iPhone XR Hands-On Videos Offer Best Look Yet at Apple’s Latest Flagship

By Ryan Christoffel

Today a variety of YouTube videos have been published featuring hands-on looks at the iPhone XR, which becomes available for pre-order tomorrow and ships Friday, October 26th. We’ve embedded several of the best videos below.

One common message across multiple videos is that the iPhone XR doesn’t feel at all like a budget phone. Despite its similarities, this isn’t the iPhone 5C all over again; instead, the iPhone XR feels very much like a premium device, just at a much lower cost than the iPhone XS and XS Max.

Project Gemini Is a New iPad Illustration App Coming from Adobe →

Linked By Ryan Christoffel

Along with details about the forthcoming Photoshop for iPad, Adobe has announced another brand new iPad app coming soon, dubbed Project Gemini:

Today we announced Project Gemini—a focused new app focused specifically on drawing and painting. Building on Photoshop’s powerful brush engine, this new app combines powerful Photoshop brushes, precise and scalable vector brushes, and an entirely new category of groundbreaking Live oil and watercolor brushes – you’ve never seen anything like them. In addition, layers, selections, and masks enable the most modern non-destructive drawing and editing workflows.

Most importantly, though, we’ve built Project Gemini with the illustration community.

Kyle Webster, of KyleBrush.com, joined Adobe in 2017 to help build Gemini and act as an ambassador and advocate for the illustration community. Along with Kyle, a group of illustrators with diverse styles and backgrounds have been working closely with us to help Gemini achieve its potential.

According to the announcement post, the genesis of this new app was advancements in hardware that enabled Adobe’s team to build more powerful tools than were previously possible. They highlight “selection and masking tools, combined raster and vector drawing capabilities” as some examples.

I’m not in the target market for this app, but I’m excited to see Adobe continue to rethink how modern iPads can enable more powerful, yet accessible app experiences than before.

If you’d like to join the Gemini beta when it begins, Adobe has a short survey available for interested testers.

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The State of Gaming on the Apple TV →

Linked By Ryan Christoffel

Samuel Axon of Ars Technica published an article over the weekend about the state of gaming on Apple TV, inspired by the recent demise of Minecraft on the platform. In it he shares quotes from notable iOS and tvOS game developers about Apple’s problems with the Apple TV as a gaming platform.

On the subject of Minecraft, Team Alto developer Ryan Cash said:

“If I were in charge of the game…I think I’d really try to stay there. While the platform certainly isn’t the biggest, it continues to grow, and it’s a great way for certain types of audiences to experience gaming, often for their first time.”

Strange Flavour’s CEO Aaron Fothergill expressed similar sentiments, highlighting how easy it is to port a game from iOS to tvOS. He did, however, share one common request for the platform:

“I…like the idea of game controllers (ideally Apple ones) being bundled with the Apple TV as an actual Apple option. So there’s an Apple TV being sold specifically for games.”

Finally, developer Patrick Hogan shared three things he believes Apple should do:

Include an Apple-branded, full-featured controller with every Apple TV.

Market the Apple TV as a gaming platform.

“Spend a lot of money on funding platform exclusives, ports, and presence at every major gaming expo and conference to break the chicken-egg problem of getting customers to make it viable to devs.”

Gaming is clearly an area where Apple could have more success if it wanted to. Producing a controller to bundle with the Apple TV, even if it were just included with certain SKUs of the device, wouldn’t be that difficult for the company. Clearly it’s just something that the execs in Cupertino don’t want to pursue at this time.

It could be challenging bridging the gap between the touch-first games of iOS and potential controller-first titles on the Apple TV, but if Nintendo can walk that line successfully with the Switch, I don’t doubt that Apple could do the same. Until such a strategy shift takes place though, Apple TV gaming is likely to remain stuck in mediocrity.

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Adobe Unveils Photoshop for iPad, Launching in 2019

By Ryan Christoffel

Earlier this year Adobe confirmed that it was working on a full-featured version of Photoshop for the iPad, but no real details on the product were given. Today that changed, however, as the app’s official announcement arrived alongside the kickoff of Adobe’s MAX conference.

Photoshop for iPad won’t arrive until some time in 2019, but when it does launch it will differ drastically from Adobe’s current lineup of Photoshop-related iOS apps. Rather than focusing on an individual subset of desktop features, like Adobe’s existing Photoshop Fix, Express, and Mix do, the aim with this forthcoming app is to provide the full desktop Photoshop experience on an iPad.

As part of its iPad efforts, Adobe has brought the same underlying codebase of Photoshop for desktop to iOS, and it has also worked to modernize PSD files for the cloud. These new Cloud PSDs will be the default file format on the new iPad app, offering a seamless file experience across multiple devices. Adobe’s chief product officer, Scott Belsky, told The Verge:

“Cloud PSDs, when we ship Photoshop on the iPad, will also run and automatically show up on your desktop…Suddenly, you’ll have this cloud-powered roundtrip experience akin to a Google Docs experience, where literally the source of truth of your Photoshop creation is in the cloud.”

Cloud PSDs will eliminate the need for importing or exporting files, removing a major friction point that currently stands in the way of working with Adobe’s apps on the iPad. With Creative Cloud’s automatic syncing of all files, you should be able to pick up editing on any device at any time without needing to do a thing.

When manual importing or exporting does make sense to your workflow, those options will still be available in Photoshop for iPad. The app will support file providers like iCloud Drive, Dropbox, and more. Based on the preview version of the app, it appears to support Files.app’s document providers, and I’m hopeful that iOS 11’s drag and drop features will be supported as another option for importing and exporting.

The Verge was granted a week of hands-on time with Photoshop for iPad, and has a great video that demonstrates the app in action. It appears very similar to Photoshop on desktop, with some adaptations made for OS differences like iOS’s lack of a menu bar. There are sure to be touch-optimized improvements offered too though, such as a gesture the video highlights where you can tap with two fingers on the screen to undo.

Though Adobe’s goal is full feature parity between desktop and iPad versions of Photoshop, the 1.0 release of Photoshop on iPad will lack certain features that will be added over time with future updates. That full list of missing features is unavailable at this time, but we’re sure to learn more as the launch approaches.

Photoshop for iPad will be available free to all Creative Cloud subscribers, but there’s no word currently on whether a standalone purchase or iPad-only subscription will be possible. It would be a strong vote of confidence in iPad-first users to make the app available for non-CC subscribers, but based on Adobe’s history that appears unlikely.

Today’s announcement highlights what an exciting time it is to be an iPad user. With new iPad Pro models expected to be announced in the coming weeks, and a reported focus on significant iPad features coming in iOS 13, there’s no time like the present for the full power of Photoshop to make its way to Apple’s tablet.

Genius Enters New Partnership with Apple Music →

Linked By Ryan Christoffel

Today Genius, the online music encyclopedia, shared word of a new partnership it has formed with Apple – more specifically, with Apple Music. From the company’s announcement post:

Starting today, Apple Music subscribers who visit Genius will be able to play any song in full right from the song page, simply by signing into their Apple Music account.

Genius is a great place to find historical information about a song, so the ability to play any track without leaving Genius makes for a great user experience. Embedded Apple Music tracks is only one half of this partnership though. Even if you’ve never used Genius, you’re bound to benefit from this agreement because of a second piece of news. The announcement post continues:

Genius has the world’s best lyrics database and now it’s available on Apple Music. Genius will provide lyrics to thousands of hit songs on the service—bringing world-class accuracy and timeliness powered by Genius’s global community of artists and fans.

It’s unclear at this time whether the addition of Genius lyrics to Apple Music will bring lyrics to songs that previously didn’t have any, or simply more accurate lyrics to songs that already have them. Hopefully both benefits are in store for Apple Music users.

In the first couple years of Apple Music’s life, the service didn’t strike very many partnerships with third-party businesses. That appears to be changing this year, with the recently completed acquisition of Shazam, free service offers for Verizon wireless customers, and now Genius integrations, Apple is extending its service in new ways to better compete with Spotify.

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Halide Introduces Smart RAW for iPhone XS, Joining a Host of Other Improvements

By Ryan Christoffel

Since its debut Halide has been one of the best manual camera apps available on iPhone. The month of September brought a number of challenges to Halide’s team though, thanks to all the photography work Apple put into iOS 12 and the iPhone XS. And in response, within the span of a few weeks Halide has receive two major updates: version 1.9 on iOS 12’s release date, and releasing today is version 1.10 featuring Smart RAW.

Daily Dictionary’s New Watch App Showcases the Latest watchOS Capabilities

By Ryan Christoffel

Developer Benjamin Mayo released an update this week to his new word of the day app, Daily Dictionary. Version 1.2 adds an Apple Watch app, making it easy and convenient to view each day’s featured word from your wrist.

Daily Dictionary’s Watch app is particularly noteworthy due to its complications for the Series 4’s Infograph faces, and its custom UI for notifications. For complications, you can use a smaller option containing the app’s logo which serves as a launcher, or you can select a larger complication that includes the logo alongside the word of the day itself. If you’d like it to, the larger complication can also display the current date, saving you the need for a separate date complication elsewhere on the face.

One of the ways Daily Dictionary can provide its featured word each day is through a push notification, and if you have the new Watch app installed, you’ll get to see a custom notification UI that reflects the design of the full iOS app. Watch developers can take advantage of APIs that enable crafting more customizable notification interfaces, and Daily Dictionary is a great example of that. Now that the Apple Watch is becoming a more mainstream product, and since one of the Watch’s chief strengths is as a notification conduit, I hope we see lots of apps follow Daily Dictionary’s example in providing more creative Watch notifications.

Daily Dictionary is available on the App Store.

Apple’s Watch Face Problem →

Linked By Ryan Christoffel

Jason Snell today published the article I’ve been itching to write, outlining the current mess that is Apple’s watch face ecosystem. The Apple Watch in so many ways is in its best position ever, which makes the lack of coherence in Apple’s watch face strategy particularly surprising.

As Apple continues to create new watch faces at a regular clip, those faces have grown more and more fragmented in what they can do. The Siri face introduced last year was an interesting new direction for watch faces, yet it remains one of a kind in many ways. The Series 4 Watch’s Infograph faces come with a whole new set of complications, all of which are wonderful except that they don’t work on other faces, nor do older complications work on the new faces. This lack of compatibility is frustrating enough, but what may be even more vexing is that Apple itself hasn’t even provided new complications for all of its apps, only some of them – I’d love a Podcasts complication on my Infograph face, but it simply doesn’t exist.

Snell offers up a handful of suggestions for where Apple should focus its watch face efforts going forward, all of which earn my total agreement. He writes:

Every face needs to be modernized and support the new complication styles, at least on Series 4. Key system apps and features like Messages and cellular status should be available on all faces. Every face design should be more flexible.

And moving forward, Apple should allow developers even more power in building complications. Complications should be able to appear when they have something to say and disappear when they don’t—for example, I’d love for a Timer complication to appear when I’m running a timer, but the rest of the time I’d rather not see it. If complications truly are the best face of Apple Watch apps, the developers of those apps need more power to build good ones.

Every one of these ideas is entirely reasonable, and would go a long way toward fixing the current watch face mess. I know we just got watchOS 5, but I hope watch faces are a strong area of focus for Apple in next year’s watchOS 6.

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An In-Depth Explanation of Computational Photography on the iPhone XS →

Linked By Ryan Christoffel

Outside of Apple employees, one of the people most knowledgeable about the iPhone’s camera is Sebastiaan de With, designer of the manual camera app Halide. It is fitting, then, that Sebastiaan would publish what I believe is the best explanation of the iPhone XS camera system to date. Following up on a piece he wrote about the new camera’s hardware changes, the subject of today’s article is software – specifically, all the work of computational photography on the iPhone XS and XS Max.

The piece starts with an explanation of the iPhone’s new Smart HDR feature, then details the exact reasons why selfies on the new iPhones appear to employ skin smoothing (a theory he soundly debunks). Finally, Sebastiaan details the problem that the XS camera poses for RAW camera apps like Halide, and shares about the forthcoming solution Halide’s team came up with: something they call Smart RAW.

There are too many excellent, informative tidbits to quote here, so I highly recommend you check out the article in full. This year’s iPhones are so full of interesting changes to the way the camera works, most of which are undocumented by Apple – as Sebastiaan says, it is “a whole new camera” in many ways.

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