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MacStories Unwind: So, I Was Thinking About the iPad Pro…→

This week on MacStories Unwind, Federico proposes an iPad Pro experiment and he and I both recommend Steam Early Access games, one of which is also on iOS.

This episode is sponsored by:

  • Kolide – It ensures that if a device isn’t secure it can’t access your apps. It’s Device Trust for Okta. Watch the demo now.

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Magic Rays of Light: The Big Cigar, Palm Royale, and Apple’s Theatrical Strategy→

This week on Magic Rays of Light, Sigmund and Devon discuss Apple’s evolving theatrical film strategy, highlight the debut of The Big Cigar, and recap Palm Royale.

Show Notes

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Devon Dundee | Follow Devon on Mastodon or Threads

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Assassin’s Creed Shadows Is Coming to the Mac Day and Date with Consoles and Other Platforms

Source: Ubisoft.

Source: Ubisoft.

Today, Ubisoft announced that the next major release in the Assasin’s Creed franchise, Shadows, will be released on November 15th on its Ubisoft+ service, PlayStation 5, Xbox X|S, Amazon Luna, and Apple silicon Macs via the Mac App Store. According to Ubisoft:

Assassin’s Creed Shadows will immerse players in 16th century Japan. The country is heading towards a brutal path to unification, where unrest grows as new coalitions appear and corruptive foreign influences infiltrate the land.

The standard version of the game will cost $69.99 and can be pre-ordered on the Mac App Store now. Ubisoft also offers Collector’s and Ultimate editions of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, but neither variant will be sold through the App Store.

Still, the release of a major studio game for a popular franchise on the Mac App Store simultaneously with consoles and other services is notable. Many of the AAA titles that have found their way to the Mac App Store, like Death Stranding and the Resident Evil 4 remake were released on other platforms months before the Mac App Store. Perhaps the growing install base of Apple silicon Macs has begun to change the economics of big studio game releases in favor of the Mac.

Regardless of the reason, it’s good to see Assassin’s Creed Shadows coming to the Mac this fall. The release is still months away, but in the meantime, if you need an Assassin’s Creed fix on Apple platforms, Assassin’s Creed Mirage is set to launch on the iPhone and iPad on June 6th and can be pre-ordered on the App Store now.

Emulator-palooza

PPSSPP.

PPSSPP.

It’s been a big week for for emulators on iOS and iPadOS. It seems like yesterday when I was writing about Delta and being told ‘authoritatively’ online that it wouldn’t last. Yet here we are.

Last weekend, Gamma, a Sony PS1 emulator, was released. The emulator quickly appeared in the top free charts on the App Store, where Delta continues to hold steady in the top 25.

Then today, at roughly the exact same time two more well-known emulators made their debut on the App Store: PPSSPP and RetroArch. PPSSPP is a Sony PSP emulator, while RetroArch supports emulator cores for a wide variety of classic consoles.

I was out picking up my new iPad Pro when I got a heads up that both emulators were out from Brendon Bigley, who has covered both emulators on Wavelengths.

The PPSSPP release was announced by Henrik Rydgård on the emulator’s blog:

After nearly 12 years, PPSSPP has finally been approved for the iOS App Store! Thanks to Apple for relaxing their policies, allowing retro games console emulators on the store.

There are a few limitations to PPSSPP’s first App Store release compared to previous non-App Store versions:

  • Vulkan support through MoltenVK is not yet enabled
  • Magic Keyboard (iPad Keyboard) is not supported
  • The JIT recompiler is not supported
  • RetroAchievements is temporarily disabled

However, Rydgård says MoltenVK, Magic Keyboard Support, and RetoAchievements will all return to the app. JIT can’t be implemented unless Apple changes its stance on the recompiler, but Rydgård says most PSP games should run smoothly on modern hardware.

RetroArch

RetroArch

RetroArch is an even bigger deal in the sense that it contains cores for emulating a long list of classic videogame systems, including PPSSPP itself, along with Nintendo, Sega, Atari, other Sony systems, and more. One downside to RetroArch is that it’s about as non-native as an app like Delta is native, and I greatly prefer Delta’s iOS-centric approach. Still, it’s great to see RetroArch open up so many additional consoles on iOS and iPadOS.

I expect we’ll see even more game emulators on the iPhone and iPad before long, including Provenance, which is currently being beta-tested. I haven’t had a chance to spend time with these latest emulators yet, but I’m looking forward to seeing how they look on my new iPad Pro’s OLED display.

Apple Marks Global Accessibility Awareness Day with a Preview of OS Features Coming Later This Year

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

Thursday is Global Accessibility Awareness Day, and to mark the occasion, Apple has previewed several new accessibility features coming to its OSes later this year. Although this accessibility preview has become an annual affair, this year’s preview is more packed than most years, with a wide variety of features for navigating UIs, automating tasks, interacting with Siri and CarPlay, enabling live captions in visionOS, and more. Apple hasn’t announced when these features will debut, but if past years are any indication, most should be released in the fall as part of the annual OS release cycle.

Eye Tracking

Often, Apple’s work in one area lends itself to new accessibility features in another. With Eye Tracking in iOS and iPadOS, the connection to the company’s work on visionOS is clear. The feature will allow users to look at UI elements on the iPhone and iPad, and the front-facing camera – combined with a machine learning model – will follow their gaze, moving the selection as what they look at changes. No additional hardware is necessary.

Eye Tracking also works with Dwell, meaning that when a user pauses their gaze on an interface element, it will be clicked. The feature, which requires a one-time calibration setup process, will work with Apple’s apps, as well as third-party apps, on iPhones and iPads with an A12 Bionic chip or newer.

Vocal Shortcuts

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

Vocal Shortcuts provide a way to define custom utterances that launch shortcuts and other tasks. The phrases are defined on-device for maximum privacy using a process similar to Personal Voice. The feature is like triggering shortcuts with Siri, but it doesn’t require an assistant trigger word or phrase.

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AppStories, Episode 383 – The Trouble with iPadOS→

This week on AppStories, we examine iPadOS and the ways it has failed to get the basics right.

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The Trouble with iPadOS

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Ruminate, Episode 184 – The Rhythm of the Newsroom→

This week on Ruminate, snack follow up, a WeblogPoMo progress update, the 100 best albums, and AI on iOS.

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The iPad Pro 2024 Manifesto→

There are so many parts of Steve’s iPad Pro manifesto I would quote here on MacStories, but I’m going to limit myself to just a couple of excerpts.

What I like about this story is that it’s a balanced take on the limitations of iPadOS from the perspective of a developer, laid out in a comprehensive roundup. It serves as a great companion piece to my story, but from a more technical angle.

Here, for instance, is a well-reasoned assessment of why Stage Manager isn’t ideal for developers of iPad apps:

Stage Manager was such a missed opportunity: it tried to bolt-on a windowing model onto iPadOS without providing developers any way to optimize for it, and has had virtually no meaningful improvements in two years. What I really want to see are APIs. APIs to know when an app is running in Stage Manager and give it an opportunity to enable extra functionality to accommodate that — like having an ‘open in New Window’ context menu option that it would otherwise hide. APIs to set window size/shape, minimum and maximum size. APIs to open a window in split view if possible, with a preferred screen side. APIs to drag a window on mouse-down. Auxiliary views or inspector panels that can be floated on/near a primary window, like visionOS’ ornaments.

Many of these features are available as APIs to apps using the iOS SDK… on macOS and visionOS. Which is why it boggles the mind that iPad’s own Stage Manager spec completely shunned them, and ignored the explicit intent provided by developers as to how they want their apps to work. Stage Manager wasn’t provided as an opportunity to make our apps better, it was inflicted on developers in a way that harmed the developer, and user, experience. Which is why today you can very quickly stumble upon apps that don’t quite resize correctly, or have important parts of the UI covered by the virtual keyboard, or toolbars floating in strange places.

To this day, developers have no way to fine-tune their apps so that they behave differently (and better!) when Stage Manager is active. This part about JIT is also worth calling out:

Just-in-time compilation is essential to power things like web browsers, console and PC emulators, and language-based virtual machines. It is used by Apple’s own apps, like Playgrounds, to empower key functionality that no third party app can match. And it is provided in a very limited way (with a ton of asterisks) to Alternative Web Browsers in the EU under the DMA, so they can implement their own JavaScript engines. The DolphiniOS project, which emulates Nintendo’s GameCube, recently posted a video that perfectly encapsulates the problem and demonstrates why emulators for newer consoles just can’t come to iPadOS. Other app stores, like Microsoft’s Windows Store, offer a JIT entitlement as standard, and I think Apple should, too.

It’s not like JIT cannot exist on iPadOS; it’s that Apple has chosen not to offer it as an entitlement for third-party developers.

I also want to point out two more aspects of Steve’s manifesto. It’s almost a 1:1 match of a story he wrote for us in 2019, which is quite sad as it tells you a lot about iPadOS’ state of affairs. Five years later, and we’re still asking for the same changes. Additionally, it should be noted that Steve is not asking for Apple to call it a day and put macOS on iPad. Claiming that someone who criticizes iPadOS does so because “they just want the iPad to turn into a Mac” has become the de rigueur dismissal for some reply guys these days, and it completely misses the point.

I highly recommend reading Steve’s full story here.

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iPad Review Roundup: Cutting Edge Hardware and OS Frustrations

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

Late yesterday, iPad Air and Pro reviews were published, and I spent the evening reading and watching many of them, so I thought I’d share some highlights.

At Six Colors, Jason Snell, who has used and reviewed iPads for years, brings an excellent perspective to Apple’s latest iPad Pro. Like Federico, Jason is impressed with the iPad Pro’s hardware but frustrated by iPadOS:

This all leaves 2024’s modern iPad Pro in a very familiar place: It is a remarkable piece of hardware that can handle pretty much any task it’s capable of executing without breaking a sweat, and thanks to its new display, it’ll look great doing it. But it’s let down by iPadOS limitations (and more than a decade of slow-paced iPad development) that preclude it from being the shining star of Apple’s productivity line-up that it should probably be.

Also, like other reviewers, the iPad Pro’s new OLED screen was a highlight for Jason:

As a longtime user of the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, I’ve been spoiled the last few years by its Liquid Retina XDR display. It was good, but it added weight and thickness, and even its 2500 individual dimming zones couldn’t match the precision that an OLED display can bring. Apple has outdone itself with the new Ultra Retina XDR display, powered by a tandem OLED panel that offers dramatic contrasts and bright colors.

David Pierce strikes a similar note at The Verge:

This new iPad Pro feels, in many ways, like the finale of the 14-year history of the iPad, all the pieces finally in place. It also feels, as ever, like a futuristic device plagued by software stuck firmly in the past, one I’m not sure I’d recommend to most people.

I do love it, though.

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