Notes from the workshop — app launches, dev diaries, and lessons learned along the way.
When I first started programming a decade ago, I had to focus. And I was focused on mobile. Thing is, if you want to make an app, the app stores from Google and Apple require an external website for t...
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Finally. Passage goes 3D Our app has let you enjoy immersive environments in a few ways: 1. Check out the artist-made 360 images that we’ve licensed. 1. Upload your own 360 image, up to 16k 1.
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Let’s say this up front: making apps on the Apple Vision Pro is not a gold rush. I am not retired, nor are the folks I’ve partnered with on this fun journey of making cool apps on a really cool platfo...
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This was a risky move, but so far, it’s a good one. Our app Passage has a feature where you can create immersive environments in the form of AI-generated, 360 images.
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Wild, free-ranging skepticism. That was my first reaction when someone suggested I put ads in our Vision Pro app, Passage. They had made an ad network on Vision Pro, built from the ground up.
Read moreA top use of the Vision Pro is to get in the zone and focus on work. It’s for those moments when you have a solid hour or two of uninterrupted time, so you throw on your headphones and hunker down.
Read moreGood writing requires good reading. I recently launched Ember Glow. I wrote a bit about the app overall here, but there was one challenge that was a bit tricky to solve.
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This app will not generate groundbreaking art. But you might. The writing tool - which you can get here - helps people write incredible fiction.
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I’ve made my share of writing apps, and apps for writers. I’ve been a professional writer myself. In development, I’ve dealt plenty with UITextView, back before SwiftUI.
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Update: After this post was written, Apple wrote their own example and tutorial to make a skybox and fully 3D environment like the system environments.
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Let’s take a moment to slow down from bullet train speed of neural nets in Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and Dalle-2 churning out art, and the neural nets from the ChatGPT Bing-ularity.
Read moreI outlined here why I had ethical issues about making an iOS app with Stable Diffusion, the machine learning system that creates images with a text prompt.
Read moreThe app was approved in the App Store. It had gotten through app review. I had more than 900 beta testers in the public beta.
Read moreThere is one thing you kind of got to have as an option when you’re making a utility app with generated data: to-dos, recipes, notes, etc.
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I figured out how to make in-app purchases work when making apps with Swift Playgrounds on iPad, and I wanted to share with you, not only the basics, but also the ability to make the code testable on ...
Read moreI didn’t know entirely what I was getting myself into by making an app on the iPad. I went in aware of its limitations and tried to think of a little something I could make for myself that would be us...
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Happy Swift Playgrounds day! If you haven’t heard, you can now write apps on your iPad. It’s very full featured, but one thing that you might need to do a little extra work on is persistence.
Read moreA video showing pearl creation in action. This app started in the middle of the pandemic. I wanted to remember something good. And something true.
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Alright, I saw the inclusion of photogrammetry in the developer documentation early on and I was hyped! Photogrammetry is where you take pictures of an object from all kinds of angles and then stitch ...
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Summary We’ve reached the end, and to summarize, here is a little git log. And they’re all written as haiku. Five syllables, then seven syllables, then five syllables. Let’s summarize each one.
Read moreHere it is, the final feature. We’ve already overcome in the native competition with our adding and removal of pages and making the process of capturing a PDF more efficient.
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In my post about making a really cool aurora background I had a section on adjusting for accessibility. I’ve since reconsidered what I wrote and wanted to share more about what I’ve learned.
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It’s time. I’ve teased this challenger for two blog posts now, and i't’s time to reveal who it is. And it is… THE FILES APP! Yep, there is a handy button in the Files app that will let you use the sam...
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Lately I’ve been working on my well-being app Pearl. I’m going through a redesign with the help of my friends Joel and Jillian at Return Technologies! And I was interested in making a beautiful gradie...
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Alright, we’ve got a nice, useful little app for PDFs so far. Now let’s add some nice features that can put it at parity with what the Notes app can do with PDFs, now that we’ve made capturing the PDF...
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Alright, as promised, time to do some fun things. Let’s add the document scanner! First things first. I’m going to create my ScannerView.
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Last time, we left off with a cliff hanger. What was wrong with our PDF editing? Answer: our changes didn’t persist. The fileWrapper function that saves the app never got called. Hmmm.
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What I want to make is a simple PDF capture app. Lately with tax season, I'm uploading tons of docs, and I think I can offer something new.
Read moreHere we go :)
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