Inside the Apple Vision Pro Developer Labs

Apple’s Developer News site has a nice interview with three indie developers who’ve visited the Vision Pro labs, including Michael Simmons from Flexibits and David “Underscore” Smith, of Widgetsmith fame:

For his part, Simmons saw Fantastical work right out of the box. He describes the labs as “a proving ground” for future explorations and a chance to push software beyond its current bounds. “A bordered screen can be limiting. Sure, you can scroll, or have multiple monitors, but generally speaking, you’re limited to the edges,” he says. “Experiencing spatial computing not only validated the designs we’d been thinking about — it helped us start thinking not just about left to right or up and down, but beyond borders at all.”

Simmons’s remarks echo my biggest takeaway from my demo experience: the lack of a “frame” encompassing windows.

And as not just CEO but the lead product designer (and the guy who “still comes up with all these crazy ideas”), he came away from the labs with a fresh batch of spatial thoughts. “Can people look at a whole week spatially? Can people compare their current day to the following week? If a day is less busy, can people make that day wider? And then, what if like you have the whole week wrap around you in 360 degrees?” he says. “I could probably — not kidding — talk for two hours about this.”

Two hours, you say? I know a guy.

★ Monday, 28 August 2023