Last month we released Orion, a small app that turns your iPad into an HDMI monitor. This was certainly a big departure from our usual practice of making camera apps, so I wanted to take a moment to show the ‘why’ — and, after that, the ‘how’: our process of making it from thought to launch.
This is a dive into the conception, design, and development of Orion, a showcase of the fun one can have while making an app, and a look at the way a simple utility can be infused with funky retro charm.
The Pitch and the Product
This summer, Apple announced iPadOS 17 would support UVC, or USB Video Class devices (basically:”webcams”). This could be compelling to us, so we researched adding support to Halide. After all, how cool would it be to have Halide’s interface for your digital camera?
After some quick research, we found it didn’t really work quite like we had hoped. However, our experiments uncovered that those inexpensive USB-C “capture cards” you find on Amazon work like webcams. With one of those, you could plug any HDMI device into your iPad and its output would show up on your screen. It was a “Woah” moment.
What if we built an app that helped you use your iPad as a monitor?
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Evaluating An Idea
It’s one thing to have an awesome idea, and another to come up with product. We love doing things for the sake of art, but when you run your own business, you have to avoid new and shiny distractions. Otherwise, you’ll end up neglecting the work your customers rely on you for.
Ben and I pride ourselves on reviewing each other’s weird, left-field ideas whenever they come up — making sure we don’t jeopardize our entire business to, say, build an app that launches a game in the dynamic island when you press the action button (it was a promising idea, Ben). So before jumping on a new project, it helps to be skeptical. We asked ourselves a few questions.
❓ How many people want this? Our gut said, “A lot.” We’ve lost count of the times we wished we had a portable monitor within reach, whether it’s plugging it into our video and still cameras for better monitoring, connecting it to a Mac-Minis we have sitting in a closet, or just hooking up to a Nintendo Switch while traveling. At the same time, there’s a huge barrier asking someone to spend even $15 on a separate adapter in addition to the cost of our app.
❓ What makes our version special? We expected a glut of free “iPad monitor” apps in the App Store, like the Flashlight App gold rush of 2010. What could we bring to the table?
Design, in and of itself, is a feature. If this was going to be a possible use of the iPad, we might as well make it delightful.
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We also had technical tricks up our sleeve. Our research found that those capture dongles only supported 1080P resolution, and this presented an opportunity. Thanks to our background in image processing, we could build a resolution enhancer that would intelligently upscale to 4K resolution.
❓ Could it make some income to recoup our time? Assuming there’d be a lot of free utilities to enable this, we felt it was ideal for this app to be ‘freemium’. We’d make the core experience and most important part — using your iPad as a monitor — free. Advanced features, like our 4K upscaling, could be a one-time purchase. A big plus here was that we saw it as a fun exercise to build something new, and didn’t have the pressure to turn it into a business.
📝 A side note on fun: we never intended Halide to be a business, either. We just built it out of passion, and had a lot of fun doing it. That ended up becoming a huge success, and a ton of fun to work on. To this day, I think the best products are often built out of passion, not in an effort to chase huge payouts.
Okay, we had a plan, maybe. On paper, this all sounded like a good plan at that, but one with uncertainty. We know we’re obsessed with details. Unchecked, we could find ourselves spending a year on this, and if it flopped, we’d be kicking ourselves that we hadn’t made that dynamic island action button game instead (it could be a massive multiplayer game, Ben!).
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But we held ourselves to a short schedule, we could risk it. If it made a few bucks, great! If not, we could treat it as the quirky art project it was.
It was August 4th, just around the corner from New iPhone Season. This is our busiest time of year. That makes it sound kind of casual, but we are talking nights-and-weekends-crazy-busy-busy — when new iPhones come out, we don’t get advance hardware or a heads-up on what’s coming. We have to run to the store, buy the phones, and fix what is broken first and then work long nights to support what’s new.
We had to get Orion out before then. If we didn’t ship Orion in time, we had no choice but to shift focus to Halide and Spectre updates and abandon it. So we set the new iPhone launch as our deadline— either ship this app in 45 days, or abandon it and move on.
Buckle up.
The Design Process
While Ben worked on the technical functionality, in parallel, I explored Orion’s potential visual design. I wanted it to be very fun and even a little campy — I got a lot of inspiration from in the 80s which had a very futuristic, yet tacky look.
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I loved the optimism and almost science-fiction like reverence for technology back then. There was a lot of color and whimsy involved.
In my first explorations, I just jammed on silly, hypothetical promotional materials for Orion. I pretended flat screen displays didn’t yet exist, and imagined ads like, ‘finally, a screen you can take anywhere!’, ‘watch whatever, wherever!’, showing a couple on an abandoned sand bank with their car during a pink sunset.
Noodling around, I was suddenly inspired to make the first screen of the app: A… box?
I didn’t know what the app would look like, but I wanted it to be a physical experience. Maybe a user could unbox it, as if it really was a TV from the 80s? The most satisfying possible experience unboxing is a tearaway strip; that could translate well to a swipe.
I threw together some bits and made the box less bare: I labeled the box with an address and electronics certification sticker, using Sony corp’s old Tokyo address, along with a sticker typical of the electronics of the era, listing its voltage and Hz. The dot-matrix type on that sticker is ever so slightly misaligned, as if it wasn’t quite printed perfectly in that semi-analog world.
Funny enough, this was the first screen I designed and the last thing we actually built. In the final days, we even managed to get a few more finishing touches into it. More on that later — but suffice to say this would become both a figurative and literal shipping label.
Orion was the kind of project that is pure fun to me, and it gave me an excuse to reach out to people whose work I loved and admired. The first person I reached out to was a longtime friend and collaborator: Jelmar Geertsma.
Jelmar is an exceptional designer. He’s a master of type design, for one, but also a spectacular graphic designer. I have worked with many designers in my time, but Jelmar is the kind you only meet once and file mentally in a dramatically lit cerebral hall of fame. Most designers can pull off doing a layout or product page, but type design requires the kind of obsessive nature to keep perfecting a single letter for weeks, if not months. It requires you to have an ever-burning fire and love for the craft inside you that motivates you to do what you do. Jelmar has that fire, and it’s very bright in him indeed.
I am also lucky to call him one of my best friends, whom I met at art school days about 18 years ago. With our shared appreciation for niche design humor, typeface particularities, beautifully made things and Pulp Fiction, we got along very well in school. It led to many long sessions just designing things for fun and jamming on typefaces along with a few clashes with teachers whom we often out-witted with our computer design chops.
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In August, my grandfather passed away peacefully of old age. I flew to the Netherlands to attend the service, speak at his funeral and grieve with my family. While I was there, I took the opportunity to visit Jelmar for a few days — or nights, rather — bringing with me some fine American whiskey, a cigar or two, and a lot of ideas.
For Orion, our brainstorming sessions blended nostalgia and excitement.
This roll of film was expired, but I think it adds to the late night aesthetic.
We both love retro-80s vibes (Jelmar often wears a highly tech-forward Casio watch), and one of our most successful collaborations became my favorite detail and one of our most praised aspects of Spectre and Halide: our custom typefaces.
We’d certainly showcase our love of type in Orion, but that is not where we started.
My first sketch of the app (post-box design) had me imagining a sort of retro VCR / TV screen aesthetic. I saw two crucial parts we had to design: the ‘screen’ experience, and the on-boarding experience.
The manual was a pretty key experience. We’ve always had ‘physical’ manuals in Halide as a tactile and visually fun way to get acquainted with the app, and we notably switch their design up for major releases.
For Orion, we wanted it to be far more rooted in the period’s graphic style. That required experimenting a lot more with visual style, the Orion logo and typography. Jelmar did an insane job and put together a massive variety of designs:
I debated changing these up depending on device type, but we narrowed it down and started improving just one, in a more traditional manual aspect, which would greet the user after unboxing. I also added some paper texture and mild wear and tear. We really wanted you to feel an uncanny old-yet-modern vibe from it:
If you wonder about the phrase ‘Video System’ in Orion, that’s more than a casual label. It’s a tribute to the VCR and CRT TV era, a time when on-screen type and iconography was new, pixel-y and clumsy.
True to my first sketch, we were now down the second step in a basic flow: users open the app to a very tech-tastic, VHS tape-like manual cover design and 80s-style internal illustrations, then transition to pixely menus.
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We ended up crafting display curvature, slight chromatic aberration and interference noise, and a quasi-analog feel to the digital interface of Orion.
This effect would have been difficult to implement in years past. By limiting the app to iPadOS 17, we could take advantage of custom shaders, those tiny programs that run on your GPU, responsible for the most complex effects in video games. However, Ben was focused on the app as a whole, so it was risky sending him off on days-long explorations of cool but superfluous effects (or MMORPGs that run in the Dynamic Island). We needed help, and enlisted Anton Heestand.
Keep in mind, it’s a VERY bad idea to add more developers to a project thinking things will just go faster; more people means more time spent managing everyone’s time. You run the risk of teammates duplicating work, or making changes that interfere with each other. Luckily, Anton’s shader effects didn’t really touch the rest of the app, and he was a delight to work with. The same went for his help on the initial unboxing experience (which we’ll talk about later).
Based on designs I built in Sketch, Anton built out these cool effects, independent of the rest of our work. Despite his challenging time offset with us — Anton is in Japan — he pulled in his changes at night, and we provided feedback. This delegation was critical given our short timeline, and a big win.
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While Anton worked on the CRT effects in the interface, Ben built the CRT effect applied to the video. Why two? The UI effect was pure “flair,” while the video effect strived for physical accuracy. Ben performed rigorous QA testing…
It’s a tough job, but Ben didn’t beat himself up over it.
We won’t dig too deep into how analog TVs work, partly because this isn’t meant to be a technical post, and partly because there’s no topping this outstanding YouTube series by Technology Connections.
However, a detail we wanted to get right was the arrangement of color phosphors. These arrangements defined the three “looks” of the analog era. The triadic, where the different colors were arranged in a triangular layout:
Then, there’s slot masks:
Finally, there was the pinnacle of television, Sony’s Trinitron. It provided the brightest, most vibrant colors. That was thanks to its unique makeup:
The technical name for this is “Aperture Grille.” While that sounds like a delightful diner that is catered specifically to photographers, it is a real technical term. We avoid saying Trinitron, since it’s a trademarked name.
For our authentic CRT effect, each pixel in the shader passes through a “virtual phosphor,” and then gets slightly diffused to simulate halation — the process where every phosphor kind of ‘bleeds’ into the adjacent one.
Triad vs Slot Mask vs Aperture Grille
These shaders took about four days to build, which included some experiments with scan lines. We even tried drawing the whole image in two alternating phases, like a real TV would. We ultimately stopped at phosphor emulation as we found it hit a sweet spot in recapturing the feel of pixel art as originally shown. Virtual phosphors act as low-pass filter, whereas scan lines just hide pixels.
So Orion emulates a “perfect” television, one where there are zero gaps between runs of the cathode ray gun.
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Or maybe we’re just telling ourselves this until we decide we like scan lines.
Typography
In the type department, Orion would meet the bar set by our previous apps. The manual uses an unique cut of a Dutch sans-serif by Jelmar called Azimut, and in the menus you can spot Orion’s custom pixel font, Radiant.
We noticed most mid-eighties VCR type followed a similar grid. Radiant is based on that raster, but mixes those proportions with the style of Ambrotype, the typefaces in Halide. It also features my delightfully clumsy pixel art icons!
We call it Radiant because we designed it together while Foundation Season 2 aired its last, excellent episodes— we loved watching the show together on long nights in between jamming on the app.
Controls
Honestly, I almost went overboard with control design. It was easy to envision a wood-paneled remote with funny plastic buttons. Perhaps the plastic would be textured, like it typically was back in the day. Gritty and dark grey. I caught myself somewhat early, because a critical part of building a fun app is finding fun that doesn’t completely harm usability.
I remember the fantastic animation in iOS 6 that shredded a pass in the Passbook (now Wallet) app with a long, amazing animation. It was super whimsical, fun, and gorgeous – but deleting more than 1 pass was a real slow slog.
This stuff is great until it’s not.
The happy medium is a set of controls that feels and looks very tactile, yet not completely out of place on a modern iPadOS interface.
We probably said ‘no’ to hundreds of unhinged but fun ideas, and threw away so much delicious eye candy, just to keep things practical and grounded. In the end, it’s still plenty fun.
At the same time, fun helps keep things during the boring jobs, like explaining hardware requirements to the user. That made us grateful for the detailed manual that opens on first launch — it’s putting the ‘fun’ in ‘functional’, because it helps show how new users how cool the app could be, even without the dongle.
On the inside of the manual, we detail what you can use Orion for, and we explain the hardware you need.
We made sure to not take ourselves too seriously here: I used Jelmar’s tiny, vintage 2-cup Douwe Egberts coffee maker as an icon for ‘Various Other HDMI devices’, for instance, and switched up the heading on the second page from ‘Already have a USB-C Capture Card?’ to the far more catchy ‘Dongle Owner?’:
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I felt pretty done here. We had the manual. You could plug in at that point and use the app. Ben and Jelmar didn’t see it that way: they saw another big challenge. After the manual, how do you convince someone using Orion is worth spending $15 on a dongle?
Ben had a great idea: adding a full featured demo mode with a sample video helps anyone get a great feel for it, and we could make it a particularly campy old 80s video to really make it fit the mood.
One possible snag: bundling a long video inside the app would add to Orion’s download time, and take up needless space on your iPad. No problem: we download the demo video on-demand and discard it after viewing.
The Icon
I whipped up an Orion glyph on day 1 of the project before seeing much else. I figured it had to feel a bit retro-TV like, with a hint of space age.
This was nice enough, but my friend Louie Mantia wrangled with the curves a bit to arrive at this version:
Extremely eagle eyed longtime Lux fans might understand the visual pun in the icon here: Halide launched as our first app, and had an app icon shape hidden in the aperture of the camera:
With Orion, our fourth app, it hides a similar visual joke but with a bit more layering. Perhaps our development icon can reveal it to you:
App four — four icons. Get it?
Now it was just a matter of choosing the final app icon.
Honestly, I simply chose the one that was the most fun to make: the test-image TV tube. It matched our last minute domain name choice of Orion dot tube. We still use the Orion logo throughout, though — on our website and all over the app.
The Upgrade Screen
The final challenge in the last week or so was designing an attractive upgrade screen for the Pro features. We decided to reuse some of our unused manual graphics — they were just too good — so we could pack more retro-80s graphic design into the app and inform people of the kind of cool features that we had in Orion Pro.
I really wanted to do something fun with the price label, so I made a rather too detailed, half-peeled and slightly damaged discount tag.
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While investigating typical typefaces, I discovered Apple’s San Francisco Compressed typeface style matched great:
To accomplish the worn sticker effects, I used a combination of textures and brushes in Photoshop to get the material right, then created vector shapes in Sketch of the label and its small paper ‘folds’.
Final details and the little curl were all rendered in Sketch. We exported a blank ‘tag’ bitmap so we could dynamically render the price for localization.
Chunky Friends
Recall Ben’s solution to users not being sold with just the manual? As we put final touches on these screens, Jelmar worked on designs outside of the app. He had already worked on a fun series of chunky renders of various movie props:
So, we figured, rather than just tell you what the app does with dry text, he jammed on these extremely cool, chunky renders showing the app in use.
See it connected to a camera:
Or a computer:
Or consoles:
We mixed things up with modern and old versions. Going fully retro with all our materials might confuse people. “Orion only supports ancient, 1982 era hardware?”
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If you look closely, you might spot a few fun easter eggs in there too. Let’s just say it’s all in the Halide cinematic universe – and we’re very grateful that our friends at Panic and Campo Santo let us use imagery here from some of our favorite games in action: Untitled Goose Game and Firewatch.
What Didn’t Make It
With our deadline fast approaching, it was time to cut stuff. While it’s tempting to add features up until the last minute, at a certain point you need the discipline to say “pencils down.” The final stretch of any release should be about pixel peeping and bug hunting.
One feature that hit the cutting room floor were alternate icons — imagine a NES icon, an Xbox icon, a beige Macintosh screen, and more. I’d love suggestions if you have any, because we still want to get this into an update, and I genuinely love working on app icons.
On the marketing side, we didn’t have time to shoot a launch video. I even visited a thrift store to buy 80s clothes and enlisted some friends — one of which was committed to cutting their hair to leave only a mullet. Next time, perhaps?
What shouldn’t get lost in lamenting that which we couldn’t, is relief in what we somehow could.
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I was tremendously glad that we managed to include our unboxing experience— our very last feature to get implemented. Remember me writing about it? I wanted to get a last few changes in: notably, I wanted the edges to be somewhat irregularly ‘torn off’, so I had to dust off my old Photoshop dual brush skills to create nice, ragged fibrous edges on the bitmap mask.
This detail in the app is my personal favorite, and I was beyond honored that Cabel Sasser was willing to write a bit of beautiful intro music to set the tone perfectly once you finish pulling that cardboard strip.
It’s a playful nod to tech unboxing videos, and I secretly still hope someone makes a dedicated unboxing video for our quirky app — though some videos already show it off beautifully, like this great one from Jackson Hayes.
As Ben focused on last minute scrubbing for bugs and prepping for submission, I spent the night before launch assembling our Orion site.
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I assembled this last-minute website in Framer (cheers for modern web tools!).
That was, fortunately, easy even for this self-admitted web-challenged designer. I managed to create a pretty decent page in Framer in just one very long night in a very uncomfortable wooden chair in a farmhouse. And with that, we were all set for a launch.
On Wednesday — two days after iPadOS 17 came out, and just two days before new iPhone 15s would hit stores and arrive at people’s doorsteps, we sent out notice to press and flipped the switch.
Introducing Orion: A display that can go with you anywhere.
Turn your iPad into an HDMI monitor for cameras, consoles and more.
Much like Halide’s first version, before we launched, barely anyone tried it besides ourselves. You really never know with a project like this if it will be well received or not. We wondered if we struck the right balance between inside joke and functional product.
And… people actually got it. Financially, it exceeded our (admittedly very low) expectations, but most importantly, it seems to have put a smile on many people’s faces.
Money was never and has never been our metric of success. When you get hundreds to thousands of messages from people geeking out on our weird, quirky details, those late nights fretting over little details instantly became even more worth it.
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We’re so glad you love Orion. It really was our pleasure.
Last month, two young paddleboarders found themselves stranded in the ocean, pushed 2,000 feet from the shore by strong winds and currents. Thanks to the deployment of a drone, rescuers kept an eye on them the whole time and safely brought them aboard a rescue boat within minutes.
In North Carolina, the Oak Island Fire Department is one of a few in the country using drone technology for ocean rescues. Firefighter-turned-drone pilot Sean Barry explained the drone’s capabilities as it was demonstrated on a windy day.
“This drone is capable of flying in all types of weather and environments,” Barry said.
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Equipped with a camera that can switch between modes — including infrared to spot people in distress — responders can communicate instructions through a speaker. It also can carry life-preserving equipment.
The device is activated by a CO2 cartridge when it comes in contact with water. Once triggered, it inflates into a long tube, approximately 26 inches long, providing distressed swimmers something to hold on to.
In a real-life rescue, after a 911 call from shore, the drone spotted a swimmer in distress. It released two floating tubes, providing the swimmer with buoyancy until help arrived.
Like many coastal communities, Oak Island’s population can swell from about 10,000 to 50,000 during the summer tourist season. Riptides, which are hard to detect on the surface, can happen at any time.
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Every year, about 100 people die due to rip currents on U.S. beaches. More than 80% of beach rescues involve rip currents, if you’re caught in one, rescuers advise to not panic or try to fight it, but try to float or swim parallel to the coastline to get out of the current.
Oak Island Fire Chief Lee Price noted that many people underestimate the force of rip currents.
“People are, ‘Oh, I’m a good swimmer. I’m gonna go out there,’ and then they get in trouble,” Price said.
For Price, the benefit of drones isn’t just faster response times but also keeping rescuers safe. Through the camera and speaker, they can determine if someone isn’t in distress.
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Price said many people might not be aware of it.
“It’s like anything as technology advances, it takes a little bit for everybody to catch up and get used to it,” said Price.
In a demonstration, Barry showed how the drone can bring a safety rope to a swimmer while rescuers prepare to pull the swimmer to shore.
“The speed and accuracy that this gives you … rapid deployment, speed, accuracy, and safety overall,” Price said. “Not just safety for the victim, but safety for our responders.”
Manuel Bojorquez is a CBS News national correspondent based in Miami. He joined CBS News in 2012 as a Dallas-based correspondent and was promoted to national correspondent for the network’s Miami bureau in January 2017.
It’s been quite some time since we heard anything about Netflix’s animated adaptation of Splinter Cell — but the streamer has finally provided some details on the show. The reveal comes in the form of a very brief teaser trailer, which shows a little bit of the show, but mostly showcases Liev Schreiber’s gravelly take on lead character Sam Fisher. We also have a proper name now: it’s called Splinter Cell: Deathwatch.
Correspondent Conor Knighton visits New Jersey beaches along the Delaware Bay to learn about horseshoe crabs – mysterious creatures that predate dinosaurs – whose very blood has proved vital to keeping humans healthy by helping detect bacterial endotoxins. He talks with environmentalists about the decline in the horseshoe crab population, and with researchers who are pushing the pharmaceutical industry to switch its use of horseshoe crab blood with a synthetic alternative used in medical testing.
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Strands is the NYT’s latest word game after the likes of Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections – and it’s great fun. It can be difficult, though, so read on for my Strands hints.
SPOILER WARNING: Information about NYT Strands today is below, so don’t read on if you don’t want to know the answers.
Your Strands expert
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Your Strands expert
Marc McLaren
NYT Strands today (game #201) – hint #1 – today’s theme
What is the theme of today’s NYT Strands?
• Today’s NYT Strands theme is… A way with words
NYT Strands today (game #201) – hint #2 – clue words
Play any of these words to unlock the in-game hints system.
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DIRTY
STRICT
POSE
POSED
DEAN
DOSE
NYT Strands today (game #201) – hint #3 – spangram
What is a hint for today’s spangram?
• A bard’s domain
NYT Strands today (game #201) – hint #4 – spangram position
What are two sides of the board that today’s spangram touches?
First: left, 4th row
Last: right, 5th row
Right, the answers are below, so DO NOT SCROLL ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE THEM.
NYT Strands today (game #201) – the answers
(Image credit: New York Times)
The answers to today’s Strands, game #201, are…
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RHYME
VERSE
METER
STANZA
SYNTAX
DICTION
SCANSION
SPANGRAM: POETRY
My rating: Moderate
My score: 2 hints
I’ve never been a fan of poetry, though I love words and language. Set it to music and it’s a different matter – and I guess the best lyricists are also poets. But ask me to talk about SCANSION and STANZAs and I’m a little lost. All of which is a way of justifying why I needed two hints to complete what for some people will probably be a fairly simple Strands puzzle.
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I worked out what the theme was early on, with the clue of ‘A way with words’ and the fact that I found RHYME by accident combining to set me on the right track. But though I spotted a couple more, I couldn’t get them all without needing a helping hand for METER and STANZA. After that I spotted the spangram, and the others were solved pretty much by a combination of guesswork and my modicum of knowledge.
Yesterday’s NYT Strands answers (Thursday 19 September, game #200)
SPIDER
MILLIPEDE
BEETLE
TERMITE
EARWIG
SPANGRAM: CREEPYCRAWLIES
What is NYT Strands?
Strands is the NYT’s new word game, following Wordle and Connections. It’s now out of beta so is a fully fledged member of the NYT’s games stable and can be played on the NYT Games site on desktop or mobile.
I’ve got a full guide to how to play NYT Strands, complete with tips for solving it, so check that out if you’re struggling to beat it each day.
A blockchain entrepreneur, a cinematographer, a polar adventurer and a robotics researcher plan to fly around Earth’s poles aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule by the end of the year, becoming the first humans to observe the ice caps and extreme polar environments from orbit, SpaceX announced Monday.
The historic flight, launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, will be commanded by Chun Wang, a wealthy bitcoin pioneer who founded f2pool and stakefish, “which are among the largest Bitcoin mining pools and Ethereum staking providers,” the crew’s website says.
The Fram2 crew, seen during a visit to SpaceX’s Hawthorn, Calif., manufacturing facility. Left to right: Eric Philips, Jannicke Mikkelse, commander Chun Wang and Rabea Rogge.
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SpaceX
“Wang aims to use the mission to highlight the crew’s explorational spirit, bring a sense of wonder and curiosity to the larger public and highlight how technology can help push the boundaries of exploration of Earth and through the mission’s research,” SpaceX said on its website.
Wang’s crewmates are Norwegian cinematographer Jannicke Mikkelsen, Australian adventurer Eric Philips and Rabea Rogge, a German robotics researcher. All four have an interest in extreme polar environments and plan to carry out related research and photography from orbit.
The mission, known as “Fram2” in honor of a Norwegian ship used to explore both the Arctic and Antarctic regions, will last three to five days and fly at altitudes between about 265 and 280 miles.
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“This looks like a cool & well thought out mission. I wish the @framonauts the best on this epic exploration adventure!” tweeted Jared Isaacman, the billionaire philanthropist who charted the first private SpaceX mission — Inspiration4 — and who plans to blast off on a second flight — Polaris Dawn — later this month.
The flights “showcase what commercial missions can achieve thanks to @SpaceX’s reusability and NASA’s vision with the commercial crew program,” Isaacman said. “All just small steps towards unlocking the last great frontier.”
This looks like a cool & well thought out mission. I wish the @framonauts the best on this epic exploration adventure!
Polaris Program, Inspiration4, Axiom, & now Fram2 showcase what commercial missions can achieve thanks to @SpaceX‘s reusability and NASA’s vision with the… https://t.co/t0bUWgXesW
Like the Inspiration4 mission before them, Wang and his crewmates will fly in a Crew Dragon equipped with a transparent cupola giving them a picture-window view of Earth below and deep space beyond.
No astronauts or cosmonauts have ever viewed Earth from the vantage point of a polar orbit, one tilted, or inclined, 90 degrees to the equator. Such orbits are favored by spy satellites, weather stations and commercial photo-reconnaissance satellites because they fly over the entire planet as it rotates beneath them.
The high-inclination record for piloted flight was set in the early 1960s by Soviet Vostok spacecraft launched into orbits inclined 65 degrees. The U.S. record was set by a space shuttle mission launched in 1990 that carried out a classified military mission in an orbit tilted 62 degrees with respect to the equator.
The International Space Station never flies beyond 51.6 degrees north and south latitude. NASA planned to launch a space shuttle on a classified military mission around the poles in 1986, but the flight was canceled in the wake of the Challenger disaster.
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“The North and South Poles are invisible to astronauts on the International Space Station, as well as to all previous human spaceflight missions except for the Apollo lunar missions but only from far away,” the Fram2 website says. “This new flight trajectory will unlock new possibilities for human spaceflight.”
SpaceX has launched 13 piloted missions carrying 50 astronauts, cosmonauts and private citizens to orbit in nine NASA flights to the space station, three commercial visits to the lab and the Inspiration4 mission chartered by Isaacman.
Isaacman and three crewmates plan to blast off Aug. 26 on another fully commercial flight, this one featuring the first civilian spacewalks. NASA plans to launch its next Crew Dragon flight to the space station around Sept. 24.
Bill Harwood has been covering the U.S. space program full-time since 1984, first as Cape Canaveral bureau chief for United Press International and now as a consultant for CBS News.
Today we’re launching a totally new, totally different app. Meet Orion.
Orion is a small, fun app that helps you use your iPad as an external HDMI display for any camera, video game console, or even VHS. Just plug in one of the bajillion inexpensive adapters, and Orion handles the rest.
But wait — we’re a camera company. Why an HDMI monitor?
We built this to scratch a few itches. First, in professional cinematography, it’s common to connect an external screen to your camera to get a better view of the action. Orion not only gives you a bigger screen, but you can even share screenshots with your crew with a couple of taps.
We also built this for… pure fun. When traveling with a Nintendo Switch, it’s a delight to play games on a bigger screen, especially alongside friends.
Orion goes a step beyond display. By default, inputs could look fuzzy on an iPad’s retina display. (Why? The Switch runs a modest 1080p resolution, and even if it ran at a higher resolution, most adapters on the market can only run 60 frames per second at 1080P.)
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Orion sharpens those low resolution inputs with an AI powered upscaler!
Another perk is control over the brightness of the image beyond the iPad’s screen brightness. If you’re trying to view video in daylight, crank up brightness to HDR range for extra help. If you’re on a late-night flight and don’t want to bother anyone around you, make things darker than the iPad’s darkest.
OK, I hear you ask, but how much does all of this cost? A camera monitor is hundreds of dollars. Well, Orion is free. Yep, free.
If you want to support the app, get Orion Pro: It packs AI upscaling, CRT emulation for retro games, and image adjustments (and whatever else we cook up). It’s a one-time upgrade for $5. It unlocks everything. No subscriptions.
As for those adapters, we found plenty available for under $20. Now it’s easy to get confused and accidentally buy, say, a USB-C hub with video output, which can’t capture anything. (Ask me how I know.) That’s why we personally tested the top ten adapters on Amazon and made a helpful buying guide with our recommendations and some other accessories, too.
The Story of Orion
This summer, Apple announced a set of awesome new features coming to iOS 17, and one of them was external-webcam support on iPad. After digging into the feature for our flagship app, Halide, we weren’t satisfied with the results in a camera app.
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However, we did discover that a ton of companies sell tiny, inexpensive adapters that convert HDMI signals into webcams. “What if you could use an iPad as a portable screen?” Hmm! Intriguing. We had an idea, and we got to work.
We wrote the first line of code on August 6th, we’re shipping September 20th — 45 days later.
We’re launching at the start of new iPhone season, so we’re already super busy and shifting our focus to our flagship iPhone photography app, Halide. Orion won’t distract us from that, because we’re calling it a b-side.
B-sides are small fun, small, and focused projects. Apps like Halide needs major work every year to keep up with new hardware, but we expect Orion will be “done” after a release or two. We’ll keep maintaining it so it doesn’t break, but we won’t revolve our lives around it. It’s a fun utility, and that’s why we’re only asking for a few bucks.
Beyond being fun to build and design, apps like Orion let us experiment with new developer tools earlier than in our flagship apps. In a mature app used by lots of people, it’s a good idea to wait a year or two before adopting a cutting edge technology; while Apple launched SwiftUI in 2019, but we waited until 2021 to add it to Halide. SwiftUI has been a huge win for certain types of problems— and we couldn’t have built Orion so quickly without it— but by waiting two years before adding SwiftUI it to Halide, we had to play a lot of catchup in 2021.
So apps like Orion allow us to scratch our own itch, which is how we got into building apps in the first place, and also help us keep up with where iOS is heading.
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The Orion Video System Design
You might notice something about the styling of Orion — it’s very stylized in a… retro sort of way.
When we set off to design the app, we really wanted it to be fun. Starting with the basic idea—a portable screen—we thought of the era where televisions and video were still exciting, fresh technology. The techno-utopia of the early 1980s came to mind. We find this a delightful aesthetic.
Pastels, purples and pinks. Detailed technical illustrations and bright colors. Futuristic logos. Type that tracked far too tightly thanks to the invention of the photo-typesetter. And of course, the invention of bitmap typefaces and on-screen user interfaces and icons.
We didn’t want to just lean into the clichés—there are enough vaporwave sunsets with Deloreans out there that try to seem ’80s’— so went and developed a visual language that is based on the electronics brochures and VCR interfaces of bygone days that conveys ‘modern’ in a way only the 1980s visual vernacular can.
In Halide, we did everything we could to make the app feel as tactile as a real camera. Great cameras are wonderfully tactile — every knob and switch has a weighted, deliberate feel and click to it.
In Orion, we wanted to give you the joy of your own ‘video system’. That meant starting from the beginning: you open the box to unpack it. Because, well, why not.
Instructions follow, so you can get started quickly.
And when not actively in use, you return to a glowing, slightly distorted nostalgic place of on-screen menus, where our custom-made pixel font called Radiant steals the show.
If it wasn’t obvious, we had a lot of fun doing this. And that’s what really mattered to us: if anything, Orion was a project to collaborate with friends on something fun and different.
Thank you
We want to build things with craft, fun and delight. To showcase that apps are an art form, and have no business being boring. We hope you enjoy the result — we know that we loved building it for you. Thanks to you, we get to do what we love.
Orion was a collaboration with friends. Some of the incredible design and typography on display (and our two custom typefaces) are the work of Jelmar Geertsma. Orion was co-engineered with Anton Heestand. The opening music (yes, opening music) is by Cabel Sasser. Extra thanks go to Louie Mantia for bézier wrangling and our families — especially Margo — for supporting us in doing what we love. If you are still reading here, please consider leaving us a review on our apps — it goes a very long way.
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