Wooji Juice

Ready for iOS 27, I’ve released the Ferrite 3.3 update. Includes significant speed boosts when exporting CAF or M4A files. Also released? Hokusai 3 and Hokusai for Mac! Huge update/new app! And have I mentioned how much I like Liquid Glass in the 27 OSen?

After more than 6 weeks, Apple have finally(!) fixed the issue preventing me from upload a TestFlight build of Hokusai for Mac. 🎉 Submitted, pending approval. If you haven't jumped on the TestFlight yet, now's a great time to do so!

Today, I want to pull back the curtain on Hokusai 3 — going into TestFlight beta testing soon, I'm looking for plenty of people to kick the tyres. Rewritten from the ground up, with a beautiful, colourful new design and a _whole bunch_ of the most requested features!

Hokusai 3 includes: • iCloud Drive sync projects, presets & faves • Timeline markers • MP3 export • 48 kHz support • Multichannel recording And lots more besides inc. maybe the biggest news: an all-new native Mac app! There's so much it took 2 “bento boxes” & there's still stuff I couldn't get to

About 15 years ago (summer 2011) we released Hokusai Audio Editor. It looked like this — before Retina, when the only screen sizes were “iPhone” or “iPad” and you had to design each in a separate file:

It was kinda basic at the time; looking back, I'm amazed it worked at all: we still had to support devices with just 128MB of memory, half reserved for iOS! Since then, the biggest change was Hokusai 2, which adopted a very “flat” design. It's... okay? This is what's currently in the App Store:

So here's a fun fact — and by “fun” I mean “weird and annoying”: If you made an iOS app so long ago it was before the Mac App Store existed, then go to add a Mac version now, the App Store throws it back in your face when you try to upload it.

This is because (around 15 years ago!) Apple changed a technical aspect of how their systems identify apps, and the Mac App Store doesn't support the old version. Bonus fun fact: developers themselves _can't fix this_. Fortunately, Apple Dev Support apparently can… eventually.

I’m sure I’m just showing my age here, but I still like the magic of adding cloud sync to an app and watching stuff flow seamlessly between devices. Networking was always a big deal to me even back when it was just a serial cable between two machines.

Today I finally switched it on for The New Thing — the sync engine uses Swift generics to support all kinds of data — and it Just Works™️, changes syncing after a few seconds (I have deliberate throttling set on it, it doesn’t need to be instant).

I’m sure I’m just showing my age here, but I still like the magic of adding cloud sync to an app and watching stuff flow seamlessly between devices. Networking was always a big deal to me even back when it was just a serial cable between two machines.

iOS 26 Liquid Glass + SwiftUI thing I recently discovered: If you're using `glassEffect(in:)` with a custom Shape, and you're using "interactive" glass, it'll render the interaction highlight as a capsule, _not_ your custom shape. This will often look bad because of the mismatch, esp. at corners.

But you can force it to use a roundrect of arbitrary radius — limited, but great if you're rendering (say) a "speech bubble" shape, as you can at least get it to highlight everything except the "tail”. How? Well, you need to implement the `RoundedRectangularShape` protocol.

Exactly 10 years ago today, Ferrite 1.0 was released to the App Store! It's been a pretty wild decade. Here's to 10 years of Ferrite, and many more to come…

Ferrite 3.2.1 is out today, with support for high-quality recording from AirPods (with H2 chip: AirPods 4, AirPods Pro 2 or 3)! apps.apple.com/app/id101878... Note: this requires iOS 26, and you’ll need to enable the feature in Ferrite, Tools → Settings → Recording. Why? Well, an iOS 26 bug…

…which means high-quality AirPods recording doesn’t work unless you also enable *low-quality* Bluetooth recording. And enabling *that* destroys the audio quality of *both* recording *and* playback if you connect any other Bluetooth headphones. By “low quality”, I mean old-school phone call level:

Some bad news regarding our synthesisers: I think this is the year we'll have to retire these, probably this month. Shame, as I love them, but they've had a good run (the "new" one is over 10 years old!) and predate all sorts of modern development tech like Swift, SwiftUI, and AUv3.

Next, Transcriptionist: • Background transcription — won't be as widely available, as transcription needs GPU & fewer devices support background GPU use • Exploring use of Apple's transcription API. Preliminary tests seem promising — not as accurate as existing large brains, but quick and efficient…

First up, Ferrite: • Continue exports in background, track progress in a Live Activity (note: it'll still be possible for exports to get cancelled if other apps require too many resources) • Lightly updating UI for Liquid Glass. Don't expect complete rethink — that's not something to rush into.

I've been doing a lot of stuff recently with the new iPad OS 26 menu system. Something I think Apple haven't thought through — I haven't seen any guidance from them on it & their apps seem to be ignoring it — is: an iPad app that edits documents, also kinda has 90% of the Files app shoved in to it.

It's particularly fiddly when it comes to keyboard shortcuts. Apple's apps currently seem to mostly ignore the document browser in the menus — not just Numbers, Pages etc but also Preview, which was presumably developed with iOS 26 in mind.

I've been doing a lot of stuff recently with the new iPad OS 26 menu system. Something I think Apple haven't thought through — I haven't seen any guidance from them on it & their apps seem to be ignoring it — is: an iPad app that edits documents, also kinda has 90% of the Files app shoved in to it.

Looking for TestFlight beta testers for Hokusai Audio Editor! My first audio editing app, it came out long before Ferrite (in 2011!) and is still going strong: www.wooji-juice.com/products/hok... — I have Big Plans for its future, and (according to the App Store) it’s used a lot more than Ferrite…

But for some reason, people don’t talk about it much & it always struggles to find testers. Right now I’m running a new Hokusai TestFlight, and would love to get more eyeballs on it. It’s a minor update — because those Big Plans I mentioned? They’ll require dropping support for older iOS versions…