Apple today unveiled several technologies designed to make it easier and faster for developers to create new apps.
SwiftUI is a development framework designed to make building user interfaces easier than ever, according to Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. ARKit 3, RealityKit, and Reality Composer are advanced tools designed to make it even easier for developers to create compelling AR experiences for consumer and business apps, he adds.
The company also unveiled new tools and application programming interfaces (APIs) to simplify the process of bringing iPad apps to Mac. And updates to Core ML and Create ML allow for more powerful and streamlined on-device machine learning apps. Federighi says other new developer tools are:
PencilKit, which makes it easy for developers to add Apple Pencil support to their apps and includes the redesigned tool palette.
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SiriKit adds support for third-party audio apps, including music, podcasts and audiobooks, so developers can now integrate Siri directly into their iOS, iPadOS and watchOS apps, giving users the ability to control their audio with a simple voice command.
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MapKit now provides developers a number of new features such as vector overlays, point-of-interest filtering, camera zoom and pan limits, and support for Dark Mode.
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In addition to language enhancements targeted at SwiftUI, Swift 5.1 adds Module Stability — the critical foundation for building binary-compatible frameworks in Swift.
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New Metal Device families facilitate code sharing between multiple GPU types on all Apple platforms, while support for the iOS Simulator makes it simple to build Metal apps for iOS and iPadOS.
