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Job Simulator Devs Say They Feel ‘Vindicated’ By Apple Vision Pro’s Approach To VR

Henry Stockdale, of UploadVR is at the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco this week and interviewed Andrew Eiche, the CEO of Owlchemy Labs, creators of Job Simulator and other VR games:

Asked about the studio’s hand tracking focus and how Apple Vision Pro uses hand tracking as its primary control method, Eiche believes Apple’s system feels like “huge vindication” for Owlchemy’s strategy.

Eiche told Stockdale:

We had this similar pinch gesture in our previous hand tracking demo without knowing what Apple was going to do at all, so it’s great to see that we’ve all coalesced around this one interaction.

When we first tried the Apple Vision Pro, we were like, ‘yes!’ This is like what we have been hoping for in many cases. Making an app on a headset is difficult right now on every headset because you have to start from scratch. With Apple, you can use Swift UI. You can use all of these different tools to build an app to get the base layer. And then you add everything on top of it and it’s interesting. So yeah, it felt like a huge vindication.

Job Simulator first launched on Sony’s PlayStation VR in 2016, so it’s interesting to hear that its veteran VR development team independently arrived at a similar interaction scheme as Apple’s Vision Pro designers and engineers.

In addition to Job Simulator, Owlchemy Labs announced last month that it is also working on bringing Vacation Simulator to the Vision Pro.

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Apple Has Built a New Home for ‘Manuals, Specs, and Downloads’

Apple has consolidated documentation for its products, including manuals, technical specifications, and downloads on a new webpage that was first discovered by the Japanese-language website Mac Otakara and reported on this morning by MacRumors.

Most of what you’ll find on Apple’s new page was previously published elsewhere, but the new structure of the page is an improvement. It’s simple to drill down by product category to find information on the device for which you need information or use the prominent search field below the product icons. As you may spot from the screenshot above, I’ve not only bookmarked the site, I’ve also addd it to my Safari Favorites bar.

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The App Store’s Updated Purchase History

Matt Birchler discovered a change to the App Store’s Purchase Page that seems to have largely flown under the radar. There are more details on the new page than before, which makes it easier to review past purchases. By default, you’ll see your last 90 days of paid purchases grouped by day. However, you can filter by free and paid, purchase type, and family member who made the purchases. You can also limit results to the last 30 or 90 days, this year, last year, or a custom period, which Matt points out displays, at most, one year of purchases.

A few of my recent purchases.

A few of my recent purchases.

It’s also worth noting that your purchase history is not limited to apps. My purchases go all the way back to 2005, when I started buying music on iTunes. Playing with the filters is like opening a time capsule full of classic media finds and embarrassing ‘What were you thinking?’ purchases.

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Ruminate, Episode 180 – Spoilers for Colin

This week, Ruminate joins MacStories, we follow up on the AI/Arc discussion from episode 179, Tim Berners-Lee’s open letter, Robb explains Colin the Caterpillar, and John dives into Southern food.



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NVIDIA Introduces Remote Scene Rendering for Vision Pro Development

NVIDIA is in the midst of its 2024 GTC AI conference, and among the many posts published by the company yesterday, was a bit of news about the Apple Vision Pro:

Announced today at NVIDIA GTC, a new software framework built on Omniverse Cloud APIs, or application programming interfaces, lets developers easily send their Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD) industrial scenes from their content creation applications to the NVIDIA Graphics Delivery Network (GDN), a global network of graphics-ready data centers that can stream advanced 3D experiences to Apple Vision Pro.

That’s a bit of an NVIDIA word salad, but what they’re saying is that developers will be able to take immersive scenes built using OpenUSD, an open standard for creating 3D scenes, render them remotely, and deliver them to the Apple Vision Pro over Wi-Fi.

What caught my eye about this announcement is the remote rendering and Wi-Fi delivery part. NVIDIA has been using its data centers to deliver high-resolution gaming via its GeForce NOW streaming service. I’ve tried it with the Vision Pro, and it works really well.

NVIDIA says:

The workflow also introduces hybrid rendering, a groundbreaking technique that combines local and remote rendering on the device. Users can render fully interactive experiences in a single application from Apple’s native SwiftUI and Reality Kit with the Omniverse RTX Renderer streaming from GDN.

That means visionOS developers will be able to offload the rendering of an immersive environment to NVIDIA’s servers but add to the scene using SwiftUI and RealityKit frameworks, which Apple and NVIDIA expect will create new opportunities for customers:

“The breakthrough ultra-high-resolution displays of Apple Vision Pro, combined with photorealistic rendering of OpenUSD content streamed from NVIDIA accelerated computing, unlocks an incredible opportunity for the advancement of immersive experiences,” said Mike Rockwell, vice president of the Vision Products Group at Apple. “Spatial computing will redefine how designers and developers build captivating digital content, driving a new era of creativity and engagement.”

“Apple Vision Pro is the first untethered device which allows for enterprise customers to realize their work without compromise,” said Rev Lebaredian, vice president of simulation at NVIDIA. “We look forward to our customers having access to these amazing tools.”

The press release is framed as a technology focused on enterprise users, but given NVIDIA’s importance to the gaming industry, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the new frameworks employed there too. Also notable is the quote from Apple’s Mike Rockwell given the two companies’ historically chilly relationship.

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AppStories, Episode 375 – Why’d You Download That?

This week on AppStories, we take a look at our latest app downloads on a variety of Apple devices.


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Why’d You Download That?


On AppStories+, I cover is attempts to integrate text-to-speech engines with read-later apps.

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Exploring Apple Jing’an

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

Earlier today, Apple announced that its Jing’an store will open in Shanghai on March 21st. Apple’s press release includes several images of the new store, but for more context and an extensive collection of images, you can’t beat Michael Steeber’s Tabletops newsletter.

As Steeber explains:

Apple Jing’an illustrates the idea that good things take time. Years have slipped by since rumors of this store first appeared. Other stores have opened and closed in all corners of the globe, an entirely new retail design language materialized, and the world emerged from the pandemic while Jing’an Temple Square sat dormant. This week, spring arrives. It was worth the wait.

The years that have passed since the Jing’an store project began mean that the underground store is an interesting hybrid of designs found in other landmark stores in recent years. Undoubtedly, the most striking aspect of the new store is that it’s almost entirely subterranean:

It’s only after passing through the portal that the magnitude of the store is revealed. Much deeper and taller than the plaza suggests, entering Apple Jing’an is a bit like discovering a glimmering cavern on a walk around a bluff face. The familiarity of the Apple Retail experience collides with the mystery of a dramatic architectural landmark… underground.

I would love to see this store someday. Elements of its architecture remind me of Apple’s store along the Chicago River, but like all of the company’s flagship retail locations, Jing’an has a unique character all its own.

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MacStories Unwind: A Videogame Doubleheader

This week on MacStories Unwind, spring is in the air, the cicadas are coming, and Federico is teasing a bigger and better MultiButton shortcut. That makes it the perfect time for a videogame doubleheader with Balatro and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.



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Double Brood Invasion Imminent

MultiButton 1.1 and CAPS

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Building Games for Playdate in Swift

Panic’s Playdate has been in the news again recently. The company has caught up with pre-orders, so anyone can order one, and it will ship within 2-3 days. Also, Lucas Pope, the creator of beloved games like Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn just released Mars After Midnight, a game I plan to dig into this weekend. The Playdate catalog is also running its first-ever sale, but there’s just one day left, so check it out today.

Most recently, I saw Panic’s Cabel Sasser link on Threads to a post by Rauhul Varma on the Swift.org blog. The Playdate’s developer SDK supports Lua and C, and as Varma explains, “the typical Swift application and runtime exceed the device’s tight resource constraints.”

However, Varma, who is an engineer in Apple’s Advanced Prototyping in the Platform Architecture group, had an idea for building Playdate games that would fit on the device:

Recently, the Swift project began developing a new embedded language mode to support highly constrained platforms. This mode utilizes generic specialization, inlining, and dead code stripping to produce tiny binaries, while retaining the core features of Swift…

These defining characteristics make the embedded language mode a great solution for shrinking Swift to fit the Playdate’s constraints.

To demonstrate the approach, Varma shares two games built in Swift: Conway’s Game of Life, which is a sample included in the Playdate SDK, and a Breakout-like game called Swift-Break. For developers who are interested in building games for the Playdate using Swift, Varma’s post includes a detailed explanation of the process, and the code and documentation are available on GitHub.

I love this project because it lowers the barrier to getting started for Swift developers who may not be as comfortable or familiar with Lua or C. I hope this leads to even more great releases for Panic’s awesome little handheld game platform.

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