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April 27, 2020
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The A.I.-powered app has revolutionized basketball practice.
HomeCourt is quite possibly the biggest thing to happen to basketball practice since the invention of the sneaker.
The app uses artificial intelligence (A.I.) and augmented reality (AR) to create and shape on-court basketball drills. It can tell whether you’re shooting off the dribble, catching and shooting, or just practicing free throws. It will measure your release time and the angle of your shot. It knows how fast you’re moving before you shoot. It calculates your vertical leap. And after your workout, you can see performance charts and a video breakdown right away. It’s a metrics fan’s dream.
HomeCourt lets you watch your dribbling skills in real time.
HomeCourt offers real-time coaching as well. With the help of your iPhone or iPad’s front-facing camera, you can get real-time feedback from coaches across town or on the other side of the globe.
As people shelter in place around the world, HomeCourt has made its services free to everyone through May 31. A recent feature update also lets coaches create a virtual team roster in the app, so players, coaches, and parents can participate in remote workouts, drills, and competitions. The company is also working on other ways it can support basketball players and coaches while school activities, practices, and tournaments are being cancelled or postponed.
Cofounder Philip Lam says the company’s shot-tracking prototype kicked everything off. “Even though it could only track shots in a few specific situations,” he says, “it made us believe it was possible to use a single smartphone camera to track complex basketball activities.”
Get instant feedback right on the court.
Today the company has 22 employees in Hong Kong and San Jose, California, and players across the globe.
Here Lam explains how HomeCourt got into the game:
”Before we launched, we played pickup basketball every week, and we started talking about how great it would be if we could get our stats — who hit the most shots, who got the most rebounds, all that stuff. And the idea just came up: Can we actually use the camera on the phone to do that for us? That’s how it started.
We built HomeCourt on mobile to make it affordable to players around the world. We came up with the idea of simulating the Stephen Curry tennis-ball drill with an interactive AR experience. That turned out to be the foundation of HomeCourt’s dribble workout. Everyone on the team was really excited to try it and compete with each other.”
Yes, the app keeps track of this many stats.
”Most other basketball training applications are content-based — no other mobile solution provides this system of proven training techniques combined with real-time A.I.-powered analysis.
In mid-2018, we built a prototype that could track advanced metrics, like release angle, release time, and vertical jump. We named this feature Shot Science. At that time, the iPhone X was the latest iOS device. It was powerful, but it still wasn’t fast enough to run Shot Science in real time and enable players to hear audio shot analysis during a live practice.
The new iPhone series came in September 2018, and it was a much more powerful device for running machine-learning algorithms. We found our algorithm [ran] six times faster in the iPhone series with the A12 Bionic chip. With the optimization in our algorithm, we could finally offer Real-Time Shot Science. The opportunity to demonstrate that at the 2018 Apple iPhone event [was] definitely one of the most special days in our journey so far.”
A sketch of the design that eventually became HomeCourt.
”We’ve had parents tell us that it becomes a competition with videogames: “Oh, they really do practice more, and they play fewer videogames, and I’m really happy about it!” And I’m really happy about it too!
And, yes, we still definitely play every week.”
Originally published on the App Store.
Instantaneous app launches are a big part of providing a great experience on iPhone or iPad. Whether someone is tapping on your app icon for the first time or returning from elsewhere, they should be able to get started immediately. A launch screen lets you provide that seamless and adaptive experience while your app loads any pertinent information in the background, and you can create it directly in Xcode.
Designing the right storyboard for your launch screen can make a world of difference in how quickly you can immerse people into your user interface. Here are a few recommendations and tips to help you create great launch screens for your app.
Although people won’t be able to interact with your launch screen, you should always build your screen using an Xcode storyboard. Storyboards are flexible and adaptable and support all device screen sizes, which allows you to use a single storyboard to manage your launch screens for every platform you support.
Note: Don’t use a static image for your launch screen. Static images have been deprecated and all App Store apps must use an Xcode storyboard to provide an app’s launch screen by June 30, 2020. Learn more here.
The fastest way to convince someone your app is responsive and ready to go is to show them the same interface in your launch screen that they expect on your app’s main screen.
When an app first starts up, it shows its launch screen before transitioning to the main interface. When someone switches away, the app automatically saves an App Snapshot of its interface so that it can return to where they left off; if an app can’t restore its state in this way, however, it will display the launch screen instead.
As such, you want to make sure your launch screen storyboard looks close to identical to your main interface. If you include elements that look dramatically different, it may be confusing or jarring when your app shifts to the main screen. If you have an app that might take a bit longer to load, like a game, and you’d like to provide any kind of animated experience during that time, we recommend using a solid color background; from there, the app can move gracefully to the game’s first screen.
When someone launches your app, you want them to feel immersed — no matter their appearance settings. We’ve already addressed how to create adaptive launch screen storyboards, but it’s also important to think about a device’s appearance. If your app supports Dark Mode, your launch screen storyboard should as well. Make sure that your storyboard uses adaptive colors, and set the background of the view to the System Background Color.
Anything you add to your launch screen storyboard should be optimized appropriately. If you want to add an asset to your storyboard, such as a static image that normally appears as part of your app’s user interface, make sure that its image dimensions are no larger than the view it’s going to be placed in. Your storyboard may not display if you use assets at larger resolutions.
Unlike your app’s interface, your app’s launch screen can’t be localized into other languages: Any text you display in your storyboard will remain in the original language you select. As such, it’s best to avoid including any text at all.
Learn more about designing with storyboards in the Developer Library
Learn more about launch screens in the Human Interface Guidelines
Learn how to create a Storyboard using Interface Builder
Learn more about responding to app launches in the Developer Library
Learn more about storyboards, scenes, and connections in the Xcode guide
Learn more about supporting Dark Mode in your interface in the Developer Library
People naturally multitask on their devices. Whether they’re switching from app to app, bringing together apps on iPad using Slide Over or Split View, or creating multiple windows of the same app, they should be able to pick up right where they left off — and UI state restoration is a core part of making that experience seamless.
When your app goes out of view, the app’s process is typically put on pause; it’s not given any more CPU time, which keeps the processor free for other tasks. If your app has background processes that are running, the system can even terminate those if an active app needs more resources than currently available.
Restoring the state of your UI is a crucial part of making your app feel responsive — and it’s especially important if you plan to support multiple windows in your iPadOS app. If you have a note-taking app that has four different notes open in different Split View pairings, for example, state restoration helps preserve each note, rather than returning someone to the main screen when they open one of the windows.
Two different types of scenes can be backgrounded and processes halted. These scenes’ states should be saved to restore later.
NSUserActivity is a core part of modern state restoration with UIScene and UISceneDelegate: It provides a lightweight way to capture the state of your app and put it to use later, holding key information for both view controllers and important view states — information that can also be used when constructing view controllers for Handoff and Universal Linking.
While what you store in NSUserActivity is up to you, we recommend collecting only the bare minimum so that your app can quickly restore itself. Think of the most unique and simple way you can identify your view controller, like a clear identifier or URL. Include that information, and make sure you can identify where the view controller lives in your navigation and how content should appear within it. For example, when using an Xcode storyboard you may want to store and retrieve view controllers using restoration IDs.
The best way to implement UI state restoration is to make your app scene-based, which requires iOS 13, iPadOS 13, Mac Catalyst 10.13, or tvOS 13 or later. (For more information on working with scenes in your app, check out the Developer Library.) Here’s how to get started with scene-based state restoration:
NSUserActivity object to save the app’s state. This can be created in your scene delegate.NSUserActivity, store relevant information (like the current navigation’s state, and view controllers that have been presented or pushed) along with your user’s intent.NSUserActivity within stateRestorationActivity(for:) in the scene delegate.
You need to collect the right information in each UIScene to pick up where someone left off.
This NSUserActivity will now be stored inside the scene’s stateRestorationActivity property. When your app needs to restore its state, it should do so by looking for this saved NSUserActivity under scene(_:willConnectTo:options:) in the scene delegate.
What about the older view controller-based state restoration APIs?
If you need to support older versions of iOS, macOS, or tvOS, you can use older view controller-based APIs for state restoration via restoration classes and the app delegate. This also means if you want to update your app to adopt UIScene as well as implement UI state restoration across multiple versions of iOS, you will need to implement both scene-based and view-controller based APIs. However, we highly recommend building scene-based UI state restoration.
Compared to the older APIs, modern state restoration requires a different approach to how you define, save, and restore your UI state and your user’s intent. With a scene-based app, you have to separate events in an application’s life cycle and the scene’s life cycle, which means tracking changes also differs. Having multiple scenes means there are many more windows to track, each with unique user actions and navigation history. For some of those windows, you may choose not to restore state depending on their function, requiring state restoration to be more flexible and dependent on how you define the user’s intent.
Prior to the introduction of UIScene, each app had a singular life cycle.
If you can update your app to scene-based restoration and take advantage of NSUserActivity, you’ll also unlock easier pathways to implementing features like Spotlight search, Handoff, enabling Universal Links, and creating new scenes as primary or auxiliary windows. And you’ll provide a smoother and frictionless experience for people using your app, too.
Watch “Architecting your app for multiple windows”
Watch “Targeting content with multiple windows”
Watch “Window management in your multitasking app”
You can now distribute your apps in 175 countries and regions on the App Store, allowing you to increase your impact and grow your business. As you deliver great experiences to an even more diverse audience, learn how you can localize your apps, product pages, and marketing materials to better connect with customers in different locations.
As a reminder, to allow your app to appear in these new countries, your membership Account Holder first needs to accept the updated Program License Agreement by signing in to their account on the Apple Developer website. If you have a Paid Applications Agreement, the Account Holder will also need to accept this updated agreement in App Store Connect. To make your app automatically available in all new countries, select the “New Countries or Regions” checkbox.
HealthKit allows your app to provide valuable health-related insights to users by working with the Apple Health app. The updated HealthKit Human Interface Guidelines include guidance on using the Apple Health icon in your app, enhanced editorial guidance on using Apple Health-related terms, and clarified privacy and data-usage guidelines.
View Human Interface Guidelines
Works with Apple Health badge now available. You can also now use the Works with Apple Health badge to promote your HealthKit-enabled apps. Download the badge and review the guidelines for using the badge on marketing communications.
Brian Mueller can make anything hilarious. Even the weather.
Brian Mueller is something of a Renaissance man. He single-handedly codes, designs, illustrates, and writes all of the dialogue for his wisecracking Carrot apps, which fall into categories that typically don’t have a lot of personality: to-do lists, alarm clocks, calorie counters.
To call his style droll would be an understatement. The exercise app Carrot Fit, for instance, implores you to “jump flabby human, jump for freedom!” in a deadpan robotic voice.
For more about Brian Mueller and his approach, check out this video interview where he details Carrot Weather’s evolution on Apple Watch.
Each Carrot app delivers surprising punch lines.
Carrot To-Do is equally sardonic — “It’s been 18 hours since you did anything useful” — while Carrot Weather takes liberties with its forecasts. “It’s a beautiful day! Ha ha, just kidding. It’s raining.”
A smack-talking to-do list app might not seem like the big idea that would let you quit your day job. In fact, Carrot’s success caught even Mueller off guard. “For some reason, people have responded to this. I still can’t believe sometimes any of this caught on,” he says.
Working out of a spare room in his Philadelphia-area home, the former aspiring screenwriter has penned thousands of lines of dialogue for his apps, which he constantly updates to nod to current events. (A recent one-liner from Carrot Weather: “Don’t tell anyone, but I regularly send bad weather to areas with high concentrations of stay-at-home order protesters.”)
Mueller is a one-man team, making half a dozen apps from home.
As for the inspiration for Carrot, Mueller credits those closest to him: his mom, sister, and wife — all of whom tease one another relentlessly.
“A lot of the dialogue for Carrot is drawn out of stuff that we’ve actually said to each other,” he says. “Every time my wife says something funny, I write it down for the apps. Sometimes she gets annoyed by that, but she’s a lot funnier than I am.”
Brian Mueller’s wife, Greta, is one of Carrot’s biggest inspirations.
When Mueller dreamed up the idea to create a character-driven app, he had zero coding experience. “I’m an English major with a creative-writing minor. I love to write and create characters and tell stories, but I had no real idea of what I would do with my life.”
Mueller’s first instinct was to hire a developer to realize his vision. “I didn’t want to sound like a jerk when talking to a programmer, so I bought a book on iOS programming for beginners, just to know what terms to use,” he says. As he read iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, Mueller was surprised by how easy it is to make an app. By January 2013, Carrot To-Do had launched on the App Store. It took him about a month to create.
I love to write and create characters and tell stories, but I had no real idea of what I would do with my life.
Brian Mueller, Carrot creator
Initially, sales were tepid. It took a couple of years, and a few more apps, before Carrot found a broad-enough audience for Mueller to quit his day job and become a full-time developer.
The Carrot universe continues to expand. Mueller has built seven iOS apps and an iOS sticker pack, as well as Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Mac versions of Carrot Weather. With the arrival of AR (augmented reality) technologies on iOS, Mueller taught himself how to add an AR component to Carrot Weather. Now you can see the surly character Carrot as a spherical “ocular sensor” hovering in your surroundings. She turns red if you annoy her.
Watch Carrot float around your world in Carrot Weather’s AR mode.
Although being a one-man app shop isn’t easy, Mueller enjoys wearing all the hats. “When I hit a road block with coding, I can take a break and switch to writing or doing some design work,” he says. “I’m not stuck doing the same thing over and over.
“It’s a weird way to work, but I’m a bit of a perfectionist and it allows me to make exactly what I want.”
Originally published on the App Store.
When taxes or foreign exchange rates change, we sometimes need to update prices on the App Store. In the next few days, prices of apps on the App Store and in-app purchases (excluding auto-renewable subscriptions) will change in Barbados, Moldova, and Uzbekistan due to new value-added taxes. Your proceeds will be adjusted accordingly and will be calculated based on the tax-exclusive price.
A low value-added tax was also introduced in Malaysia. Prices on the App Store in Malaysia will not change and proceeds will be adjusted accordingly.
You can download the updated price tier charts now. Once these changes go into effect, the Pricing and Availability section of My Apps will be updated. You can change the price of your apps and in-app purchases (including auto-renewable subscriptions) at any time in App Store Connect. If you offer subscriptions, you can choose to preserve prices for existing subscribers.
For fans of Catana Comics, her sticker app was love at first sight.
Thanksgiving with her boyfriend’s parents, a bout of the flu, and a “very old” iPad. These were the circumstances that gave rise to Catana Chetwynd’s beloved cartoons back in 2016, when she was 21 years old.
“I had been playing around with drawing on the iPad for a few months and John [now her fiancé] suggested that I make a comic,” she says. “It seemed like a good way to pass the time, since I wasn’t feeling well. Turns out, it was really fun!”
Over the next few days, she drew five more comics based on everyday situations in her relationship, like not-so-subtly requesting back rubs from John and rolling her eyes at his juvenile jokes.
John and Catana: the real-life couple behind the cartoons.
John, a software engineer, posted them on Reddit, and the internet fell hard: more than 2,000 comments poured in. “We were really surprised by the flood of positive responses,” Chetwynd says. John set up a website and she created an Instagram account—which now has nearly 3 million followers—and Catana Comics was born. “There are some incredibly awesome webcomics out there,” Chetwynd says, “but when we started, there weren’t really any based on a couple.” She has found that most of her fans enjoy sharing her comics with a significant other.
How Catana Comics go from sketch to screen.
It makes sense, then, that the number-one request Chetwynd got from her followers was for a sticker pack. With the Catana Comics iMessage app, fans can easily exchange her big-eyed, huge-hearted caricatures with a special someone. “Shortly after we came out with the first batch of stickers,” Chetwynd says, “I received an email from a woman who said that her husband was on a very long business trip in a different time zone. She loved that the stickers allowed them to quickly send emotive messages without using words.”
Fans demanded stickers—and here they are.
Chetwynd can relate, since she and John connect via her stickers too: “We both work from home, but in different rooms, and there are so many days where the only communication we’ll have is sending each other a sticker every hour or so.” One of her go-tos: a drawing of John looking at a picture of her saying, “I miss you.” “It was in the very first release and I wasn’t thinking it could be funny when I made it, but now John will go to the bathroom and I’ll send it to him,” she says. “I use it almost every day.”
Originally published on the App Store.
CarPlay Dashboard consolidates music, maps, and Siri suggestions into a single screen inside your car for a safer, smarter experience. Starting with iOS 13.4, you can add support for CarPlay Dashboard in your navigation app, too: Make your map, upcoming maneuvers, and dashboard buttons available at a glance by adopting a few new capabilities inside the CarPlay framework.
Note: To integrate your app with CarPlay Dashboard, your CarPlay navigation app needs to support UIScene. For more information on adopting UIScene, check out “Introducing Multiple Windows on iPad”.
To support CarPlay Dashboard inside your navigation app, you’ll need to update to Xcode 11.4 if you haven’t already.
iOS 13.4 offers new capabilities within the CarPlay framework: CPDashboardButton, CPDashboardController, and CPTemplateApplicationDashboardScene.
CPTemplateApplicationDashboardScene is a new UIScene subclass that CarPlay creates when it determines that your app should appear in CarPlay Dashboard.
CPDashboardController and CPDashboardButton let you manage controls that appear in CarPlay Dashboard.
To take advantage of CarPlay Dashboard, start by supporting CPTemplateApplicationDashboardScene and its related protocol CPTemplateApplicationSceneDelegate.
Note: You need use CPTemplateApplicationSceneDelegate instead of CPApplicationDelegate to support this feature.
We’ll take you through each step below. In addition, we’ve provided a sample application scene manifest for your reference.
<key>UIApplicationSceneManifest</key>
<dict> <key>CPSupportsDashboardNavigationScene</key> <true/> <key>UISceneConfigurations</key> <dict> <key>UIWindowSceneSessionRoleApplication</key> <array> <dict> <key>UISceneClassName</key> <string>UIWindowScene</string> <key>UISceneConfigurationName</key> <string>Phone</string> <key>UISceneDelegateClassName</key> <string>MyAppWindowSceneDelegate</string> </dict> </array> <key>CPTemplateApplicationSceneSessionRoleApplication</key> <array> <dict> <key>UISceneClassName</key> <string>CPTemplateApplicationScene</string> <key>UISceneConfigurationName</key> <string>CarPlay</string> <key>UISceneDelegateClassName</key> <string>MyAppCarPlaySceneDelegate</string> </dict> </array> <key>CPTemplateApplicationDashboardSceneSessionRoleApplication</key> <array> <dict> <key>UISceneClassName</key> <string>CPTemplateDashboardScene</string> <key>UISceneConfigurationName</key> <string>CarPlay-Dashboard</string> <key>UISceneDelegateClassName</key> <string>MyAppCarPlayDashboardSceneDelegate</string> </dict> </array> </dict>
</dict>Step 1: Create a scene delegate
To begin, define a scene delegate for CPTemplateApplicationSceneSessionRoleApplication. This can be done dynamically in your UIApplicationDelegate by returning a configuration in application:configurationForConnectingSceneSession:options:, or ahead of time in your app’s Info.plist in the Application Scene Manifest.
The delegate must conform to CPTemplateApplicationSceneDelegate, where it will be given an instance of CPInterfaceController and CPWindow, as you’ve been used to with CPApplicationDelegate.
Additionally, to support CPTemplateApplicationDashboardScene, include a new key in your Application Scene Manifest to declare support for CarPlay Dashboard: CPSupportsDashboardNavigationScene with a value of true.
Step 2: Define the dashboard delegate
Next define your delegate to the dashboard scene just like you would for the main template application scene. This delegate conforms to CPTemplateApplicationDashboardSceneDelegate and will be given an instance of CPDashboardController and UIWindow.
Step 3: Draw your CarPlay Dashboard content
Use the provided window to draw navigation related content for display in the CarPlay Dashboard, similar to the CPWindow given to the main template application scene. You can also provide two instances of CPDashboardButton to CPDashboardController that appear in the guidance card widget while your app is not actively navigating.
Step 4: Use your app in CarPlay Dashboard
People can interact with your app through both the dashboard buttons as well as within your main app interface. When navigation begins in your app using CPMapTemplate and CPNavigationSession, CarPlay will automatically display maneuvers in the guidance widget. When navigation ends, it will revert to your currently set dashboard buttons.
Learn more about creating apps for CarPlay
Learn more about integrating CarPlay with your navigation app in the Developer Library