Written by Federico Zanetello Feli Bernutz

Description: Take a deeper dive into the latest tools, technologies, and advances across Apple platforms to help you create even better apps.

Xcode Cloud

• available starting today

Pricing

• 25 hours/month free until end of 2023

Vision for the Developer Platform

Swift

• swift-async-algorithms - open-source package that brings concurrency to Swift's rich set of existing sequence algorithms
• new set of clock types for representing time units
• new set of async algorithms builds on these clock types to provide many time-based algorithms, e.g.:

fastEvents.throttle(for: .seconds (1)) // helps slow down updates from a sequence

• distributed actors
  • actors can communicate across multiple processes or devices. The distributed keyword marks these actors and methods that can be accessed remotely
  • just as actors help Swift protect your state data from race conditions, distributed actors help Swift make them available outside your process, using a pluggable transport mechanism

• regular expressions
  • new regular expression literal
  • built directly into the language, allowing the Swift compiler to check for correctness
  • unlock the power of Swift's type system when you're extracting information with a regular expression
  • Unicode support

let order = "Order from <Betsy's Bakery>, type: maple frosted, count in dozen: 3"
let regex = /Order from <(.*)>, type: (.*), count in dozen: ([0-9]+)/
order.firstMatch(of: regex)

let log = "0   FoodTruckKit    0x000000018a0e5d88 Donut.bake() + 144"
let logRegex = /\s+([a-zA-Z_.]+)\s+(0x[\da-fA-F]+)/
log.firstMatch(of: logRegex)

• Regex Builders
  • can directly convert a regular expression literal into a regex builder

let log = "0   FoodTruckKit    0x000000018a0e5d88 Donut.bake() + 144"
let logRegex = Regex {
  OneOrMore(.whitespace)
  Capture {
    OneOrMore {
      CharacterClass(
      	.anyOf("_."),
      	("a"..."z"),
      	("A"..."Z")
      )
    }
  }
  OneOrMore(.whitespace)
  Capture {
    "Ox"
    OneOrMore(.hexDigit)
  }
}

log.firstMatch(of: logRegex)

• Swift Generics improvements
• Package Plugins
  • instead of code in your app, they're code that helps build your app
  • can be invoked from the command line or within Xcode, either as part of your build phase or on-demand
  • run in a sandbox environment which prompts you for permission before reading or modifying your code
  • examples: linting, formatting, code generation
  • can run on Xcode Cloud

• build improvements
  • new parallelization efforts
  • (static) link time is up to twice as fast

• Swift concurrency runtime is now more tightly integrated with the OS
• launch time for apps written in Swift is dramatically faster on iOS 16 (up to 2x)
• wall of features:
  • Predictable ARC
  • Compile-time constants
  • any for all protocols
  • Flexible pointer comparisons
  • Implicit type parameters
  • Lightweight requirements
  • Type placeholders
  • SwiftPM plugins
  • Top-level async
  • Pointer comparisons
  • Pairwise result builders
  • Optimizations written in Swift
  • Distributed actors
  • Flexbile key coding
  • Regex literals
  • Better memory binding
  • Temporary buffers
  • Multi-statement closure type inference
  • Faster declaration checking
  • Protocol opening
  • Faster linking
  • Protocol caching on startup
  • @Sendable closures
  • Efficient Array metadata
  • Eager compilation
  • Async Algorithms
  • Unicode character classes
  • Concurrency back-deployment
  • if let shorthand
  • Clock types
  • Function back-deployment
  • Module disambiguation
  • Pointer conversion for C calls
  • Sendable
  • Native grapheme breaking
  • Faster Set operations

SwiftUI

• new navigation API
  • programmatic control over view presentation
  • can easily save and restore selection
  • can replace the full contents of a navigation stack

NavigationStack(path: $navPath) {
  MusicLibraryView()
    .navigationDestination(for: Album.self) { AlbumDetail($0) }
    .navigationDestination(for: Artist.self) { ArtistDetail($0) }
}

• Grid
  • new API that makes it easier to lay out a set of views aligned across multiple rows and columns
  • new custom layout API
    • gives you the flexibility to build any type of layout you want
    • e.g., flow layout, radial layout

• half sheet API (UIKit's Detents API)
• share sheet support
• new UICollectionViewCell contentConfiguration of type UIHostingConfiguration for hosting SwiftUI views in collection view cells:

cell.contentConfiguration = UIHostingConfiguration {
	// your SwiftUI view here
}

• Swift Charts
  • highly customizable charting framework
  • makes it easy to create visualizations
  • uses the same declarative syntax as SwiftUI

Chart(data) { element in
  BarMark(
  	x: .value("Product", element.product),
  	y: .value("Sales", element.sales)
  )
}

• New ViewThatFits view
  • A view that adapts to the available space by providing the first child view that fits

ViewThatFits {
  HStack {
    // content
  }
  VStack {
  	// content
  }
}

• (macOS) new MenuBarExtra API
  • menu bar extras are those are the icons on the upper right corner of your screen, like Wi-Fi and Spotlight
  • add it to the body of your app

@main
struct MyApp: App {
  var body: some Scene {
    WindowGroup {
    	// ..
    }
    #if os(macOS)
    MenuBarExtra {
      ScrollView {
        VStack(spacing: 0) {
          BrandHeader(animated: false, size: .reduced)
          Text("Donut stuff!")
        }
      }
    } label: {
      Label("Food Truck", systemImage: "box.truck")
    }
    .menuBarExtraStyle(.window)
    #endif
  }
}

System Experience

Lock Screen widgets

• essentially watchOS complications for iOS
• Circular widget
• Rectangular
• Inline - tiny amount of text/SF Symbols above the clock on iPhone
• from WatchOS 9 complications also work with WidgetKit

Live Activities

• also backed by WidgetKit and SwiftUI
• can animate your updates from one state to the next

Messages Collaboration API

• new way to enhance collaborative experiences
• can start a collaboration via the or drag & drop
• uses existing API

App Intents Framework

• Automatic generation of App Shortcuts, without the need for the user to manually create or add to Siri
• no separate intent definition files or code generation, your code is the source of truth
• If you adopted Intents to integrate with Widgets or domains like media or messaging, you should keep using the SiriKit Intents framework
• For developers who build custom intents for Siri and Shortcuts, you should go ahead and upgrade to App Intents
  • Xcode can convert your custom intents to App Intents

New APIs

• DriverKit is now available on iOS 16 and iPadOS 16
• CallKit is now available in watchOS 9 and macOS 13
• ScanKit and RoomPlan have new features that use AR and LiDAR scanning
• Focus filters let you adjust the content of your app based on the user's current focus
• MapKit
  • new 3D City Experience available, camera controls
  • Look Around
  • Apple Maps Server APIs
    • Geocode - turns a lat/long into an address
    • Reverse Geocode - turns an address into GPS coordinates
    • Search
    • Estimated Times of Arrival

• New WeatherKit (available in all platforms), pricing:

• VisionKit
  • live text API
  • data scanner API
  • new automatic language detection for Japanese and Korean

Part of this note was originally published at fbernutz.github.io.