What This Is About
USDZ Thumbnail is a tool I created during my new app development journey, as a tool I myself needed. I wanted to explore what SwiftUI could offer in the AR space, and decided to take the dive from the UIKit environment I had been using until then. This will eventually become a full product on the App Store, but it still needs further tweaks to become what I want it to be.
Let's Not Dwell On Technicalities...
This app started as a tool that I am actively using and developing, to create thumbnails for my upcoming AR project. Through my searches, I did not find anything that would work as I needed it to, so I took the opportunity to explore what SwiftUI was capable of doing in a macOS app.
Shifting over from my iOS and UIKit habits, it did take some time to understand the mechanics of SwiftUI, as the two frameworks are quite different in nature. I did appreciate the native preview provided by SwiftUI while developing the app, in contrast to the "tricks" needed to achieve the same result in UIKit, and see why Apple is pushing this framework as the future of Apple development. However, there are still some quirks to be removed from SwiftUI, and I hope that the team at Apple are hard at work on implementing all remaining bits and pieces from UIKit. Over my couple of years in working in Xcode, I have developed a fair understanding of Swift, but I do hope that Apple does not decide to simply jump ship before SwiftUI is declared "ready" by the wider community.
Features
- Built on SwiftUI, running on macOS 14+
- Uses controls similar to Apple's own AR tools to move an object
- Generates thumbnail images in both PNG and JPG formats, in different sizes
- Hot-loads new objects and maintains the current object orientation for batch processing
- Can save and load view presets, to allow for quick switching of views
Find It On GitHub!
I decided to publish a first version of this app on GitHub, so that many more developers can experiment with the code I created. Having cloned so many projects during my journey so far, I thought that this would only be fair to other devs who want to learn the world of AR.