Issue 559

Comment

Did you see Apple announce door detection and other iOS 16 feature previews for Global Accessibility Awareness Day a few days ago? Don’t you love living in the future? I know I do. 🥰

Of course, Apple didn’t say it, but as impressive as door detection is on a phone/tablet, it transforms into a life-changing one inside AR glasses.

It set me thinking on a topic I haven’t written about before or even seen get much public discussion. How will apps in an AR operating system share the field of view?

The first, somewhat obvious way is via a notification system. We’ve seen this with Google Glass and other projects, and it’s safe to say this will be a feature of any AR software platform.

But what about apps that want to composite information over the top of your field of view? That needs to be a completely different model than we have with iOS-based devices. It makes no sense for an app to be able to cover the entire field of view and no sense for apps to be “brought to the front” in the same way that you interact with apps on iOS. Imagine if you had to launch a DoorDetector app before it would start monitoring, especially if you were following AR directions with the Maps app to find the building with the door.

So, background processing of sensor data will be critical, but how many apps will be allowed to process simultaneously, and how on earth would you deal with the privacy implications of needing to inform users of what apps are watching what sensors?

Then, let’s think about how those apps get to draw into the field of view. Again, there is so much potential for chaos. How many apps can draw simultaneously? How much of the field of view is each app allowed to cover? If multiple apps are drawing, does the operating system need to monitor the total coverage? I could list mind-blowingly complex problems that Apple would need to overcome for days!

Also, everything I’ve talked about here is software-related and doesn’t even consider that every time a sensor gets monitored drains power from a battery that can only be so big when attached to your head!

On one hand, I love these problems as I’ve never had to consider anything like this before, and that’s exciting. On the other, the downside is that these problems are so challenging that it’s likely that the first several iterations of anything that ships to the public will likely approach third party apps exceptionally cautiously. I expect plenty of Apple-only entitlements and slow progress for third-party apps in the first few years.

My gut feeling still says that this is not the year for a big AR announcement, and I still don’t see any signs of them being interested in VR, despite plenty of rumours. The most likely exception is for the VR/mixed-reality product is a developer kit, but I still don’t buy it.

Maybe something in 2023?

News

Update to subscription notifications

It's been about six weeks since Apple confirmed the existence of a pilot programme for in-app subscription prices to increase automatically, and here's the news on how it will work. There are restrictions on how much you can raise subscriptions before an explicit opt-in is needed, and it's only available in some territories. Of course, scammy developers will be pushing at every opportunity to increase, increase, increase, so I'd expect tweaks to the finer details over time.

The SwiftUI Series

Do you want to improve your SwiftUI skills? Are you at a loose end next week? If so, this (virtual) event organised by Jordi Bruin might be just what you need. There's a different theme every day, so you're sure to learn something whether you jump in for just one or attend throughout the week! It's all free, too. What a fun idea.

Tools

Beginner's guide to Swift package manager command plugins

The plugin system introduced with the 5.6 release of SwiftPM is powerful. You may have seen it powering DocC documentation generation, but did you know it could do much, much more than that? Tibor Bödecs has a good write up to get you started.

Editing Swift Packages in Visual Studio Code

If you had told me five years ago that in 2022, writing Swift in a JavaScript-based text editor from Microsoft called Visual Studio would be a great experience, I wouldn't have believed you, but here we are! This post from Tim Condon goes through a couple of things you'll need to know about the vscode-swift extension and ends up with a multi-package workspace.

Code

Running games in the browser with SwiftWasm

It's been about six months since I last wrote about SwiftWasm, so it's about time to check in on how it's doing. Luckily, Kyle Newsome has written about using it to write his entry for this year's Toronto Game Jam! It's worth a read.

Don't ignore QuickLook

Here's Jordan Morgan with some great advice not to ignore the Quicklook framework! I knew it could view all kinds of file types that you might not expect, but I didn't know about this delegate method either!

Encode and Decode SwiftUI Color

Don’t you wish SwiftUI’s Color was codable? Natalia Panferova does, too, and decided to write all about it. Her post doesn’t skimp, either. It’s a comprehensive look at all the issues you might encounter when dealing with this problem.

Spiral

All you need in addition to this package from Alexey Bukhtin is a reason to use it!

Videos

Sydney CocoaHeads Accessibility Spectacular

Talking of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, Sydney Cocoaheads put on what was effectively a mini-conference with four fantastic talks! First up, a lightning talk from Chris Kolbu & Tony Arnold, then Bas Broek, Rob Whitaker, and Sommer Panage. Amazing!

Why I Finally Got into ASO as an Indie Developer

Two video links in one week? What's going on here? I couldn't let this interview between Ariel Michaeli and Ryan McLeod on promoting his Blackbox game. He talks about various things that initially stopped him from working on ASO before eventually experimenting and finding success.

And finally...

What platform should you write your next game for?

Issue 559 May 20th 2022