OS versions
• msvc/ : Visual Studio integration files
• samples/ : Assorted samples
• tools/ : Source code to tools