Apple on Monday showcased new tools, technologies and APIs for developers at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC 2022).
These include widgets on the “lock screen”, WeatherKit, general availability Xcode Cloud – Apple’s continuous integration and delivery service built into Xcode – and Metal 3 to allow game developers to create graphics with accelerated performance. It also announced improvements for Swift, SwiftUI, Xcode, and SKAdNetwork.
“We love collaborating with our developer community and providing them with innovative new technologies that enable them to build the next great generation of apps,” said Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of global developer relations and marketing. for business and education.
Xcode Cloud is now available with free subscription plans of 25 hours per month until December 2023 for members of the Apple Developer Program, and a maximum of 1,000 hours per month.
Xcode Cloud lets developers and teams of all sizes build, test, and deliver apps in the cloud to free up their Mac for other tasks. With parallel testing in the cloud, developers can test a simulated version of every current Apple device, deploy a version for internal testing, or deliver to beta testers via TestFlight.
He also announced improvements for Xcode 14. Project builds will be up to 25% faster, while the Xcode app is now 30% smaller to download, with downloadable simulator runtimes for watchOS and tvOS.
“The new cross-platform target creates a single SwiftUI interface for use across iOS, iPadOS, macOS and tvOS,” Apple said.
SwiftUI live previews are now interactive by default in Xcode. The new App Icon feature in the Asset Catalog will allow developers to provide a single icon size for all platforms, and Xcode will automatically generate all required assets for the app.
“Xcode includes language and editing improvements with smarter autocomplete, and additional live snippets give developers faster access to the code they want to write,” he added.
Game Abilities
Apple introduced Metal 3 – the latest version of its graphics framework – with new features including MetalFX Upscaling.
The new “fast resource loading” API can reduce latency by providing a more direct path from storage to GPU.
Game developers who integrate with Game Center can add activity views to the dashboard. It also announced SharePlay support to make it easier for users to play together in real time.
Swift and SwiftUI improvements
Swift has added string processing capability with new regular expression literal support built right into the language, allowing developers to quickly verify the correctness of their regular expressions and extract information with less code.
Additionally, package plugins are now available in Swift Package Manager.
SwiftUI, Apple’s next-generation UI framework, offers an improved navigation API to make it easier for developers to control how their app moves between views.
Other additions include custom layouts and Swift charts.
WeatherKit
WeatherKit allows developers to integrate global weather forecasts that power Apple Weather directly into their apps.
“Using high-resolution weather models combined with machine learning and prediction algorithms, Apple Weather provides current weather, hourly 10-day forecasts, daily forecasts, and historical weather,” he said.
WeatherKit will be available to developers through native Swift and REST APIs.
Ad improvements
It added new functionality to the SKAdNetwork API to help ad networks and advertisers better measure in-app or web ad performance while maintaining user privacy.
This includes hierarchical source IDs. SKAdNetwork also offers hierarchical conversion values to allow developers to receive more conversion insights for smaller campaigns.
New APIs
New APIs for Apple developers include Live Text to enter text directly from photos and videos found in apps, or via a live camera feed.
Additionally, the collaboration features built into Messages are available for third-party apps.
“Developers can also highlight content that users have shared from their app in Messages in a new Shared with you section of their app, making it easier for recipients to return to that content later,” he said. he declares.
Other APIs available include Passkeys, MapKit, Focus filter, Automatic Shortcuts, RoomPlan, and Live Activities.
For watchOS 9, VoIP calls will now be supported with CallKit.
Published on
June 07, 2022
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