Platforms State of the Union

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