Platforms State of the Union

• App Store requirement to adapt to all screen sizes from Spring 2020

• tvOS gets Multi-User support plus support for Xbox and Playstation game controllers

SwiftUI

• Less Code. Better Code. Everywhere. Declarative Syntax.

• Round images by Image(name).clipShape(Circle()).shadow(radius: 3, y: 3)

• CornerRadius by Image(name).cornerRadius(3)

• Creating a label by Text("Done!").font(.headline).color(.gray)

• Changing label to button by Button("Done!", action: done).font(.headline).color(.gray)

• Automatic Spacing & Insets, Localizability, Right-To-Left, Dynamic Type, Dark Mode, …

• Animations are Repsonsive, Interruptable, Automatic with minimum amount of code

• Build powerful layouts through composition leveraging VStack and HStack

• Adopt ObservableObject for model objects that can change

• Live Development Experience

• Adopt PreviewProvider for views/view controllers (surrounded by #if DEBUG) to live-preview in canvas

• Multiple previews with different configurations displayable on one canvas

• Adopt SwiftUI gradually at your own pace

Swift

• Introduction of Module Stability which ensures compatibility for binaries of current/future versions of Swift compiler

• GitHub adds Swift Package support to the GitHub Package Registry

• Swift Packages for apps on all platforms seamlessly supported by Xcode

Xcode 11

• Add additional editors whenever and whereever you want

• Use related content (Live View, Assistants, …) in any editor of your workspace. They disappear automatically when there is no content.

• Minimap enables straigt-forward code navigation. Highlights MARK declarations, Issues, Test Failures, …

• Add Documentation feature auto-adds missing function parameters

• Refactoring also changes documentation parameters

• Source-control history moves to the Inspector pane on the right side. Can now always be open.

• Editor displays inline code-change comparison

• TestPlans enable the developer to create many different test combinations (localizations, environment settings, sanitizers, devices). Works with Xcode Server!

• Enable device conditions in Xcode: Network Link Conditioner, Thermal State

• New app performance metrics for released apps: Battery Usage, Launch Time, Hang Rate, Memory Use, Disk Access

• TestFlight user feedback lets users share screenshots and comments

macOS Catalina

• Bring your apps to the Mac by just enable one checkbox in Xcode

• Move kernel extensions out of the kernel into user space with DriverKit which improves macOS stability for all users

• System volume will become read only. User data and apps are on a read/write volume.

• New permissions for apps that want to do Keystroke Recording, Screen Capture, Screen Recording

• New permissions for apps that want to access directories like Documents, Desktop, Downloads, iCloud Drive, Removable Media, Network Volumes

watchOS

• The watch becomes independent from the phone by running its own apps, by just checking a checkbox in Xcode

• Independent apps are highlighted on the watchOS App Store

• App Store has fully featured app descriptions. Apps are searchable by dictation and scribble. Direct download of the new, small bundles.

• Notifications, CloudKit, Complication Pushes, Text Fields, Sign In With Apple

• Streaming audio to the watch

• SwiftUI support

iOS

• New semantic colors that automatically update for the brand new Dark Mode

• New set of adaptive materials and vibrant content filters with variable transparency which support ligh/dark content mode

• Modal view controllers are now displayed as cards by default

• Peek and pop redesigned to show previews with contextual actions

• SFSymbols are 1500+ free, vector assets, variable scales and weights

• Re-designed share sheet

iPadOS

• Major enhancements to multi tasking by new UIWindowScene API

• New SceneDelegate to manage multiple windows at the same time from one app

• New state restauration system using NSUserActivity

• PencilKit framework for customize drawing in your app

• Major simplification in text selection. UITextInteraction API to fix conflicting-gesture issues

• ScrollViewScrubbing: Grab and drag the any scrollview scroll indicator

Accessibility Features

• Accessibility has been added to the iOS Quick Start guide

• Accessibility has been moved one hierarchy level up into the Settings main menu

• Accessibility sub-menus menu got icons for better discoverability

• Voice Over can display a grid for better selectability. You can show accessibility labels and much much more. It’s an incredible feature!

• Showing accessibility labels via Voice Over completely changes how we can test them. They are now just displayed on screen!

Privacy

• Good Practice: Process user data on device whenever you can & Ask for permission when processing user data & Encrypt user data

• Allow once is a new option when requesting location permission

• Apps location usage shown on a map by apple from time to time

• Sign in with Apple provides fast, easy sign in without tracking by tapping a Sign in with Apple Button and a quick FaceID

  • No more email address verification since apple already done this!

  • All AppleID-emails are protected by 2FA

  • Built in fraud detection

  • Apple provided email relays protect users real email address

  • Cross platform support: Works on Android and Windows devices (on the web)

  • No tracking by Apple

Machine Learning

• Happens on-device

• Engine is capable of 5 trillion operations per second

  • Image Saliency provides image heatmap

    • Highlights important objects and where users are likely to focus

    • Helps auto-cropping photos

• • Text Recognition

    • Search text from signs, posters and documents

    • Take advantage of the document camera capability from the Notes app

• • On-Device speech API with support for 10 languages

• CoreML supports more than 100 layer-model types which brings e.g. breakthrough natural language processing to your apps

  • Core ML On-Device Personalization enables developers to update models from inside the app (in the background)

  • Create ML becomes a macOS app enabling users creating models without writing code

    • Choose from different model templates

    • Build multiple models with different data sets and define parameters of each

    • Real-time feedback on model training

    • Supports transfer learning (e.g. for image classification) which speeds up training

    • Experiment and preview models, e.g. use microphone to test sound classification models

Siri Shortcuts

• Make them discoverable by adding the Add to Siri button to your apps

• Apple made them conversational by adding Parameters

• Shortcuts app is build into iOS and iPadOS

• Added Automation which allows to set triggers for when to run specific shortcuts

• Configurable 3rd-party actions enable combination of multiple actions (multi-step shortcuts)

  • Synced via iCloud to all of your devices

ARKit

• Integration of AR Quick Look with Apple Pay to try out clothes, glasses, and other products (and immediately by them)

• Worlds largest AR platform

• 3 technologies that make it easy to develop AR experiences: ARKit, RealityKit, Reality Composer

• Reality Composer lets you layout AR experiences in 3D on macOS, iOS and iPadOs

• RealityKit is a modern real-time 3D engine. Designed for AR. Easy integration with existing apps.

  • Uses physically based rendering, Data driven rendergraph, Multi-threaded

  • Access through native Swift API framework

• ARKit 3

  • Simultaneous from and back camera

  • Motion capture by ML algorithm

  • People occlusion detection by ML algorithm

Metal

• Modern high performance (100x OpenGL) GPU programming. Low overhead. Easy to use.

• Core layer under all of Apples frameworks: UIKit, AppKit, Core Animation, SpriteKit, RealityKit, ARKit, MapKit, WebKit, Core ML, Create ML, VisionKit, Core Image, Camera Processing

• Full support in iOS Simulator brings major performance improvements

  • Metal Compute provides building blocks for general purpose computation: Shading Language, Compiler, Compute Encoding, Metal Performance Shaders,

  • Metal Tile Shading combines compute shaders and fragment part into one highly-efficient render pass

  • Metal Indirect Compute Command Encoding lets you build GPU compute commands right on the GPU

• Amazing Metal-based, animated Raytracing demo with computationally expensive multi-reflections and more

• “Built for Pros” 😅