Notices by Steve Troughton-Smith (stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social), page 6

I am still figuring out how other apps implement SharePlay, but I'm reasonably happy with how it works in @broadcastsapp now in this initial version. You can start up a session over iMessage, then any participant can start playback of a station. Station name/address/artwork is shared directly through SharePlay, doesn't need to already be in your library. Could make for a fun 'watch party' mode for audio-only streams like podcasts or live events

Bumped @broadcastsapp to v3.2 to account for the new watch app and SharePlay support, so I can bundle them together. Making sure to keep the scope of this update pretty small, as it's not intended to draw out into an iOS 17 update over the summer

On visionOS, I expect to place the @broadcastsapp playback toolbar in an ornament (simulated at the bottom of the window here instead), and the Now Playing screen to open as a new window — like the Mini Player on macOS. It took just a little bit of rewiring, and expanding code I had for Mac Catalyst, but getting these changes in now should hopefully mean when I build and run upon release of the visionOS SDK that everything ‘just works’

There's no visionOS SDK yet, but I can prepare for the ornaments API by making the @broadcastsapp layout more flexible. This may lead to bigger UI changes down the road to the iPad version, which I'll probably roll into a v4.0? For now, it's just decoupling some layout elements

The redesign continues; I added a 'reality' device idiom (that corresponds to iPad) so I can test all my visionOS code paths at will. I'm trying to match what we saw of the visionOS Music app, and predict the navigational layout structure I'll need to light up properly when the SDK launches. I even have my ornaments prepped and ready, just ifdef'd out 😂

I added an AppKit target to the @broadcastsapp codebase just to experiment, and of 245 source files only 11 are portable 💀 All the pre-existing SwiftUI code is uncompilable, because even basic things like size classes don't have a macOS equivalent or translation. I continue to believe that the AppKit SwiftUI target is simply a dead end and needs to be rolled into the Universal app platform instead. I don't want to continue with this bringup experiment at all

I think that's what I'm gonna do; shelve the updated watch app for the time being. There are other updates I want to ship and I don't want this holding me back, plus I don't have an actual Watch to do testing on anymore for such a significant revamp so it's probably for the best. Broadcasts v3.2 with SharePlay can continue on without it

If WWDC had got me thinking about SwiftUI again, even slightly, working on the @broadcastsapp watch app has definitively dissuaded me. I'm so unhappy with the development experience that I would discontinue the watch app in a heartbeat if it didn't have users. Every element is a battle, and I've wasted so much time trying to get it to work 'correctly’; if I had UIKit, I would have been done in a day and shipped months ago. Almost at the point where I git revert everything and go back to WatchKit

Finally after 4 years I've renamed the Broadcasts Xcode project to 'Broadcasts’, and given the whole project structure a cleanup 😄

Tweaked my xrOS test scene to more closely simulate visionOS, so I can prototype my layouts and make sure the right code paths are firing

While I have a little downtime, I’m giving the tvOS app a look over to see what more of the Broadcasts experience I can expose. The Station Browser is a tough one, as it has a lot of non-tvOS-safe UI elements, but I'm doing the basics in getting things compiling at the very least. Now Playing though has been a frequent request

Though it's not actually visionOS, my little prototyping view controller is proving invaluable at reminding me which other parts of my UI need to be updated to not use static background colors. It's nice to have a core app structure that is flexible enough to cope with all these changes, for once. Having lived through the dark, painful years of rewriting iOS 6 designs for iOS 7+ and a dozen new device sizes, this is pretty refreshing

This is a special moment for me, so I'll share it with you too: this is the first launch of @broadcastsapp natively on visionOS. It's alive! 🧟

Lots of work to do, but this is promising

I put together this prototype over a year ago, and it's kinda neat that my floating toolbar wasn't too far off what they actually did in visionOS

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't completely overwhelmed by how much effort I see before me to try and support visionOS properly across any one of my apps, nevermind all of them 😵💫

Kinda neat that my Help framework just works out of the box on visionOS 😄

Now all my codepaths are in order, @broadcastsapp is pretty much fully-functional on visionOS. There's still plenty to learn re metrics, control sizes, and best practices, but what you see here is pretty close to what I would expect to ship at launch. It's going to take a while for me to build up a mental model of how visionOS apps work, so this design will evolve over the rest of the year

I’m pretty darn glad Vision Pro isn't shipping in September, that's for sure 😅

Even so, I'm pretty happy so far with the bringup process

My fun little experimental menu bar view kinda feels like it could work on visionOS. I should stick it into an ornament…

Just quick demonstration of what multi-windowing in @broadcastsapp might do on visionOS — main UI in one room, mini player in another. It would really be cool if music came from a physical source location, or if I could even have different stations playing in different rooms. In the sim, at least, all audio is piped through the main speakers and seems sourceless 🤔