“Diablo IV” is now available for play and the opening video looks much better than it did in the betas …

Looks as if it’s going to be a busy day what with “Diablo IV” and the new Xcode 15 beta and all the stuff from WWDC that needs to be sifted through 🙂

#Gaming #DiabloIV

Watched the WWDC keynote last night and the Apple AR headset (or Vision Pro) is finally here. But …

My first (and most lasting) impression was one of loneliness.

A father watching videos of his kids, but there’s no family around, he’s all alone.

A woman watching movies on a huge screen but she’s sitting all alone in a darkened room.

Even the woman using the headset and having somebody come by seems to be so isolated from everything.

I’m sure this is not what Apple intended, but that’s the lasting impression I got.

I went in hoping that Apple would show something that people could share. Where people can consume entertainment together and just share in the joy of doing things together. But that didn’t seem to be what they were aiming for — at least, not with this iteration.

Given the price tag, and the barriers to entry, I think I’ll stick with the Meta Quest 3 for the time being. At least, it’s one seventh the price of Vision Pro 😛 Maybe in a couple of years, things will be different?

#Apple #VisionPro #AppleHeadset #Meta #Quest #Impressions

@jefframes I’m not sure it actually caters to people who can afford multiple devices either 🙂 I want to write about this in more detail later (just woke up and gathering my thoughts) but the whole demo felt like a lonely experience …

There was nothing about people using the device together — it was all about just consuming stuff all on your own or connecting to remote people.

@jefframes Sorry to hear that 😕 Hope things ease up for you soon so that you can play around with stuff ….

@jefframes I know how you feel to an extent (but my work is generally good about WWDC and they understand that if I want to binge WWDC videos during work hours, that’s part of work 🙂) …

What I generally do is start a weekend project where I can play around with the new stuff and don’t have to worry bout backward compatibility … Of course, my computer is littered with the skeletons of such projects. Only a few make it — even as personal apps that I or my wife use 😛

@glennf @the_other_jon @davemark @HitokiriEric To me personally, the Apple headset would be very useful but I do agree I might be in the niche category for the use case 🙂

I spend most of my day, every day, in front of screens. So I want as large a screen as possible whether it is for work, gaming, or entertainment. The added possibility of being able to have vision correction built-in is a bonus! So I’ve been waiting for these for years (and have been trying most other solutions too …)

Plus, we move/travel a lot and so a tiny form factor device which gives me a huge screen again works for my own use-cases.

The only area that I’m not sure about is shared media/entertainment consumption. My wife and I watch/play everything together. Will Apple cater to this via SharePlay or something similar? Or are we going to be in our own little bubbles even with the Apple headset?

As far as I’m concerned, that would be the factor which decides whether the headset takes off or not.

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@mjgardner LOL. Yeah, I remember when they released SpriteKit and a new renaissance in gaming was expected. But after a couple of years, I don’t know if people even remember SpriteKit …

It did have some cool features (and a lot borrowed from cocos2D) but I don’t think I ever used it …

Maybe this time’s the charm? 😀

@AngelaPreston Yep, you did 🙂 I think we have it on PlayStation haven’t played it yet. Just need to find some time 😛

And on the other side of the fence (from Meta), Apple seems to have suddenly discovered that gaming exists 😛

“No Man’s Sky” released for Mac yesterday and an announcement of “Stray” coming to the Mac next …

Hmm … anybody think that all this might have something to do with the AR headset and a push towards gaming on it in a major way?

#AR #Apple #Gaming #Announcements

So it appears that Meta is taking the as yet un-announced Apple AR headset as serious competition … Announcement of Quest 3 yesterday and a slew of new games for the Quest — and some of them might actually get me to try VR gaming 🙂

I’ve mostly been interested in the work aspect of VR — like having a huge monitor I can code on, but now I might be tempted by “Asgard’s Wrath 2” …

I guess I’ll have to see what Apple has on offer before making a decision? 😛

#AR #Headsets #Meta #Apple #VRGaming

@sids Thank you 🙂 Will take a look …

Given how rich the navigation patterns are in UIKit, I do hope that we get some love this year for navigation. Let’s wait and hope I guess?

@jefframes I’ll just say that I’m curious 🙂 I’ve been waiting for this for years, but I have no idea as to the business side of things. I just hope it works well enough for it to do what I want it to do and that it gains enough marketshare to stay around doing it … 😛

I tried to explain the issues I was having with the current SwiftUI navigation options yesterday, but I don’t think I did a good job 🙂 So here’s a second stab at it …

Basically, my understanding is that the only out-of-the-box way to show new views is to either use a NavigationLink or a sheet. I had a List where I wanted the user clicking on the list cell to take them to one view and the user clicking on a button within the list view to take them to another view. (See screenshot #1). This was fairly easy to do in UIKit.

But when I use NavigationLinks for both items, they automatically add these disclosure indicators and doubles them for two NavigationLinks (yes, I know you can hide them with some jugglery, but you shouldn’t need to do that). Worse still, you still get taken to only one view no matter where you click 😛

Fine, so two NavigationLinks in the same cell won’t work. So let’s try making one of them (the button) show a sheet instead. That should work, right?

And this does indeed work. (See screenshot #2).

So all is well? Well kinda … First, I shouldn’t need to show a sheet when I don’t want to. If I want to push a new view in, then I should be able to do so, right?

But leaving that quibble aside, let’s say I want my cell to have a distinctive look. Like in screenshot #3. But now I have the disclosure indicator outside my content cell. And that really doesn’t look good to me …

Oh, but you can put the NavigationLink and the cell content in a ZStack to control that, you say? Sure, but then things look like screenshot #4 😛 Sure, with some more tweaking I can probably get things working right but shouldn’t this be easier?

Also, do note that you can set the opacity of the NavigationLink to 0 and hide the disclosure indicator altogether and yet have the NavigationLink work. And that’s what I did in my app, but in that app, setting things up this way wouldn’t work for the two separate views. Tapping on the button would launch both the detail view and the other view.

But it works correctly here. So I think I must have gotten something subtle wrong in the other implementation.

However, if you want to avoid all these hassles, you might want to try out this package:

https://github.com/DoubleSymmetry/XNavigation

It let me do view navigation the way I wanted to, instead of having to use sheets when I didn’t want to use sheets 😛

If you have a better way to do what I was trying to do, please do let me know. I’m always eager to learn 🙂

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated to the developer of the package in any way. I just liked how it made navigation so much easier … at least for the use cases I had.

#iOS #SwiftUI #Coding #Navigation #Apple
Screenshot #1. Trying to use tw…
Screenshot #2. The button/image…
Screenshot #3. Adding a backgro…
Screenshot #4. The disclosure i…

@danhalliday Thanks, will give that a try and see if that helps 🙂

The issue that I ran into (which I probably didn’t explain properly in the previous post) was that I had a List cell which was enclosed in a NavigationLink but which also had a sub item in the cell with a different NavigationLink. Putting two NavigationLinks for the same list item didn’t appear to be supported … but I must confess that I didn’t dig too deep since I just wanted to get on with the project I was working on 😛

I did try using a sheet with the sub-item too and that would just do both navigations at once. But again, it might have been a bug and it is possible SwiftUI works as intended. I did intend to write a new post about this issue later today anyway and now you’ve actually motivated me to make sure that happens and maybe do a bit of digging into this issue too.

So thank you for that … I think 😛

While I have come to love the latest iteration of SwiftUI for how fast I can get stuff done, one thing that still trips me up is navigation — it’s almost as if Apple expects all screen navigation to happen either as explicit taps on UI elements, or simply modal screens 🙂

With my latest app, I have been hitting navigation limitations pretty hard. I have a list item which also has a button on it which should take you to a different item than tapping on the list item itself. Try as I could (OK, I didn’t try verrry hard 😛) I couldn’t make this work correctly.

Then I found this handy package:

https://github.com/DoubleSymmetry/XNavigation

It made all of my navigation handling issues disappear! (Well, at least for now … I’ve only been using the package for about an hour …) It did make all of the scenarios I encountered (and had to find workarounds for so far) disappear. So I’m very thankful to the author since it makes navigation fun again for me 🙂

#iOS #Coding #SwiftUI #Navigation

@denisdepalatis Thanks 🙂 My wife feels the same way as you do about the UI … I’m ambivalent — guess I can’t choose a favourite child 😛

@lolbat Yep, I just couldn’t read any more of that article after a point. So I have to wonder how all the people affected by this behaviour must have felt like … It’s just unimaginable for me 😕

I know people do behave this way but I still can’t help but hope that perhaps we can be better … maybe?

A few years back, I wrote a timer app for my wife since she was tired of how you can’t have more than one iOS timer running at a time. She would want to have two or more timers running at the same time and you just couldn’t do it with the default iOS timer …

At that time, I was heavily into Flutter and so did the app in Flutter so that we could have the timer on either iOS or Android.

After some time, my wife stopped using the app for some reason (we don’t remember why now) and I stopped working on it.

A few days ago, I wanted a recurring timer — one which would fire hourly for say 10 hours during the day and couldn’t find something that worked and wasn’t full of ads 🙂 So I went back to my old timer app.

So much time had passed that the Flutter app took me about a day to get back to working condition. But I kept feeling as if the process was slow … too slow. Just compiling the code to run the app would take a couple of minutes and that just added up. Plus there were other issues.

So I did some scrounging around and found that I had another version of the code — an early attempt to turn the app into a SwiftUI app. It took me only about a day of work and I already have that doing the basic stuff and getting close to feature parity to the Flutter version.

It’s interesting how different languages evolve and change over time and what you thought was the best at one point no longer is …

Screenshots for comparison below.

#Timers #Coding #iOS #Flutter #SwiftUI
Screenshot of an iOS app with m…
Screenshot of an iOS app writte…

We were both big fans of “Lost” when it started … and then kind of got tired of the constant shifting sands in terms of storylines and were totally pissed off at the ending (mostly because the writers themselves had dismissed the ending early on, but relied on people’s short memories when it came to the end). But we never knew, or even considered then, some of the implications of the stories being told or the background.

The following Vanity Fair article casts the spotlight on some horrendous things going on behind the scenes and be warned, it was so horrible that I couldn’t complete the article. I have no respect for Damon Lindelof or Carlton Cuse (not that I had before, but I did recognise their names and would watch shows involving them … but no more!) and it is horrible how human beings can behave this way …

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2023/05/lost-tv-show-culture

#Lost #WorkCulture #Racism #TV