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Posts tagged with "developer tools"

Apple Publishes Updated Human Interface Guidelines for visionOS→

In addition to releasing the visionOS SDK and developer tools today, Apple has updated its Human Interface Guidelines and published additional visionOS documentation for developers. The updated HIG begins with an overview of designing for the Apple Vision Pro, covering topics like Passthrough, Spatial Audio, Focus and Gestures, Ergonomics, and Accessibility, advising developers to:

Embrace the unique features of Apple Vision Pro. Take advantage of space, Spatial Audio, and immersion to bring life to your experiences, while integrating passthrough, focus, and gestures in ways that feel at home on the device.

If you’re interested in Apple’s design philosophy for the Vision Pro, the HIG is an excellent plain-English read. For developers who want to dive deeper into the details of building apps, Apple has also published a lot of additional documentation covering the nuts and bolts of building visionOS apps.

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Apple Releases visionOS SDK and Developer Tools

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

Today, Apple announced the visionOS software development kit that will allow developers to start creating apps for the Apple Vision Pro. In addition to the SDK, an update to Xcode is introducing Reality Composer Pro, which lets developers preview 3D models, animations, images, and sounds. There’s also a new visionOS simulator that can be used to test different room configurations and lighting for visionOS apps.

The developer labs that Apple announced at WWDC will open soon too:

Next month, Apple will open developer labs in Cupertino, London, Munich, Shanghai, Singapore, and Tokyo to provide developers with hands-on experience to test their apps on Apple Vision Pro hardware and get support from Apple engineers.

Developers can also apply for an Apple Vision Pro developer kit, so they can test apps on the device itself. Anyone who has used Unity’s tools to build 3D apps and games will be able to port them to visionOS next month too.

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

Among the developers who have tried the visionOS SDK is Algoriddim, whose CEO, Karim Morsey, said:

The djay app on Apple Vision Pro puts a fully featured DJ system right at a user’s fingertips. With a reimagined spatial interface, anyone can mix their favorite music and apply real-time effects using just their eyes and hands. Whether for a beginner or a seasoned professional, djay on Vision Pro transforms the user’s surroundings with stunning environments that automatically react to their mix, enabling them to experience and interact with music in ways never before possible.

It’s great to see Apple getting these tools into the hands of developers so soon after WWDC. Building apps for Apple Vision Pro uses many of the same technologies and tools developers are already familiar with, like Xcode, SwiftUI, RealityKit, ARKit, and TestFlight. However, with excitement for Apple Vision Pro still high, now is the perfect time to get the new visionOS SDK and tools in developers’ hands as they plan for the device’s release next year.

Apple Releases Developer Tools to Facilitate Porting Videogames to the Mac→

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

During the WWDC keynote, Apple showed off Game Mode for the Mac, which gives a game priority over a Mac’s CPU and GPU resources. Apple has also reduced the latency of AirPods used while gaming and doubled the sampling rate for connected Bluetooth controllers.

Game Mode promises to improve the overall experience of gaming on the Mac, but it’s not all that was announced at WWDC. Apple has also announced a series of developer tools designed to make it easier to port games to the Mac from other platforms.

Among those tools is a Game Porting Toolkit, which Tom Warren of The Verge says is:

 similar to the work Valve has done with Proton and the Steam Deck. It’s powered by source code from CrossOver, a Wine-based solution for running Windows games on macOS. Apple’s tool will instantly translate Windows games to run on macOS, allowing developers to launch an unmodified version of a Windows game on a Mac and see how well it runs before fully porting a game.

The Game Porting Toolkit is meant as a way for developers to quickly see how much work needs to be done to port their games to the Mac, but that hasn’t stopped gamers with developer accounts from downloading the tool and taking everything from Cyberpunk 2077 to Diablo IV for a spin on the Mac according to Warren.

Along with a tool to convert shaders and graphics code to Apple’s Metal framework, The Game Porting Toolkit and other announcements at WWDC mark a concerted effort by Apple to expand the catalog of games available to Mac users. Whether game developers will take advantage of these tools and bring their games to the Mac remains to be seen, but recent announcements that Stray and Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding, Director’s Cut are coming to the Mac are both good signs.

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TestFlight’s Inability to Handle Large Beta Collections Needs to Be Fixed

I’ve been thinking about app scalability a lot lately – most recently in the context of TestFlight, which I find is incredibly frustrating to use, at best, and, on the Mac, often unusable. This isn’t a new problem for me, but I haven’t mentioned it much in the past because I’ve suspected that my experience is colored by the fact that I’m an outlier. But, outlier or not, the app deserves more attention than it’s been given.

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WorldWideWeb: A Simple Web Server Utility for Mac, iPad, and iPhone

Early today The Iconfactory released their latest app, a simple web server utility called WorldWideWeb. Solidly developer-focused in scope, the app serves files from a local directory to an automatically generated URL, making these files available to any device on your local network. While there are sure to be more inventive use cases for such a utility, its general purpose is for testing simple websites built on the Web’s greatest primitive: HTML.

WorldWideWeb’s killer feature is simplicity. The app’s entire main interface consists of two tiny sections: in the first you select a folder, and in the second you start or stop the web server. When the server is activated, a URL is generated. The app uses Bonjour to make the address available to any device on the same Wi-Fi network as the host. Just copy and paste the URL or press the ‘Open in Browser’ button to view the website natively in a web browser.

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Logger Is the Missing Console for Shortcuts Power Users

Logger for Shortcuts.

Logger for Shortcuts.

Indie developer Alex Hay has long pushed the boundaries of what third-party developers can build with the SiriKit framework and Shortcuts integrations on Apple platforms.

In late 2019, his Toolbox Pro app redefined what it means to complement Apple’s Shortcuts app with additional actions, creating an entirely new sub-genre of headless utilities designed to provide additional actions with configurable parameters. Recently, Hay introduced Nautomate, another utility that provides users with Shortcuts actions to integrate with the Notion API without having to write a single line of code. And today, Hay is launching Logger, another Shortcuts-compatible app that is similar to his previous ones, but with a twist: rather than adding actions for external services or apps such as Apple Music and Notion, Logger offers actions to create the troubleshooting console that has always been missing from Shortcuts.

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Steve Troughton-Smith on Mac Catalyst’s Shortcomings→

Steve Troughton-Smith has spent a lot of time with Mac Catalyst, developing Mac versions of Broadcasts and Pastel, as well as an extensive library of sample code for other developers. As Troughton-Smith explains in a post on his website, Mac Catalyst has come a long way since it first appeared as part of macOS Mojave. However, there remains plenty of room for improvement to allow a wider range of apps to feel at home on the Mac.

Troughton-Smith’s detailed list of problem areas include:

  • Extensive problems with the document-based apps are supported
  • Limitations in the way Preference windows are supported
  • The lack of support for menu bar extras and apps
  • The difficulty of working with Mac-style Table and Collection Views
  • Issues with the extent and way toolbars, window controls, inspector panels, window dragging, scaling primitives, upgrade cycles, and backward compatibility are handled

As I read through Troughton-Smith’s detailed explanation of the issues, I immediately thought of many of the Mac apps I’ve tried in the past couple of years that would benefit if Apple implemented his suggestions.

Based on Troughton-Smith’s extensive list, you might expect that he’s pessimistic about Mac Catalyst’s future, which isn’t the case:

Mac Catalyst is in a great place; it has improved substantially every year since its introduction, and for most developers it is by far the best way to build great Mac-like Universal apps that run across iPhone, iPad and Mac. Its hybrid nature allows a developer to pick and choose which elements of UIKit, SwiftUI, and AppKit they need to achieve the experience they’re looking for, or combine them all for the best of both worlds. It clearly has a lot of traction inside Apple’s product teams, as it’s become the enabling technology for Messages, Maps, Podcasts, Find My, Playgrounds, Books, Voice Memos, Stocks, Home, and News. Paired with SwiftUI, it’s rapidly becoming the defacto standard for new Mac apps on the App Store, for better or for worse — all the more reason that the remaining rough edges be given priority.

I wholeheartedly agree with this assessment. Mac Catalyst has come a long way in a short time and has already become the default starting point for many developers, judging from the large number of Mac Catalyst apps developers have shared with me in the last year or so. However, as Troughton-Smith makes clear, there are still trouble spots that are preventing or slowing down Mac Catalyst’s adoption in important app categories, which is why a focus on Mac Catalyst is on my macOS wish list for WWDC again this year.

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MacStories Developer Debrief: WWDC 2021

We kicked off the MacStories Summer OS Preview Series on AppStories a couple of weeks ago with interviews of four 2021 Apple Design Award winners. We’ll also publish a series of in-depth first-looks at what users can expect this fall from iOS and iPadOS 15, macOS Monterey, and watchOS 8. We’ll also be interviewing developers on AppStories, exploring the technical details that we expect will have the biggest impact on upcoming app updates and releases. You can follow along with the series through our dedicated hub or subscribe to its RSS feed.

Today, we wanted to continue the conversations that began with the AppStories ADA interviews by talking to seven more developers about a wide range of topics. Now that the initial excitement has passed and the dust settled from WWDC, we wanted to hear more from the developers who will be using Apple’s latest technologies to bring readers new apps and innovative updates to readers this fall.

This year, we spoke to:

The following is a collection of the responses from each of the developers I interviewed on a wide range of topics from new frameworks and APIs to Shortcuts on the Mac, the ability to publish apps built on the iPad, SharePlay, SwiftUI, Swift concurrency, and more. Thanks so much to everyone for sharing their insights on these topics with MacStories readers. We greatly appreciate everyone taking time out of their busy post-WWDC schedules to participate.

I received fantastic, thoughtful responses from all of the developers I interviewed, which resulted in more material than I could use for this story. However, we’ll be featuring unabridged versions of the interviews in the next two issues of MacStories Weekly. It’s an excellent way to get an even deeper sense of the ramifications of this year’s WWDC announcements. If you’re not already a member, you can learn more at club.macstories.net or sign up below.

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A First Look at the Apple Developer App’s New Design and Search Functionality

Shortly after announcing WWDC will be held online again this year from June 7 - 11, Apple released a significant update to its Developer app, which serves as a hub for news and watching WWDC sessions.

The sidebar of Developer is now easier to navigate. On the iPhone and iPad, content categories, such as Design, Frameworks, and Graphics and Games, can now be collapsed, greatly reducing the amount of vertical scrolling when browsing news and sessions. The iPhone and iPad versions of the app use a more compact, tile-based layout for the Discover tab, which allows for more items to be featured too. The design works well on the smaller screen of the iPhone, but where it really shines is on the iPad and Mac’s larger screens.

The old Discover tab (left) and the updated version (right).

The old Discover tab (left) and the updated version (right).

The iPad app’s tab bar has also been eliminated, moving what was previously there into the sidebar. Combined with the collapsible sidebar sections, the app is both easier to navigate and has more room for content on the iPad than ever before.

Search results are better organized than before.

Search results are better organized than before.

The update also includes a dedicated Search tab. Instead of a vertical list of results in the sidebar, the results are displayed in the app’s main view organized by videos, articles, and news, showing top results with the ability to ‘See all’ if more results than can fit onscreen are available. I used Developer’s search functionality a lot last year and looking at the results pulled from last year’s WWDC, I can already tell it will be easier to find the videos I want. Also, ‘Favorites’ have been replaced by ‘Bookmarks,’ although the functionality of the two appears to be the same in my limited testing.

The Developer app has always been a useful companion app for WWDC, but with the event being remote last year and again this year, it has taken on greater importance as one of the primary ways developers access sessions and news about Apple’s frameworks. Although I haven’t spent a lot of time with the app yet, it’s clear that a lot of thought went into adapting it to fit in with Apple’s modern iPad and Mac design vision and providing a better experience when sifting through the deep catalog of videos and other content that is available to developers.