YouTube is probably one of the parts of the internet I consume the most, so I was more than a little sad when YouTube announced that they don’t have plans to build a visionOS app, and disabled the option to load the iPad app. This leaves you with Safari, and the website is okay, but definitely doesn...
It wasn't publicly spoken about much from what I understand, but headsets were sent to some select developers within a month or so of the announcement. A buddy of mine was working at a company that is basically totally AR/MR focused and they had around 3 units for development purposes. Disney had to have had them even sooner because they were demoing Disney stuff right at the announcement.
I wouldn't be totally surprised if the Apollo guy was one of them. He's an ex Apple employee and Apollo got called out or at least shown in Apple keynotes multiple times before it shut down.
Under the "Can I give feedback?" section, he mentions that he only used the simulator in Xcode for developing this. So sadly he wasn't one of the few people with a development unit. That makes how quickly he's done this even more impressive!
From the article (right under "Can I give feedback"):
I’ve only been able to develop this in the simulator, which obviously has its limitations, so once I get my hands on a device this Friday I’ll probably have a lot of thoughts on things I want to improve as well.
Please help me understand the point of the Vision Pro? It’s not VR. And every app and screenshot I’m seeing looks like “let’s throw this window, that you could normally have on your desktop or TV in your field of view”. Are there any mechanisms to have it interact with your surrounding in an AR type manner? Or does it just overlay flat windows on top of what you’re seeing?
Afaik there are only a handful of actual AR stuff right now:
Application windows stay anchored to your environment until you reset them. If you put them on top of your desk, it'll stay there even if you move to your kitchen.
When you look at your mac, it'll sometimes pop a button to allow you to initiate virtual display to your mac.
When you look down to your bluetooth keyboard, it'll show whatever you type in a floating box complete with suggestions.
Even that seems kinda half ass in this version. Like you think you'd be able to drag a window from your monitor outside the monitor. Instead, it just... Shows your monitor again.
I am not the target market for this device though. I'm not really sure who is, beyond the diehard apple people.
I do find it funny how quickly apple pr moves from the "when they do something they do it right" to "well this is first gen so we expect it has some flaws".
It’s AR and VR in whatever mix you want it to be. The little spinny dial at the top controls how much of the real world you see vs how much of a virtual environment you see. The bottom end is full AR, the top end is full VR.
That’s it, I don’t. I want AR, but just throwing up a random flat window in my field of view without interacting with the environment is not AR. It’s just your monitor with a dynamic background.
Does it block ads?
It doesn’t, I don’t think Google would like that, but if you have YouTube Premium you won’t see ads, just like the website. Honestly, YouTube Premium is like one of the most essential subscriptions for me, it’s so handy to never worry about ads and it’s pretty cool in that it also supports the creators substantially more than if you watched ads. So I dunno, if you can afford an expensive Apple Vision Pro, I’d really consider treating yourself to YouTube Premium!
YouTube sucks balls, but people still want it and the dev, who made Apollo and is one of the best app makers out there, did what they could to make YT available quickly.
So now you’re shitting on him personally because he didn’t fulfill your crusade. Get a life or learn to program and get off your ass and do it yourself.
Your point is correct, but it's fair to comment on the fact a previously vocal free software/no subscription dev is following a different model with this project. He was quite vocal about the reddit API changes, and many folks heard of him during that situation.
Since a lot of people will come to the comments without reading the article itself:
It is embedding the Youtube video, like a lot of websites and apps do - if you ever watched a youtube video outside of youtube.com or official apps, odds are it is using the same API as that app.
It still shows ads and uses the Youtube website directly for certain parts, but with some custom CSS and JS akin to how browser extensions would work.
It’s ok in this case, since it is only an alternative web view and videos are loaded, like on the website, with ads, except, if you have premium, of course.
For ad block, I guess, you have to use an extension for safari, which I don’t know if they are supported on vision safari.