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Posts tagged with "Vision Pro"

Vision Pro App Spotlight: My Favorite Digital Clock Apps for Vision Pro

It's clocks all the way down.

It’s clocks all the way down.

Who would have guessed that the category of visionOS apps I’d obsessively download from the App Store would be…digital clocks?

Hear me out: it’s very easy to lose track of time when using – and especially working with – the Vision Pro. It’s not just that the current time, in the absence of a status bar – is tucked away in Control Center, which requires you to look up and open a separate window; it’s that with this new platform, and with all these new apps, I want to try everything and my brain is reacting to dozens of stimuli every minute. Time flies when I’m wearing the Vision Pro, filling my workspace with windows and juggling multiple tasks, and that’s not even to mention when I’m in an immersive environment.

Which brings me to humankind’s greatest invention: the clock. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could always see a digital representation of the current time as a tiny window somewhere in your workspace? And wouldn’t it be even better if that digital clock had configuration options that, you know, a physical clock on a wall can’t offer?

For the past few days, I’ve been downloading essentially every clock app I could find on the visionOS App Store, and I’ve compiled a list of my favorite options so far.

Let’s dive in.

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Vision Pro App Spotlight: Things for visionOS Is a Familiar, Intuitive Task Management Experience

Things for visionOS, floating in the sky.

Things for visionOS, floating in the sky.

The biggest compliment I can pay to Things for visionOS is that it doesn’t feel like a compromised version of the iPadOS experience at all. In fact, thanks to the spatial nature of multitasking on the Vision Pro, I’d venture to say that Things for visionOS is a better version of the iPad app, at this point second only to its Mac counterpart in terms of functionalities and overall flexibility.

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Screens VNC App Now Available in Compatibility Mode for visionOS→

Just yesterday I was looking for ways to VNC into my gaming PC because I wanted to stream Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth (an amazing game that you should play) on my Vision Pro using my new NDI encoder (I understand this is a very Ticci phrase; more on this topic soon).

Anyway, I went looking for Screens, my favorite VNC client, on the visionOS App Store, and it wasn’t available. I was surprised by its absence, but I just assumed the folks at Edovia were working on some fixes for the app running on the Vision Pro. I downloaded Jump Desktop, which worked pretty well, but I’ve never been a fan of the Jump Desktop UI, and I’d rather use Screens everywhere.

Right on schedule, Screens for iPad has now been made available on visionOS in compatibility mode. This is excellent news since I can now use Screens on all my Apple devices to quickly connect to my PC and Mac mini server; you can also check out how Screens’ trackpad mode works with visionOS’ gesture system in this blog post.

And once again, you should check out Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth if you haven’t yet (I covered it on Unwind and this episode of Into the Aether about it is a great listen too).

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Vision Pro App Spotlight: Parchi Brings Voice-Created Sticky Notes into Your Environment

Parchi is a new visionOS sticky note app by Vidit Bhargava, the maker of the dictionary app LookUp. The app is a straightforward, but handy utility for jotting down a quick note using your voice.

When you start recording, Parchi's record button turns into a big stop button.

When you start recording, Parchi’s record button turns into a big stop button.

When you launch the app, you’re greeted by a bright yellow gradient window with a big record button in the middle. Tap it and start speaking to record a note. Tap again to stop, and your audio recording will transform into a yellow sticky note with your recording transcribed into text. Once created, you can drag notes around your environment, leaving them in places where they will serve as valuable reminders. In the bottom corners of the note are buttons to play back your audio and delete the note.

The All Parchi view.

The All Parchi view.

You can also access all of your notes from the app’s main UI by switching from the ‘Parchi Recorder’ view to ‘All Parchis,’ which displays each of your notes as a horizontally scrolling collection. The ‘All Parchis’ view also includes a search field for finding particular notes in a large collection.

Leave notes where they make the most sense within your environment.

Leave notes where they make the most sense within your environment.

I love Parchi’s simplicity and ease of use, but I’d like to see it expanded a little too. The smallest size note is still somewhat large. It would be great if I could shrink them even further with the text transforming into a play button when there isn’t enough room to display it. I’d also like to see Siri and Shortcuts support added to make it possible to create a note without first opening the app. Finally, a copy button would make Parchi a better complement to task managers and other apps by allowing text to be moved to other apps as needed.

Overall, though, I’ve really enjoyed using Parchi. It’s the kind of quick interaction I appreciate when I’ve got something on my mind that I want to jot down without interrupting the flow of whatever else I’m doing.

Parchi is available on the App Store for $2.99.

Vision Pro App Spotlight: Shortcut Buttons Turns Your Shortcuts into Spatial Launchers

Shortcut Buttons for visionOS.

Shortcut Buttons for visionOS.

I received my Apple Vision Pro yesterday (for the full story of how it eventually found its way to Italy, you don’t want to miss the next episode of AppStories), and, as you can imagine, I’ve been busy downloading all the apps, learning my way around visionOS and – just today – using the extended Mac display mode. The first 24 hours with a Vision Pro are a whirlwind of curiosity and genuine nerd excitement, but despite my attention being pulled to a hundred different places, I’ve found the time to test one app in particular: Shortcut Buttons by Finn Voorhees.

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The Best Way to Take Screenshots on Apple Vision Pro

Taking good-looking screenshots on the Apple Vision Pro isn’t easy, but it’s not impossible either. I’ve already spent many hours taking screenshots on the device, and I thought I’d share my experience and some practical tips for getting the best screenshots possible.

Although I’ve only had the Apple Vision Pro for a week, I’ve already spent a lot of time thinking about and refining my screenshot workflow out of necessity. That’s because after I spent around three hours writing my first visionOS app review of CARROT Weather and Mercury Weather, I spent at least as much time trying to get the screenshots I wanted. If that had been a review of the iOS versions of those apps, the same number of screenshots would have taken less than a half hour. That’s a problem because I simply don’t have that much time to devote to screenshots.

Taking screenshots with the Apple Vision Pro is difficult because of the way the device works. Like other headsets, the Apple Vision Pro uses something called foveated rendering, a technique that’s used to reduce the computing power needed to display the headset’s images. In practical terms, the technique means that the only part of the device’s view that is in focus is where you’re looking. The focal point changes as your eyes move, so you don’t notice that part of the view is blurry. In fact, this is how the human eye works, so as long as the eye tracking is good, which it is on the Apple Vision Pro, the experience is good too.

However, as well as foveated rendering works for using the Apple Vision Pro, it’s terrible for screenshots. You can take a quick screenshot by pressing the top button and Digital Crown, but you’ll immediately see that everything except where you were looking when you took the screen-grab is out of focus. That’s fine for sharing a quick image with a friend, but if you want something suitable for publishing, it’s not a good option.

Fortunately, Apple thought of this, and there’s a solution, but it involves using Xcode and another developer tool. Of course, using Xcode to take screenshots is a little like using Logic Pro to record voice memos, except there are plenty of simple apps for recording voice memos, whereas Xcode is currently your only choice for taking crisp screenshots on the Vision Pro. So until there’s another option, it pays to learn your way around these developer tools to get the highest quality screenshots as efficiently as possible.

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The Apple Vision Pro Developer Strap→

Jeff Benjamin writing for 9to5Mac has a comprehensive breakdown on what the Apple Vision Pro Developer Strap can and can’t do. One of the primary benefits for developers is capturing video. As Benjamin writes:

The Developer Strap also lets developers capture a direct video feed from Apple Vision Pro via a wired USB-C connection using Reality Composer Pro. Files transfers of the captured feed occur via the direct USB-C connection. Users without the strap can still capture these feeds but via Wi-Fi only.

Benjamin also explains how to use the strap to access Recovery Mode:

You can also restore visionOS using Recovery Mode via the wired connection made possible by the Developer Strap. This includes downgrading from visionOS beta releases.

My experience is in line with Benjamin’s. The Developer Strap may make capturing short videos and screenshots easier, but it can’t do much else.

I will add, however, that I was contacted by a MacStories reader who tipped me off to one other thing the Developer Strap can do, which is act as a video source for QuickTime. This works a lot like capturing screenshots and video from an Apple TV via QuickTime, and the advantage is that you can capture more than the 60-second cap imposed by Reality Composer Pro. That’s great, except that the capture is foveated, meaning that the video recorded will be blurry everywhere except where you’re looking.

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Vision Pro App Spotlight: Juno

Leading up to the release of Apple Vision Pro, there was as much, or perhaps more, talk about which apps wouldn’t be on the platform on day one as there was about which would. To be sure, there are some very notable holes in the Vision Pro’s catalog, and one of the biggest is YouTube. However, as we’ll see over and over with the Vision Pro apps we’ll be covering at MacStories, the gap isn’t nearly as bad as you’d think, thanks to developers like Christian Selig, the former maker of the Reddit client Apollo and his brand new app, Juno.

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