> ...doing work in headsets...
Is it possible to use Vision Pro to build and publish a Vision Pro app?
Because it seems to be another Apple device separating producers and consumers just like iPad and iPhone.
Is it possible to use Vision Pro to build and publish a Vision Pro app?
Because it seems to be another Apple device separating producers and consumers just like iPad and iPhone.
The persistent framing of i-devices this way on HN, after all these years, is baffling to me. Tons of creation happens on them, or using them as a tool in service of creation, much of which would be harder or impossible with traditional computer. Just not a lot of software creation.
Even in digital art where the iPad excels doing something like having a reference photo open while you work is compromised and the only good way to do is to hope the app you're using supports it a reasonable way or else throw away half your screen real estate.
For most creation-oriented tasks I do that aren't computer-centric, I'd much rather have an iPhone or iPad than a laptop. They're great tools for creation & work, just not so much for creating stuff for computers, certain exceptions aside, and for those they're mostly just about as good as a laptop, or even not-very-good but usable in a pinch, not better.
Desktop shines when you create something novel.
It's as simple as that -- there are tons of things people have created really polished iOS "happy path" software to create on, but they're not general purpose creators.
Specifically because anything general purpose threatens Apple's App Store toll gate, and thus cannot be allowed to exist.
If apple would just get over themselves and allow sideloading (or, gosh, a terminal!), it would go a long way to improving iOS usability for creatives.
…as long as they’re sanctioned by the platform owners.
The main one for me is the longevity of your data. It is connected to the control over your data you have in a desktop OS. Good luck finding what you did five years ago in an app in some device and reproducing it now. You are at the mercy of some proprietary format the app creator chose, the availability of the app at a later stage, whether you saved your work in a cloud service, whether you kept your old device running, the operating system updates you installed, .....
With a desktop you can archive your work, whatever it might be, in sequences of bits that reside in your disk. Open source software and virtual machines go a long way for helping reproducibility.
Not all tasks benefit from reproducibility and longevity but I'd argue they include a lot more than computer programming
Compiling code isn't impossible; every webpage that contains JavaScript uses the Just In Time compiler to execute JavaScript. The ability for 3rd party apps to compile code is limited due to security reasons—Apple's Lockdown Mode [1] specifically disables the JIT.
iPad users have been able to write code using Swift and submit apps to the App Store since late 2021. [2]
I have no doubt you'll be able to create apps using the Vision Pro in the future… there's probably a version of Swift Playgrounds [3] running on a prototype Apple Vision Pro right now.
[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-use-lockdown-mode-ios-16/
[2]: https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/apples-swift-playgrounds...
I think the disconnect is in the type of creation, the higher-end production quality you want, rarer iOS devices are. And the corollary is, if you only care about the highest-end of creation, they essentially become invisible.
For producing stuff for computers or for industrial design (e.g. CAD or architectural drafting), yes. In other areas, tablets and phones are ubiquitous tools, and if they vanished tomorrow they wouldn't be replaced with e.g. laptops—they'd be replaced with paper, with various single-purpose devices, et c.
iPad is not because it cannot be used to create the Vision Pro. It may still have advantages where it's better for some uses cases, but it still doesn't make it a general purpose computing device in the same way that a TV is better for watching videos than a Macbook, but a TV is not a "real computer".
I think the real/not-real computer thing's not especially illuminating, but I don't take issue with it the same way I do dismissing phones and tablets as "consumption-only", a perspective I find simply baffling, because I see them used for creation and productive purposes all the time in a ton of contexts by ordinary people.
Are we going to be able to create a large software project using it without carrying around a MacBook as well?
It’d be nice to be able to run macOS when I travel and not have to bring my MacBook.
I suspect that, like the iPad, there will be ways to force it to function as a standalone device, but that the happy path will be heavily optimized towards you buying as much Apple hardware as possible.
I suspect the downvotes are because the keynote literally featured someone using their Mac inside the headset. And another video (session? State of the union?) showed developing a Vision Pro app on the Mac and testing it right next to the Mac from inside the Vision Pro.
That doesn’t mean Apple will expose that. Maybe just not today. The original iPhone had a full OS capable of multitasking but it wasn’t a feature given to the user due to memory and battery constraints. We’ve now had it for years.
This was the first we’ve seen of it, and I suspect the on device development story was not one they wanted to spend limited time on. Plus knowing Apple it seems likely they’d want to make Xcode work better for the interface than just plopping the Mac app in.
Time will tell. The iPad can do development. Apple has proven it with Swift Playgrounds. But they still haven’t given us Xcode. So who knows.
Or are you speaking instead to a local terminal environment, like iSH or a-Shell on iPad?
Apple announced just before WWDC the iPadOS versions of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, their professional media creation tools. We've all seen shows and listed to music (and podcasts) created with these tools. While most of the core functionality is the same between the Mac and iPadOS versions, the iPad versions take advantage of multitouch and other iPadOS features, as they should.
> Plus knowing Apple it seems likely they’d want to make Xcode work better for the interface than just plopping the Mac app in.
Yes; that's how Apple does things.
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, iPad users can already use Swift Playgrounds to code and submit an app to the App Store [1].
It's just a matter of time before there will be a version of Xcode for the iPad.
Thats nothing compared to the bash build stages and custom permission setups, third party libraries, bespoke source code management scripts, ruby-based project initialization and preprocessing scripts I've seen amongst Xcode-based projects.
When those fail, you are troubleshooting through logs and at the filesystem level.
If the idea is a version of Xcode without those things but is otherwise fully featured, I think that is actually speaking about some future version of Swift Playgrounds.
Otherwise, "Xcode for iPad" is basically a jailed Mac VM.
basically is it a laptop (fully independent), an ipad (excellent secondary device that can do focused work on it's own), or a smart monitor (peripheral with some built in usability)?
It's using local Wifi (or USB), so the latency is very low.
Beyond that, even though an iPad can act as another monitor, it's not a big monitor. It doesn't really achieve the ideal of a workstation replacement.