NowPlaying by Hidde van der Ploeg has come a long way since its start. It’s always been an excellent companion to Apple Music, packed with music discovery features that fill a big gap in Apple’s system app. But, with the visionOS version, van der Ploeg has taken NowPlaying to a new level. visionOS allows users of the app to spread out, focus on the music, and absorb the rich catalog of metadata and editorial content about their music in a beautiful, relaxing atmosphere.
Posts tagged with "visionOS"
Vision Pro App Spotlight: NowPlaying
Vision Pro App Spotlight: Day Ahead
Day Ahead is an interesting approach to visualizing the events on your calendar. It’s a visionOS-only app that uses what looks like a transparent tube filled with drops of colored liquid that represent the events of your day. It’s strange, but I think there’s something to it that we’ll be seeing from other visionOS developers as they explore the unique characteristics of the Apple Vision Pro.
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.
Vision Pro App Spotlight: CARROT Weather and Mercury Weather
We’re going to be covering a lot of visionOS apps over the coming weeks, so I thought a fitting place to start would be with two of our favorite weather apps from other Apple platforms: CARROT Weather and Mercury Weather. Both apps are past MacStories Selects award winners. CARROT Weather won the Best Watch app in 2020 and the Readers’ Choice award in 2022, and we named Mercury Weather the Best Design winner of 2023. So, I expect a lot of readers are already familiar with both apps. However, if you’re not, be sure to check out these past stories for more on what makes them two of our favorite weather apps on the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch:
- Recent CARROT Weather Coverage:
- CARROT Weather 5.9: A Robot Relationship and Layouts - Recent Mercury Weather Coverage:
So today, my focus is solely on the visionOS versions of both apps, which fill the gap left by Apple’s curious omission of its own Weather app from Vision Pro.
Apple Publishes Vision Pro User Guide and Support Documentation
Apple has created a comprehensive Vision Pro user guide and accompanying support documentation that was published late last week. I’ve spent some time browsing through the user guide, and it’s full of excellent tips to help get people started with the new device. Each section of the guide links to related support documents, which go into more depth about the topics covered. I’ve pinned the page in Safari as I continue to explore everything the Apple Vision Pro can do.
Another page worth bookmarking is a story by Joe Rossignol and Aaron Perris of MacRumors, who compiled a long list of what they describe as ‘nearly all’ of the support documents listed in the Vision Pro user guide. You’ll come across links to these documents in the user guide itself, but if you want to go deeper on a topic and bypass the user guide, MacRumors’ story is a great place to start.
On Vision Pro’s Spatial Computing→
There’s no tech commentator better equipped to talk about the history of spatial interfaces in Apple operating systems than John Siracusa, and I enjoyed his latest, thought-provoking column on where visionOS and the Vision Pro’s gesture system fit in the spatial computing world:
Where Vision Pro may stumble is in its interface to the deep, spatial world it provides. We all know how to reach out and “directly manipulate” objects in the real world, but that’s not what Vision Pro asks us to do. Instead, Vision Pro requires us to first look at the thing we want to manipulate, and then perform an “indirect” gesture with our hands to operate on it.
Is this look-then-gesture interaction any different than using a mouse to “indirectly” manipulate a pointer? Does it leverage our innate spatial abilities to the same extent? Time will tell. But I feel comfortable saying that, in some ways, this kind of Vision Pro interaction is less “direct” than the iPhone’s touch interface, where we see a thing on a screen and then literally place our fingers on it. Will there be any interaction on the Vision Pro that’s as intuitive, efficient, and satisfying as flick-scrolling on an iPhone screen? It’s a high bar to clear, that’s for sure.
In yesterday’s review on The Verge, Nilay Patel shared a similar idea: it’s a strange feeling to use a computer that requires you to look at what you want to control at all times. I don’t know what to think about this yet since I don’t have a Vision Pro, but I’m curious to learn how this interaction method will scale over time as we start using this new platform on a daily basis. It’s quite fitting, however, that visionOS is based on the one Apple platform that supports both kinds of manipulation with a pointer and touch.
What Reviewers Have Learned about Apple Vision Pro
By the time most Apple hardware is released, we usually know every minute detail of the specs and have a pretty good idea of what using it will be like. That hasn’t been the case with the Apple Vision Pro. Apple conducted multiple waves of demos in the months since WWDC 2023, but those were tightly controlled and limited. Today, however, we’re seeing the first hardware reviews from a range of media outlets and YouTubers who have had a chance to spend about a week testing the device.
There are some excellent reviews that are well worth reading in full, but I thought I’d highlight some of the most interesting tidbits that were either unknown or unclear before now to help give readers a better sense of what this hardware is all about.
The Vision Pro’s Most Important App Is Safari→
Interesting perspective by David Pierce, writing for The Verge, on how, for the time being, Vision Pro users may have to use Safari to access popular services more than they anticipated:
But what if you don’t need the App Store to reach Apple users anymore? All this corporate infighting has the potential to completely change the way we use our devices, starting with the Vision Pro. It’s not like you can’t use Spotify on the headset; it’s just that instead of tapping a Spotify app icon, you’ll have to go to Spotify.com. Same for YouTube, Netflix, and every other web app that opts not to build something native for the Vision Pro. And for gamers, whether you want to use Xbox Game Pass or just play Fortnite, you’ll also need a browser. Over the last decade or so, we’ve all stopped opening websites and started tapping app icons, but the age of the URL might be coming back.
If you believe the open web is a good thing, and that developers should spend more time on their web apps and less on their native ones, this is a big win for the future of the internet. (Disclosure: I believe all these things.) The problem is, it’s happening after nearly two decades of mobile platforms systematically downgrading and ignoring their browsing experience. You can create homescreen bookmarks, which are just shortcuts to web apps, but those web apps don’t have the same access to offline modes, cross-app collaboration, or some of your phone’s other built-in features. After all this time, you still can’t easily run browser extensions on mobile Safari or mobile Chrome. Apple also makes it maddeningly complicated just to stay logged in to the services you use on the web across different apps. Mobile platforms treat browsers like webpage viewers, not app platforms, and it shows.
As we saw when we surveyed the state of apps already submitted to the visionOS App Store, more companies than we expected have – for now – decided not to offer their apps on the Vision Pro, either in the form of native visionOS apps or iPad apps running in compatibility mode.
I think that “for now” is key here: if visionOS proves to be a successful platform in the long term (and early sales numbers for the Vision Pro seem encouraging), most companies won’t be able to afford ignoring it. And why would they? If the users are there, why shouldn’t they provide those users with a better app experience?
This idea is predicated upon the assumption that native apps still offer a superior app experience compared to their web counterparts. The tide has been turning over the past few years. Workflows that would have been unthinkable in a web browser until a few years ago (such as design and collaboration) can now live in a browser; the most popular AI service in the world is literally a website; the resurgence of browsers (with Arc arguably leading the space) proves that a new generation of users (who likely grew up with Chromebooks in school) doesn’t mind working inside a browser.
With this context in mind, I think Apple should continue improving Safari and extend its capabilities on visionOS. My understanding is that, in visionOS 1.0, Safari cannot save PWAs to the user’s Home Screen; I wouldn’t be surprised if that feature gets added before visionOS 2.0.
New Apple Vision Pro Hands-On Accounts From Engadget and The Verge
Today’s announcement by Apple about the entertainment aspects of the Vision Pro was followed up by new hands-on stories from Engadget and The Verge. A lot of what they saw was similar to the WWDC demos, but there were some new highlights, including additional Environments, a beta of the Disney+ app, Apple’s Encounter Dinosaurs app, and the Vision Pro’s floating keyboard.
One of the big open questions about the Apple Vision Pro is how well its virtual keyboard works. Interestingly, Engadget’s Cherlynn Low and Dana Wollman had very different experiences with it:
Cherlynn: It’s not as easy as typing on an actual keyboard would be, but I was quite tickled by the fact that it worked. Kudos to Apple’s eye- and hand-tracking systems, because they were able to detect what I was looking at or aiming for most of the time. My main issue with the keyboard was that it felt a little too far away and I needed to stretch if I wanted to press the buttons myself….
Dana: This was one of the more frustrating aspects of the demo for me. Although there were several typing options – hunting and pecking with your fingers, using eye control to select keys, or just using Siri – none of them felt adequate for anything resembling extended use. It took several tries for me to even spell Engadget correctly in the Safari demo.
Engadget’s editors were also impressed with the Disney+ Avengers and Star Wars-themed environments.
The Verge’s Victoria Song and Editor-in-Chief Nilay Patel also spent some time with the Apple Vision Pro. According to Song’s story:
Nilay had shot some spatial videos where he’d intentionally moved the camera to follow his kid around the zoo and felt some familiar VR motion queasiness. Apple says it’s doing everything it can to reduce that, but it’s clear some shots will work better in spatial than others — like any other camera system, really.
Song describes the experience of seeing EyeSight demoed, too:
So we got to see a demo of EyeSight — what an onlooker would see on that front display when looking at someone wearing the Vision Pro. It’s a bit goofy, but you can see the wearer’s eyes, part of what Apple calls a “persona.” (We were not able to set up our own personas, sadly.) When Apple’s Vision Pro demo person blinked, we saw a virtual version of their eyes blink. When they were looking at an app, a bluish light appeared to indicate their attention was elsewhere. And when they went into a full virtual environment, the screen turned into an opaque shimmer. If you started talking to them while they were watching a movie, their virtual ghost eyes would appear before you. And when they took a spatial photo, you’d see the screen flash like a shutter.
What’s clear is that it’s one thing to read about these experiences with the Vision Pro and a completely different thing to live them. After reading several accounts, I still don’t know what to expect myself, except in the broadest sense. That’s both a little frustrating but also very exciting.