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Apple Highlights Apps and Games Updated for iPad Pro

In yesterday’s weekly refresh of the App Store’s front page, Apple launched a new section highlighting apps updated to support the iPad Pro with design optimizations and new features.

Creativity and productivity soar when you pair great apps with iPad Pro. We’ve compiled some of our favorites that take advantage of its expansive Retina display and astounding performance. On iPad Pro, everything from drawing to multitasking to watching videos is a stunning experience.

The section is organized in six sub-categories, each grouping apps that have been updated with integrations for specific iPad Pro and iOS 9 features, such as ‘Enhanced for Apple Pencil’, ‘Powerful Multitasking’, or ‘Desktop-Class Apps’. Featured apps include well-known names such as Evernote, 1Password, Slack, and OmniGroup apps, but also apps from smaller indie studio like Numerics (which takes advantage of the Pencil in an interesting way), LiquidText, Curator, and Workflow.

With the exception of Apple Pencil, apps featured by Apple in this section don’t have access to iOS features that are exclusive to the iPad Pro, and they’re not iPad Pro-only apps. Instead, Apple is highlighting apps that optimize for the iPad Pro’s hardware and bigger screen to augment existing iOS 9 functionalities. Thanks to the 12.9-inch display, multitasking on the iPad Pro is more powerful than its counterpart on the iPad Air 2; with the four speaker audio system, video apps can be more immersive.

In a separate section, Apple is also highlighting games for iPad Pro – which include titles like The Room Three, Broken Age, and Geometry Wars 3. You can find the section here.

“Why the iPad Pro Needs Xcode”→

Steve Streza, writing on the state of some iPad apps and developers stretching their iPhone UIs for the big screen:

App developers don’t feel this pain as much, because they’re not living on iPad. For 8+ hours a day, they’re stuck using Xcode on a Mac. They aren’t living and breathing the idioms and design patterns of great iPad apps. Instead they’re stuck on Macs, usually sitting on desks with mice or trackpads, using a very underpowered and unwieldy iPad simulator, to build apps you touch with your hands on the couch.

Xcode running directly on the iPad Pro could fix many of those problems. You now have a tablet powerful enough to run an IDE, with a very nice keyboard cover, and a screen big enough to encompass all the functionality of Xcode, capable of testing almost every feature of every iOS device ever made. You can code with your keyboard and test with multitouch. You could work on a desk and take your whole development environment with you on the couch, bed, or plane.

I couldn’t agree more with all the points mentioned by Steve, especially about the potential benefits in education. As I wrote yesterday, the iPad Pro’s hardware demands to be used by new kinds of apps. This includes Apple.

Fortunately, I want to believe there’s some hope here. Over the past few months, I’ve personally heard about an iPad Pro version of Xcode in early stages, being demoed internally at Apple. I don’t know if this will ever actually happen, but it sure would make for a nice surprise at WWDC next year.

My fingers are crossed.

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Castro for iPhone Goes Free, Adopts Patronage Model

Supertop is releasing Castro 1.5 today, and, in preparation for a major Castro 2.0 update scheduled in a few months, they are making the app free with a patronage model.

From the Supertop blog:

If you like Castro, please consider becoming a patron by contributing $1/month. You will support the work of a small indie app studio in a way that the standard App Store model never can. Yesterday, Supertop needed an endless stream of thousands of new customers to sustain our business. From today, we can be successful with a far smaller number of much happier customers. We can offer better support. We can add new features more often, instead of holding them back for splashy major releases. In other words, we can do the things that indies do best.

The patronage options are 3, 6 or 12 month bundles that don’t auto-renew. We know that this model will only work out for us if you love the app enough to voluntarily choose to pay, so there will be no sales-y notifications or nag screens. Castro 1.5 adds a small note at the bottom of the two main screens and a button in settings to invite users to become patrons.

With this model, the entire app has gone free – no features have to be purchased separately, and patronage is tastefully advertised at the bottom of the main podcast list. There are no annoying alerts or nagging prompts to sign up.

In addition to patronage, Castro 1.5 has been updated with 3D Touch support, Safari View Controller, and Spotlight search. The latter is a nice addition as a lot of podcast apps don’t support it, but I wish Castro could also index titles of links from show notes (at least it doesn’t for Relay FM shows ). As you can imagine, Safari View Controller for in-app web views is pretty great in a podcast client.

Like with Overcast and other patronage-based products, I hope that users who love and depend upon Castro will consider signing up. Making money on today’s App Store isn’t easy for an indie studio, and we need to support developers who try something different to remain sustainable thanks to their audience. I hope this works out and I’m curious to see what Supertop does with Castro 2.0.

Castro 1.5 is available on the App Store.

Alive Is a Full-Featured Live Photo Manager and Exporting Tool

As I’ve written before, I love Live Photos. They can capture the fleeting nature of a moment like nothing else can, and the integration with the well-known Camera UI is seamless. Unless I’m taking product shots for reviews, I always keep Live Photos enabled.

Apple doesn’t provide a lot of options to manage and export Live Photos from the Photos app, which is why third-party developers have stepped up to the challenge with dozens of utilities to export Live Photos as GIFs, clean up their videos, and more.

Alive, developed by Clean Shaven Apps (Dispatch, Due, Clips), is a new full-featured solution that combines management functionalities with handy exporting and stitching tools for Live Photos and traditional videos.

Read more

‘The Start of Something New’→

Great piece by Ben Bajarin on the iPad Pro, with an important section in the middle on the mobile generation (which is often unaccounted for in a lot of product reviews):

There is truly something happening with this generation growing up spending the bulk, if not all, of their computing time using mobile operating systems and doing new things with new tools. Being the techie that I am, I was a bit disheartened that my twelve-year-old was getting more out of the iPad Pro and pushing it further limits than I was. But she is a part of the mobile generation after all. For them, the future will look quite different and the tools they use to make that future might look quite similar to the iPad Pro.

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Disney Infinity for Apple TV Offers Nimbus Controller Bundle→

Sarah E. Needleman, reporting for The Wall Street Journal on Disney Infinity 3.0 for Apple TV:

The Apple TV version of Infinity 3.0 includes the pad and the usual figurines but also a wireless controller called Nimbus designed specifically for Apple’s device. It features buttons and analog control sticks that gamers are familiar with, as well as Apple’s Lightning connector. It’s made by SteelSeries, a 14-year-old company that specializes in gear for competitive gamers. The controller also works with games played on iPads and iPhones.

On its own, the Nimbus sells for roughly $50 in Apple’s retail stores. When bought as part of Infinity 3.0, it basically comes at a $15 discount. (The Apple TV version of Infinity 3.0 costs about $100; the console versions run for about $65.)

Obviously, Disney can afford to physically bundle the controller inside the game because it comes with figurines to collect and use. But if I were SteelSeries, I’d be seriously looking at more of these partnerships and discounts for high-profile games coming to tvOS – whether they have a physical counterpart or not.

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Sideloading f.lux on iOS→

I know quite a few people who, upon setting up a Mac for the first time, immediately set up f.lux on it. f.lux is a free utility that changes the color of your computer’s display to adapt to the time of the day, so it’s warmer and easier on the eyes at night. I was never able to get into it (maybe because I didn’t have the patience), but many people trust it as it’s made their OS X experience better for years.

The f.lux team has built an iOS version of the app – unfortunately, they can’t release it publicly due to App Store restrictions. So, they’ve come up with a beta version that anyone can install with a free developer account and Xcode on the Mac:

Xcode 7, you can install apps directly to your iOS device with a free account from Apple. So we decided to make a beta version of f.lux for people to try.

It’s a few more steps than installing the app store, but there are plenty of harder things even on Pinterest. So, here’s how to get f.lux installed on your iOS device.

Obviously, by sideloading an app like this, you’re installing an app outside of the controlled App Store environment at your own discretion:

By loading an app this way, there are no automatic updates or bug fixes, so this version does a daily update check. If one is available, a message will appear at the bottom of the app, so you can stay up to date when we make fixes.

I’m not sure I’ll finally try f.lux this time, but it’s fascinating to see how popular this beta has become over the past 24 hours on blogs and Twitter. Imagine if, like on the Mac, Apple provided a framework to distribute and install iOS apps outside of the App Store with some security in place and a UI to manage sideloaded apps. Until a couple of years ago, it seemed obvious that it would eventually happen on iOS too.

Update 11/12

Well, that didn’t take long:

Apple has contacted us to say that the f.lux for iOS download (previously available on this page) is in violation of the Developer Program Agreement, so this method of install is no longer available.

We understood that the new Xcode signing was designed to allow such use, but Apple has indicated that this should not continue.

I assumed this would happen, and I hope we’ll see an open-source mirror on GitHub soon. f.lux has such a positive impact on lots of people (f.lux for desktop has been downloaded over 15 million times), I think Apple should work with the company to bring it to iOS as well – if only from an Accessibility standpoint.

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Connected: The iPad Pro Review→

Federico talks to Myke and Stephen about the iPad Pro.

On this week’s Connected, we prepared a special episode to discuss my iPad Pro review, how I’ve been using the device for the past week, and what we expect from it going forward. It’s a good one. You can listen here.

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