InfoQ Homepage Apple Content on InfoQ
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Austrian DPA Ruling against Google Analytics Paves the Way to EU-based Cloud Services
In a recent ruling, the Austrian data regulator declared the use of Google Analytics unlawful based on EU GDPR regulation. While the ruling is very specifically argued and worded, its implications go well beyond this particular case.
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Swift Playgrounds 4.0 Enables Creating iOS Apps Using an iPad
With its latest update to Swift Playground, Apple has made it possible for the first time to create iPhone and iPad apps using an iPad. Developers can build and submit Swift 5.5 apps using SwiftUI and the Swift Package Manager, as well as additional features.
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Swift Experimentally Introduces Support for Distributed Actors
The new Swift Distributed Actors package provides a glimpse into what the future distributed actor language feature could look like in Swift.
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What's New in SwiftUI 3
Apple is continuing to work to bring SwiftUI, its declarative UI framework for Swift, on a par with UIKit and AppKit. At WWDC 2021, SwiftUI got a number of new features, including extended List views, support for pull to refresh, asynchronous images, and more.
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Xcode 13 Extends Team Collaboration and Source Editing Features
Xcode 13 brings improved Git integration, support for GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab collaboration features, new editor capabilities, and Vim keybindings.
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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.