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

SAN JOSE, Calif. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — June 3, 2019 — Apple® today unveiled several innovative technologies that make it dramatically easier and faster for developers to create powerful new apps. SwiftUI™ is a revolutionary development framework that makes building powerful user interfaces easier than ever before. ARKit 3, RealityKit™ and Reality Composer™ are advanced tools designed to make it even easier for developers to create compelling AR experiences for consumer and business apps. New tools and APIs greatly simplify the process of bringing iPad® apps to Mac®. And updates to Core ML® and Create ML™ allow for more powerful and streamlined on-device machine learning apps.

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With Xcode, it's never been easier for developers to bring their existing iPad projects to Mac. (Photo: Business Wire)

“The new app development technologies unveiled today make app development faster, easier and more fun for developers, and represent the future of app creation across all Apple platforms,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. “SwiftUI truly transforms user interface creation by automating large portions of the process and providing real-time previews of how UI code looks and behaves in-app. We think developers are going to love it.”

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

ARKit 3 puts people at the center of AR. With Motion Capture, developers can integrate people’s movement into their app, and with People Occlusion, AR content will show up naturally in front of or behind people to enable more immersive AR experiences and fun green screen-like applications. ARKit 3 also enables the front camera to track up to three faces, as well as simultaneous front and back camera support. It also enables collaborative sessions, which make it even faster to jump into a shared AR experience.

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.

Easier to Bring iPad Apps to Mac

New tools and APIs make it easier than ever to bring iPad apps to Mac. With Xcode, developers can open an existing iPad project and simply check a single box to automatically add fundamental Mac and windowing features, and adapt platform-unique elements like touch controls to keyboard and mouse — providing a huge head start on building a native Mac version of their app. Mac and iPad apps share the same project and source code, so any changes made to the code translate to both the iPadOS and macOS versions of the app, saving developers valuable time and resources by allowing one team to work on both versions of their app. With both the Mac and iPad versions of their apps, users will also enjoy the unique capabilities of each platform, including the precision and speed when using their Mac’s keyboard, mouse, trackpad and unique Mac features like Touch Bar™.