"Steps" for iPhone 5S — written in Oxygene

Steps is a small but helpful app, which works exclusively for the new iPhone 5S, because it uses the new M7 chip that Apple has introduced with the 5S to gather motion data and let you know how many steps you are taking each day.

Whether you’re interested in that to keep track of your daily workout, or just want a fun way to explore this cool new feature of your iPhone — Steps is a great way to do it.

On first launch, Steps gathers up to 7 days of previous walking history. That’s right — Steps (or rather, the M7 chip ;) has been hard at work for you even before you bought it! So you have some data to look at immediately.

In addition to showing your daily step count, Steps (new in version 1.1) also aggregates your average daily steps for the past week and month, and it will keep track of what your personal best has been, so far — including encouragement to beat it, when you get close.

Over time, and without you ever having to think about it again, Steps will update to load in more data as you roam about, all the while keeping track of your past history. Eventually, you’ll have months and months of walking data to look at. You don’t need to launch Steps manually for this to happen (although you will want to launch it to have a look once in a while).

And because it uses the new M7 chip, Steps can do all of this without affecting your iPhone’s battery life at all.

It goes without saying that Steps is written 100% in Oxygene for Cocoa. And as with all my previous Oxygene iOS projects, full source code is available on GitHub at github.com/dwarfland/Steps.

So, if you have your iPhone 5S yet, make sure to grab your copy of Steps on the App Store, for only 99c. And if you’re a developer, make sure to check out the code, as well!