After months of working with Catalyst, and just ahead of the release of macOS Catalina, developers have thoughts on what's good and what's still surprisingly bad about Apple's project to get iOS apps on the Mac.
I talked to lots of developers at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference, from fresh-faced scholarship winners entirely new to WWDC to an experienced veteran who reported having first attended Apple's annual dev event back in 1991. The unanimous answer to "what's the most exciting thing you saw this week?" was SwiftUI, hands down.
Students and select groups of others can now apply for scholarships to attend WWDC 2019 in San Jose, but they'll have to act fast to have a chance.
Freelancer site Upwork published a listing of the top twenty fastest growing skills of the more than 5,000 it tracks. The list cited Apple's iOS development framework UIKit and its Xcode development tools, both of which took center stage at the company's Worldwide Developer Conference this summer.
Apple's efforts to bring iOS apps to the Mac have been underway for two years, and the porting process for third-party developers won't be completely automatic, software engineering head Craig Federighi said in an interview.
Developer support service Buddybuild announced that it has ben acquired by Apple, where its personnel will join the Xcode team in creating developer tools for iOS apps.
Utilizing several third-party solutions, a "Back to the Future" film fanatic has built a custom DeLorean door and trunk controller in a dash-mounted iPad that can also provide speed information, as well as nearly all of the features that an Apple CarPlay solution would.
Nineteen year old app developer Kenny Batista was one of roughly 300 scholarship winners Apple invited to its Worldwide Developer Conference last week. He met up with us to talk about his experiences and joined the AppleInsider podcast this week from WWDC.
Apple is starting to more uniformly enforce a restriction in place since the beginning of the App Store, and is notifying developers pro-actively that it will refuse approval to new apps or updates that include mechanisms to update or alter pre-approved app behavior outside the app store.
Apple senior manager Ted Kremenek has been named as the new lead of the Swift development project, and has apparently been operating in that capacity for some time behind the scenes, according to outgoing head Chris Lattner.
As expected, Apple has updated its entire array of first-party apps including Xcode, iMovie, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, to support the Touch Bar on the new MacBook Pro line, alongside some normal "stability and performance improvements" that come with nearly every update.
Apple has made Swift Playgrounds available for download, and provides a way to teach beginners and children how to code on its Swift programming language on the iPad.
Apple's implementation of a "solid state" home button expands the Taptic Engine's feedback on the iPhone, and a forthcoming API for developers' use will expand implementation to non-Apple apps.
Apple has implemented the .xip file compression protocol with digital signatures for its newest Xcode 8 beta distribution, instead of the unsecured .zip format, guaranteeing that the contents have not changed since initial creation.
At WWDC, Apple introduced Swift Playgrounds as a "revolutionary new app for iPad that makes learning Swift interactive and fun." A closer examination shows the new app is a powerful authoring tool any developer can use to teach critically important software coding skills.
After seven beta releases, iOS 9.3 is now available to download by members of the public, bringing the new easy-on-the-eyes Night Shift mode, Touch ID integration with the Notes app, new iPhone 6s 3D Touch functions, and much more.
Despite advance warning from Apple, some developers were taken by surprise after the company's previous Worldwide Developer Relations (WWDR) Intermediate Certificate expired on Sunday, preventing approval for apps and services.
Apple's software team has officially made Swift, its proprietary iOS and OS X development software, open source and available for modification by all developers, via the new website Swift.org.
Apple has shut down the iOS version of f.lux, reportedly arguing that the brightness management app violated terms of the Developer Program agreement.
Apple pushed out a batch of bug fixes with the latest version of its Xcode development software on Monday, addressing critical issues discovered in Interface Builder, debugging and user interface testing.
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William Gallagher
Daniel Eran Dilger
Roger Fingas
Neil Hughes
Mike Wuerthele
AppleInsider Staff
Jason Woods
