In the hand
A morning of tidying the websites, an afternoon of App Store kits, and an evening in which both television apps grew iPhone and iPad versions, the whole suite got its design, and PVA Today ran on something other than a TV for the first time: an iPad, at six minutes past ten.
The morning, on the web
The day started on taxr.org. A new page, Apps, gathers every public way into the record, each tagged live, beta or coming. A second, Tech, went up under the title “Giving Flyover”, the engineering behind Taxr, and within the hour was trimmed by a rule that then ran through everything else that day: show the ability, not the method. The pages that describe pva.today’s tools lost their blueprints and kept what a person needs, what you can ask and what comes back. Two new pages sell the television apps before they ship, one for PVA Today and one for Quilt City, and the privacy page now covers both, checked against their code.
The chat’s example address had been a private home. It is now the public library, in the chat, on the site and in the places the chat knows by name: “the library”, “the public library”, or just “library” all find it. The last trace, a spoken example worked out from a private home’s figures, went that evening.
And Paducah got a door of its own: paducah.mccracken.properties, the quilt edge to edge with the voice, where a tapped parcel’s page slides up over the cloth so the voice plays on. On a phone or tablet a first tap now selects a parcel, the patch darkening or the glass pulsing maroon, and a second opens it; with a mouse, one click still does.
Real frames for the store
Both television apps gained a capture mode: the opening plays silently and the app saves a full frame of a named moment, drawn on the Apple TV itself. Six for each app, from the 2017 box, went into an App Store kit: the listing, the privacy and review answers, the icon in every slot, and the screenshots with their captions. Nothing is submitted yet; the kits wait for the paid developer team.
Two apps, five screens
At seven past eight the word came to add the iPhone and iPad target, remembering the Duo, and to plan the lift of the shared core. By a quarter to nine PVA Today had an iPhone and iPad version, built from the very same files as the television app and sold as one product with it. The opening plays as on the TV, the voice too, in any window: turn the device, split the screen or fold it and the camera re-frames and the tour carries on. The remote became touch, a tap to select, swipes for the directions, two fingers for back. Paducah followed minutes later: the quilt sews itself on an iPhone or iPad under its city’s name, while the television app keeps “Quilt City”. The iPhone Duo, Apple’s foldable, runs the iPhone apps. The television apps came out of the evening unchanged.
Then the design. Glass and Cloth is the design document for the whole suite, written in the open so the team can riff on it: two apps, five screens, one county. The bar is Apple’s Design Awards. Everything on the page is built from what the apps already do, the opening, the pour, the rain, the heartbeat, the voice, the record, the quilt, and says what each becomes on each screen. The iPhone is the porch, the iPad the table, the Duo the fold, the Apple TV the room. The Pencil gets seven words, no more, so nothing is accidental. Every scene has a plain twin on an ordinary map, behind one switch, for the day someone wants the beauty turned down.
The Mac had been forgotten, so completely that nobody could quite believe it. By seven past nine it was the fifth screen: the stained-glass window hanging in a window of its own, lit by the real sun through the day; a question typed instead of spoken; the whole state across a big display. Rather than build it that night, it was written down as a list of sixteen issues, in order, for another team to burn down, from the shared core to the icon.
In the hand
The first thing asked of the iPad version, before anyone had held it, was a fling. A short flick is still the remote’s swipe. A big one spins the county, and it eases back over six seconds by a whole number of turns, so it lands exactly where the tour left off. While it spins, the iPad’s own movement turns the camera the same way, so the scene holds still in space as the tablet moves in your hands.
the spin is just candy anyway, so this is extra
Oct 2, 22:00
Then the question of whether to run it on the iPad, and at six past ten:
it worked
Oct 2, 22:06
The first time PVA Today had run on anything but a television.
The next quarter hour was spent with the iPad, not the keyboard. The axis lock, the part that holds the scene still in space, is now on from the start and set afresh at every level. A county-shaped button sits above Play/Pause, McCracken’s own outline, filled while locked: tap it and the camera holds where it is while the tour keeps its clock, so the rain, the heartbeat and the captions arrive on time. And a fling is now judged by how far the finger traveled, not how fast: an iPad swipe is quicker than you’d think, and every one had been reading as a spin, which is why a swipe into the Jackson Purchase kept landing in the wrong county. Both apps also learned to remember whether you have heard the welcome to its end.
The verdict at a quarter past eleven: the iPad app looks great. One more ask came with it, that every way back should land the view upright whatever the spin, tilt or zoom had been, and it did, in the build that merged a minute later.
Paducah in the hand
Paducah went on the iPad too. The quilt had been accumulating navigation, and the decision was to hammer it out again: on iPhone and iPad the quilt blasts in at once, edge to edge, with the sewing, the opening and the voice parked for now. Pinch to zoom, between a close look at the seams and the whole city. Tap a neighborhood and it lights alone with its card: its name, its part of town, how many parcels, how many changed hands this year. Tap it again to go in, and there the parcels are the thing you tap. Tap outside, or pinch out past it, and the city comes back. A small ↺ returns to the landing.
One fight was lost on purpose. The quilt was meant to stay put in landscape, and iPadOS 26 ignores an app’s wish not to rotate. After two tries:
just let it rotate. apple will fix that. just let it rotate i guess. i’ll be testing in landscape as if it’s the only mode that matters
Oct 2, 22:55
Every orientation is allowed, and landscape is the one that matters. Then a crash: the touch version had been borrowing the television’s navigation state and giving its parts other meanings. It got its own state, the polling went, and a pass for slop closed the day on both apps a little after eleven.
What’s next
The county button wants to be a three-way toggle: locked, so the view floats; frozen, so it follows the glass in your hands; and reset, upright and locked. The quilt’s sewing, its opening and its voice are parked on the iPhone and iPad until the navigation settles, and the Apple TV quilt is getting a neighborhood loop. The Mac has its list. And the App Store waits on the paid team, the voice’s rights and the first submission.
- taxr.org/apps: the family of apps.
- taxr.org/tech, “Giving Flyover”; trimmed to ability, not method, by one.
- The chat’s example address becomes the public library.
- Capture mode and an App Store kit for each television app.
- paducah.mccracken.properties: the quilt edge to edge, the voice playing on.
- A first tap selects, a second opens.
- PVA Today on iPhone and iPad.
- Paducah on iPhone and iPad.
- Glass and Cloth: the suite, Plain, and the Mac as the fifth screen.
- PVA Today for Mac, as sixteen issues.
- The fling.
- “It worked”: the first run in the hand.
- The axis lock from the start, the county button, a fling by distance.
- Paducah in the hand: the quilt at once, zoom, neighborhoods, let it rotate, the crash and the cleanup.
- Every flight lands upright.