So what if I sacrifice the morphing tab bar, but hide/show a tab bar when the sidebar is opened/closed instead? That way I can keep my custom sidebar logic and ornamentation, but also have a unique middle posture layout 🤔

It's an option — probably the most sensible one — but I'm undecided

There comes a moment in every major update you build where your app really starts to fork from the previous version and it becomes hard to imagine going back. I'm starting to feel that way about Broadcasts 4 now. At the time everything I did felt like tiny changes, but looking back now I'm like "wait, I did all of that since June?"

The question remains, will anybody actually like what I've done, or was I on the wrong path from the start 😅

The most important thing I need to do for Broadcasts 4 is move the monetization to a subscription model (for new users only), something I've been talking about for way too long at this point and just been too afraid to pull the trigger on.

And I think part of that is going to involve making the app iOS 26-only — if I'm going to offer subscriptions, I don't want that to tie me down to supporting older versions of the OS indefinitely, when this is very clearly a line-in-the-sand update year

There is an alternate timeline where this is what became Broadcasts 4. A timeline without crunching for six months to port to visionOS, without despair at an iPad platform vision with seemingly no future, without disgust at Apple's handling of antitrust issues, all of which combined I lost a good 18 months to

https://mastodon.social/@stroughtonsmith/110899816310922687

I made two tiny changes and it transformed how I feel about the Liquid Glass in my iPhone design

1) I use 0.99 white/black instead of systemBackgroundColor
2) I added a stronger fade underneath my tab bar

Both of these changes could trivially be implemented by Apple

There is a ton left to do in Broadcasts before I can even start pushing it to TestFlight — it is the most changed of any of my apps, touching a lot of the parts of the system that look or behave badly even at this late stage.

Plus, it adopts the new Music/Podcasts design, and I want to see how people react to Apple's, first 😅

At the moment I'm not targeting 26.0 or September, as I want to get everything else out the door before I turn my attention back to it. It will be done when it's done

"Why doesn't the last-played station automatically pre-load at launch?"

Good question. So now it does. Same amount of clicks, but no need to scroll

You ever come across a one-line-of-code change and wonder 'how the heck did I not know this?'

Today's example: setting .accessibilityTraits = .header on your collection view section headers.

Now you can navigate blisteringly fast between them with VoiceOver, like I've enabled in Broadcasts

The three states of Broadcasts' new purchase model (may not be final wording or layout):

1) No purchase
2) Existing IAP with optional upgrade to subscription
3) Subscriber

Completely noninvasive grandfathering for existing users. Maybe I should be smarter about that — alas. It gives me plenty of levers to pull in the future, should circumstances require