PRESS RELEASE June 3, 2019

Breakthrough SwiftUI Framework, ARKit 3 and New Xcode Tools Make Developing Powerful Apps Easier and Faster Than Ever

SwiftUI

The vision for Swift has always been about making development faster, easier and more interactive, and a modern UI framework is a huge part of that vision. SwiftUI provides an extremely powerful and intuitive new user interface framework for building sophisticated app UIs. Using simple, easy-to-understand declarative code, developers can create stunning, full-featured user interfaces complete with smooth animations. SwiftUI saves developers time by providing a huge amount of automatic functionality including interface layout, Dark Mode, Accessibility, right-to-left language support and internationalization. SwiftUI apps run natively and are lightning fast. And because SwiftUI is the same API built into iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS, developers can more quickly and easily build rich, native apps across all Apple platforms.

Xcode 11 Brings SwiftUI to Life

A new graphical UI design tool built into Xcode 11 makes it easy for UI designers to quickly assemble a user interface with SwiftUI — without having to write any code. Swift code is automatically generated and when this code is modified, the changes to the UI instantly appear in the visual design tool. Now developers can see automatic, real-time previews of how the UI will look and behave as they assemble, test and refine their code. The ability to fluidly move between graphical design and writing code makes UI development more fun and efficient and makes it possible for software developers and UI designers to collaborate more closely. Previews can run directly on connected Apple devices, including iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Apple Watch and Apple TV, allowing developers to see how an app responds to Multi-Touch, or works with the camera and on-board sensors — live, as the interface is being built.

Augmented Reality

RealityKit was built from the ground up for AR. It features a photorealistic rendering, as well as incredible environment mapping and support for camera effects like noise and motion blur, making virtual content nearly indistinguishable from reality. RealityKit also features incredible animation, physics and spatial audio, and developers can harness the capabilities of RealityKit with the new RealityKit Swift API. Reality Composer, a powerful new app for iOS, iPadOS and Mac, lets developers easily prototype and produce AR experiences with no prior 3D experience. With a simple drag-and-drop interface and a library of high-quality 3D objects and animations, Reality Composer lets developers place, move and rotate AR objects to assemble an AR experience, which can be directly integrated into an app in Xcode or exported to AR Quick Look.

Other Developer Features

  • PencilKit makes it easy for developers to add Apple Pencil support to their apps and includes the redesigned tool palette.
  • SiriKit adds support for third-party audio apps, including music, podcasts and audiobooks, so developers can now integrate Siri directly into their iOS, iPadOS and watchOS apps, giving users the ability to control their audio with a simple voice command.
  • MapKit now provides developers a number of new features such as vector overlays, point-of-interest filtering, camera zoom and pan limits, and support for Dark Mode.
  • In addition to language enhancements targeted at SwiftUI, Swift 5.1 adds Module Stability — the critical foundation for building binary-compatible frameworks in Swift.
  • Powerful new Metal Device families facilitate code sharing between multiple GPU types on all Apple platforms, while support for the iOS Simulator makes it simple to build Metal apps for iOS and iPadOS.

Images of Developer Tools