One of the big projects I’ve been working on is StepTracker, an iOS fitness application which uses the M7 motion coprocessor in the iPhone 5S to display your daily step count. The reason this project is so exciting to me is the new technology in the iPhone 5S makes it not only easier to make this type of app, but more practical. On previous iPhones you would have had to monitor the accelerometer in real time and process that data into individual steps. Now with the iPhone 5S and the new APIs Apple has given us, the step counting is automatically done for me on the M7 chip. The M7 uses practically no additional power (it is always doing it’s calculations even if you don’t have a fitness app installed) and therefore your phone can act as a sort of “FitBit” type device without additional battery drain. And yet there was no built-in way to use this new functionality on the new iPhone. So the day I got my 5S I started writing this app.

Below are some screenshots and a quick demo of what the current version of this app (1.2) looks like. It’s currently awaiting Apple’s approval as of 10/13/13, so the app store version does not have all of these features but it is close.

I’ve got some really cool stuff planned for the next update, so stay tuned.