Apple has rolled out new tools, technologies and APIs to help developers improve user experience. The new functions allow developers to integrate certain data directly into their apps.
“We love collaborating with our developer community and providing them with new innovative technologies that enable them to build the next great generation of apps,” said Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations and Enterprise and Education Marketing. “With powerful new APIs for widgets on the Lock Screen, new services like WeatherKit, the availability of Xcode Cloud to help every Apple developer build apps faster, and new gaming capabilities with Metal 3, developers have more tools than ever to create app experiences that their users will love.”
WeatherKit gives developers the ability to integrate Apple Weather forecast data directly into their apps, and Xcode Cloud — Apple’s continuous integration and delivery service built into Xcode — is now available to every Apple Developer Program member to help them create higher-quality apps, faster.
Metal 3 enables gaming developers to create graphics with accelerated performance, and developing for Apple’s platforms is now even more intuitive with improvements to Swift, SwiftUI, and Xcode. And with improvements to SKAdNetwork, ad networks and developers can better measure how ads perform while still preserving user privacy.
Swift and SwiftUI offer the best way to build an app, and now come with new features that streamline the development process. Xcode 14 features new enhancements to further improve developer productivity. Project builds are up to 25 percent faster, thanks to improved parallelism, and the Xcode application is now 30 percent smaller to download, with downloadable simulator runtimes for watchOS and tvOS. The new multiplatform target creates a single SwiftUI interface for use across iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and tvOS. Developer code is easier to maintain yet highly customisable to take advantage of each platform’s unique capabilities.
SwiftUI live previews are now interactive by default in Xcode, so changes are immediately live, and developers can create variants of each preview without writing any code, altering the colour scheme, text size, device orientation, or accessibility modes. The new app icon feature in assets catalogue allows developers to provide a single icon size for all platforms, and Xcode automatically generates all the required assets for the app. Xcode includes language and editing enhancements with smarter auto completion, and additional dynamic snippets get developers to the code they want to write faster.
With widgets on the lock screen, developers can now share the same code between lock screen widgets and complications on Apple Watch. Users also now can grab text straight from photos and videos in their apps, or through a live camera feed. Some new features include passkeys, focus filters, and automatic shortcuts.
Other new features include:
- watchOS 9: VoIP calls are now supported with CallKit; the share sheet enables users to share content from their favourite app directly to iMessage and other popular messaging apps; and third-party apps can now access the photos app with photos picker and even integrate with Apple TV.
- MapKit: Third-party apps can include the detailed 3D city experience and Look Around for a richer user experience. New Apple Maps Server APIs offer faster and easier maps integrations.
- Collaboration tools: The rich collaboration features built into messages are available to 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 get back to that content at a later time.
- RoomPlan: Powered by ARKit, developers can now utilise the LiDAR Scanner on iPhone and iPad to create a 3D floor plan for a room, with characteristics like dimensions and type of furniture included.
- Live activities: Using WidgetKit, developers can keep their users up to date with the most current information for an activity or event right on the lock screen.
