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Posts tagged with "visionOS"

Sharing a Vision Pro with Someone Else Is Too Hard

Adi Robertson writes for The Verge about the Vision Pro’s lackluster support for multiple users and how hard it is to share the device with someone else:

The Vision Pro is $3,499 and only one person in your household can ever use it fully, which makes no sense at all. The privacy issues are technically there on the Vision Pro — letting anyone else use it without setting restrictions in guest mode grants them access to everything you’ve got on the headset, including your messages. But as my experience demonstrates, they may not even be able to use it well enough to get that far. You can start a guest session by holding the Vision Pro’s left-side hardware button for four seconds, but you can’t store a second user’s information so they can log in quickly next time without calibration. Basically, imagine if every time you passed an iPad to somebody else in your family, they had to spend a minute poking colored dots.

The worst part of using the Vision Pro for the past two weeks has been trying to get someone else in my family to use it. As a novel type of computer that almost demands to be tried by different people in your life, the lack of multi-user support at launch is a major cause of friction for me right now. I’ve been able to get a separate set of light seal and cushion for Silvia and my mom, but the problem is visionOS. There is a guest mode, but every time someone other than me wants to try the Vision Pro, they have to do the eye setup process from scratch. It gets annoying quickly without the ability to save calibrated presets for other people.

In the demos I’ve conducted for people in my family over the past week, I’ve also realized how hard it is to guide someone else through visionOS for the first time. I wish Apple had built a dedicated “demo app” for new users who try the Vision Pro – sort of like a pre-installed (and interactive) version of Apple’s guided tour, which is also very similar to the demo I had at WWDC last year.

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Vision Pro App Spotlight: HomeUI Enables Spatial Control over HomeKit Lights, Switches, and Outlets

The Apple Vision Pro doesn’t have a native version of the company’s Home app. You can launch the iPad version in compatibility mode, which I’m glad is available, but that means it doesn’t offer any spatial computing features beyond a window floating in your environment. Fortunately, HomeUI by Rob Owen fills the gap with a native visionOS app focused on lights, electrical outlets, and switches.

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Vision Pro App Spotlight: My Favorite Ways to Take a Quick Note

One of the advantages of working with the Vision Pro is the flexibility of using your surroundings to spread out. Your entire room becomes your workspace, and if you’re in an Environment, your workable space expands even further. That makes it easier to keep a note-taking app open at all times than on any other device. In turn, that makes having an app to quickly jot down your thoughts all the more useful.

There are already quite a few interesting note-taking apps on the App Store, so I wanted to highlight a handful I like, each of which has something unique to offer.

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Apple Spotlights 12 Spatial Computing Games Available on the Vision Pro along with More Than 250 Other Games That Can Be Played on the Device

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

Apple announced that its Arcade game subscription service includes a dozen titles designed for spatial computing, along with over 250 total that are playable on the Apple Vision Pro.

Alex Rofman, Apple’s senior director of Apple Arcade, said in a press release that:

This is just the beginning of a new era in gaming, with players being fully immersed in stunning game worlds and interacting with games in their physical environment in amazing new ways. We’re leading the way in offering players unique spatial games on Apple Arcade that are only possible on Apple Vision Pro, and we’re excited to bring even more magical spatial gaming experiences to our customers soon.

Synth Riders. Source: Apple.

Synth Riders. Source: Apple.

The 12 spatial titles available to Apple Arcade subscribers include:

Alto's Odyssey is coming to the Apple Vision Pro. Source: Apple.

Alto’s Odyssey is coming to the Apple Vision Pro. Source: Apple.

Although it’s a short list of spatial titles compared to the entire Arcade catalog, Apple says more are coming soon, including:

I’ve played a little LEGO Builder’s Journey so far and it’s a lot of fun as a spatial experience, and I’ll be digging into more of these titles for a story on the site soon.


Juno 1.1 for visionOS Adds the Ability to Open YouTube.com URLs in the App

Opening videos in Juno from the YouTube website.

Opening videos in Juno from the YouTube website.

John covered Juno, Christian Selig’s new YouTube client for visionOS, on MacStories last week, and I’ve been using the app for the past few days as my default way of watching YouTube videos on my Vision Pro. Today, Selig released version 1.1 of Juno with some welcome quality-of-life enhancements such as the ability to choose video quality, faster load times, and support for dropping YouTube links in the app to watch them directly in Juno. You can read more about the changes on Selig’s blog.

The one new feature I want to call out here is the addition of URL schemes which have, once again, come to the rescue to help me navigate the early limitations of a new Apple platform.

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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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