WWDC 2022: Apple brings new tech, tools for app developers

Over the last several years, Apple has been offering platforms such as app accelerators, coding camps, and hosting Tech Talks to help upcoming and budding app developers to hone their skill sets and improve the user experience on their apps.

However, with the fast-evolving digital technology space, it's very hard for people to keep pace with it to get access to new tools and resources to improve their knowledge.

To help them, Apple during the WWDC (World Wide Developers Conference) 2022 event, announced next-generation technologies, tools, and API (Application Programming Interfaces) kits.

Apple is bringing the XCode Cloud subscription service to all small and big companies. On the Apple XCode Cloud platform, developers can directly begin to build, test, and be able to deliver a high-quality user experience on apps completely online.

As goodwill, Apple is offering 25 hours per month of free access to XCode Cloud through December 2023 to all members of the Apple Developer Program and topping out at 1,000 hours per month. It is available in a wide range of tariff plans and users can subscribe according to their budget.

Xcode Cloud service. Credit: Apple

The improved Xcode 14 helps users create and test their apps 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.

"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 color scheme, text size, device orientation, or accessibility modes," the company said.

Furthermore, Swift, which is the preferred computer language to build software and apps for Apple devices, will now get powerful string processing capability with new regular expression literal support. It is built directly into the language and this allows developers to quickly check the correctness of their regular expressions and extract information with less code.

"With new Package Plugins available in Swift Package Manager, it’s now easier for developers to run custom commands on their projects, and even upload and share the commands with others," Apple noted.

Metal 3 brings new features that unleash the full potential of Apple silicon.

It also introduced Metal-3, the new version of Apple’s graphics framework. With MetalFX Upscaling tech, developers can be able to quickly render complex scenes by using less compute-intensive frames and then apply high-quality spatial upscaling and temporal anti-aliasing.

Apple is also introducing a new WeatherKit with rich animation support and developers can make good use of the kit to incorporate world-class global weather forecast features into their apps.

The new SKAdNetwork API is said to be designed to help ad networks and advertisers better measure how ads perform in apps or on the web while still preserving user privacy.

Apple is offering several API kits including Weather, Live Texts, Maps, Focus and more. Credit: Apple

Apple is also offering several feature-rich kits to integrate their app as Widgets on the Lock Screen, make good use of Live Text, Collaboration tools, Passkeys for the password-less login process, MapKit to offer 3D city landscape on their apps, Focus filters, RoomPlan, Live Activities, and automatic shortcuts.

Get the latest news on new launches, gadget reviews, apps, cybersecurity, and more on personal technology only on DH Tech.