Notes: The interesting things from WWDC, iOS 9, Swift 2
The WWDC keynote today was great, except for the part where it just wouldn’t end. Tons of new stuff on the development front including Swift 2, iOS 9, CloudKit etc.
Here are some notes I gathered while browsing release notes, API diffs, feature pages and so on.
- You no longer need a $99 developer membership to run iOS apps on your device using Xcode. Additionally, Mac and iOS developer membership have been merged, the price remaining the same:
- Interface Builder can render blurs and transparency
- Objective-C gets generics, which means collection objects like arrays, dictionaries can have specific types, just like Swift:
- There’s a new UI class called UIStackView, which is a port of Mac’s NSStackView.
- CASpringAnimation is public!
- Apps can plug in to Safari as extensions and block content. Ad blockers incoming? Additionally, apps can populate content in Safari’s Shared Links section.
- Developers can use SFSafariViewController, which has shared cookies, auto fill and other features from Safari.
- UIPickerView can be resized to any size. No more ugly transform hacks.
- iOS apps can show a text field in notifications, which was previously restricted to Messages.
- Contacts can be finally accessed via an object oriented API, as opposed to the earlier C API.
- Calling API methods not available on minimum deployment target causes a compile time error. There’s a new available condition to conditionally execute code and avoid crashes for using new APIs:
- UICollectionView got a lot of new methods to support interactively moving items
- There’s a new UIFieldBehavior in UIKit Dynamics that lets you model vector force fields. Examples of it include gravity, electric or magnetic fields etc.
(Image credit: Wikipedia)
- Xcode Assets Catalog: Devices won’t download assets of all sizes, only 1x, 2x or 3x depending on its traits, reducing the app size.
Some interesting links: