InfoQ Homepage Apple Content on InfoQ
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ARKit 5 and RealityKit 2 Further Enhance iOS AR Capabilities
At WWDC21 Apple announced new major iterations for its ARKit and RealityKit frameworks to create augmented reality-based apps for iOS. Most significantly, RealityKit 2 will allow developers to easily create 3D models from a collection of pictures, while ARKit 5 expands face tracking and location anchor support.
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Xcode Cloud Brings CI/CD to iOS App Development
At WWDC21, Apple announced Xcode Cloud, a continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) system to help developers build, test, and distribute apps. Still in beta, Xcode Cloud supports both releasing to TestFlight and on the App Store.
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Swift 5.4 Brings Support for Multiple Variadic Arguments, Result Builders, and More
Recently released Swift 5.4 brings support for multiple variadic parameters, extends implicit member syntax, adds support for local functions overloading, and more. Additionally, it improves runtime performance and binary size.
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Sandboxing and Other Measures to Harden iMessage on iOS and macOS
After being hit by a 0-click exploit in iMessage last year, Apple has been hard at work to improve the security of its platform. One of the major changes in iOS 14 is BlastDoor, a tightly sandboxed service responsible for parsing all untrusted messages, along with randomization of the shared cache region containing system libraries, and exponential throttling to counter brute-force attacks.
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Porting to Apple Silicon: Firefox Case
With the introduction of Apple Silicon, macOS developers will need to port their programs to the new CPU. For complex programs, this may be no small feat, though, as Firefox engineer manager Gian-Carlo Pascotto recounted.
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AWS Now Offering Mac Mini-Based EC2 Instances
Announced at re:Invent 2020, AWS new EC2 Mac Instances enable running macOS on Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute to build, test, package, and sign Xcode applications for Apple platforms, including macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS, and Safari.
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How x86 to arm64 Translation Works in Rosetta 2
Along with its plan to transition their Macintosh line from Intel CPUs to its own CPUs, dubbed Apple Silicon, Apple announced Rosetta 2, a binary translation software that aims to smooth out the process. Thanks to Rosetta 2, most x86 programs will be able to execute after an initial translation step.
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Apple's ML Compute Framework Accelerates TensorFlow Training
As part of the recent macOS Big Sur release, Apple has included the ML Compute framework. ML Compute provides optimized mathematical libraries to improve training on CPU and GPU on both Intel and M1-based Macs, with up to a 7x improvement in training times using the TensorFlow deep-learning library.
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New Electron Release Supports New Apple Silicon Chips
The Electron team recently released the 11th iteration of the popular cross-platform native desktop application framework. Electron 11 introduces support for the new Apple silicon hardware (Darwin arm64). Electron 11 also updates the versions of Chromium, Node, and its JavaScript engine.
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Swift Aims to Become a Data Race-Free Concurrent Language
The Swift team has published its roadmap to improve concurrency support in Swift. In a first phase, Swift will gain the async syntax and actors, while in a second phase focus will be on eliminating data races and deadlocks.
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Apple Open Sources System, Swift Library Interfacing with System-Level API
System is a low-level library Apple introduced at its last WWDC conference to provide an idiomatic and type-safe interface to system calls and currency types usually available at the OS level. In keeping with Apple's aim to push Swift as a cross-platform development ecosystem, System has been open-sourced to make it easier for programmers to contribute to its further development across platforms.
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Google Engineer Tailors Swift for Windows
The vision for Swift to become a cross-platform programming language has moved one step further with the introduction of a Swift toolchain for Windows 10. Early adopters can now use Swift to create Windows 10 programs that interoperate through the C ABI with existing libraries available on the platform.
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Swift 5.3 Brings New Language Features, Better Developer Experience, and Improved Performance
Swift 5.3, which has recently become available with Xcode 12, includes a number of significant new features at the syntax level, including support for multi-pattern catch clauses, increased availability for implicit self, and more. Additionally, the Swift team has worked on improving runtime performance, especially when using SwiftUI, and developer experience.
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iOS 14 Now Available, Developers Forced to Rush to Submit Apps
Apple has released the first public version of iOS 14, which brings a number of new features such as app clips, widgets, improved Swift UI, ARKit, Core ML, and more. Developers received the iOS and Xcode GM version a mere 24 hours in advance, though, which led to some frustration.
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Apple Rejects NFC, Bluetooth and 14 More Web APIs, Citing Privacy Reasons
In the frame of its tracking prevention policy, Apple recently communicated its current refusal to implement 16 web APIs, citing privacy concerns. Apple emphasized that the decision could be reconsidered if the proposals evolve to reduce the fingerprinting attack surface.