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Show HN: Heart Rate Zones Plus – The first iOS app I developed

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21–30 of 97 posts

Re: Show HN: Heart Rate Zones Plus – The first iOS app I developed

#21
post #19

Can an iPhone app figure out your blood pressure (with sufficient reliability)?

... if you connect a blood pressure monitor, yes.

This app isn't figuring out your heart rate with just the phone's hardware. It is displaying heart rate data from Apple Fitness, which comes from heart rate sensor data (e.g. the one on an Apple Watch)

Re: Show HN: Heart Rate Zones Plus – The first iOS app I developed

#22
I would prefer an adaptive approach where the user also enters perceived difficulty and the app learns the correlation between heart rate and perceived difficulty to figure out the zones. I consistently have high heart rate during exercise: a normal walk might get my heart rate to 130, and a moderate run (10:30/mile) might get my heart rate to 180. A very fast run gets my heart rate to 215 (this is beyond the max measurement of the Apple Watch which is 210bpm; I had to use a Garmin HRM to get this measurement). I don't really trust the zones information iOS calculates by default, and it seems like I also can't trust the zones in this app. Switching to the Karvonen method makes the numbers look believable, but I'm not sure where the intensity comes from.

Re: Show HN: Heart Rate Zones Plus – The first iOS app I developed

#23
post #19

Can an iPhone app figure out your blood pressure (with sufficient reliability)?

Not now, but future Apple Watches are rumored to track blood pressure through analysis of pulse transit time: https://www.empirical.health/blog/apple-watch-blood-pressure...

Re: Show HN: Heart Rate Zones Plus – The first iOS app I developed

#24

I like this visualization! I'm not doing a kind of training these days where it would be useful for me, but I wish I'd known about something like it when I was. Do you support Apple watch? I never actually targeted that or owned one (I like a much more stylish smartwatch!) and thus don't immediately know how to spot that integration on an App Store detail page, hence the need to ask. But I get the sense a lot of folk…

The Apple watch Workout app has a heart zone view while you're working out, but I don't think it has a workaround summary of how much time you spent in each zone.

Re: Show HN: Heart Rate Zones Plus – The first iOS app I developed

#26
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seriously doubt Apple will casually abandon HealthKit. They are not Google, and I'm sure the contracts underpinning MFi and similar marks for major partners have savagely punitive terms that would enable those partners to recover in any such case.

Not what I was referring to, hope this clarifies but apple seems willing to change the API which would require dev time to implement, ie this isn’t a project you can stick on the app store and ignore, it will require continuous effort and cash to keep there and compatible. As an individual developer is the owner of the app and code I just want to know if the app will still exist in a year and be functional, otherwise…

Okay, all granted, but now that we agree you keep all your data which is safe, we only need discuss how no other than totally trivial project I think can really be "[stuck] on the app store and [ignored]," not for more than a couple years. Anything with meaningful platform integration would impose the same requirement, not to mention the $100 pa vig and time investment required just to show up at the party. In 2025, for something whose basic concept is obvious and the differentiator is polish, I don't see this as a tremendously reasonable showstopper the way you're treating it, even for a first time dev.

"Assume good faith" and that. Fair to ask, but show the courtesy due an equal at least until it is evident that is unwarranted. This engineer has done work demonstrating they are at least my equal and I am not prepared to treat them otherwise only because I have not seen them do so before. The 32/64 bit and Intel/Arm transitions should be enough warning for anyone and lie well within living memory.

Someone may cavil over "polish," I suppose. I have a 5-quart 'Artisan' Kitchen-Aid stand mixer in lavender, because that nicely sets off my kitchen decor and because I impose light enough duty on that machine to make aesthetics a reasonable figure of merit. This app is not that kind of machine. Who cares what color the cover plates are, when the target audience will never run the machine with them installed anyway?

(And unless there exists a design patent, why worry about a case where, at worst, you already know what market you need your product to fit?)

Re: Show HN: Heart Rate Zones Plus – The first iOS app I developed

#28

Congrats on the launch! I really would have thought it’s already part of the iOS built in apps! You mentioned it’s your first app. Did you vibe code your way through it or did you heavily use AI? I played around with Swift SwiftUI and I felt that AI helped me a lot in contrast to my day to day job, humongous code base, I can’t get AI to get those mythical 100x productivity gains, more like 0.37x, but for new projects…

Okay, admittedly I'm somewhat of a greybeard by this point... However... I thought that vibe coding was .... exactly heavily using AI... I know this not the place; but what exactly is your definition of 'vibe coding' since you've used it with such confidence in your comment perhaps you can enlighten this programmer..

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Heart Rate Zones Plus – The first iOS app I developed

#29
post #24

I like this visualization! I'm not doing a kind of training these days where it would be useful for me, but I wish I'd known about something like it when I was. Do you support Apple watch? I never actually targeted that or owned one (I like a much more stylish smartwatch!) and thus don't immediately know how to spot that integration on an App Store detail page, hence the need to ask. But I get the sense a lot of folk…

The Apple watch Workout app has a heart zone view while you're working out, but I don't think it has a workaround summary of how much time you spent in each zone.

That gets pushed to the Fitness app on iOS. It breaks down the entire workout.

Re: Show HN: Heart Rate Zones Plus – The first iOS app I developed

#30
post #29
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Apple watch Workout app has a heart zone view while you're working out, but I don't think it has a workaround summary of how much time you spent in each zone.

That gets pushed to the Fitness app on iOS. It breaks down the entire workout.

But unfortunately Fitness and Health don’t summarize HR zone data across workouts
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