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SwiftUI, Xcode 11, ARKit 3 Highlight Apple Developer News

• By David Ramel
• June 3, 2019

At its Worldwide Developer Conference kicking off today, Apple highlighted all kinds of new goodies for developers, including SwiftUI, Xcode 11 and ARKit 3.

SwiftUI is a development framework to help Apple-centric coders create UIs across all platforms, including mobile apps for iOS, which itself was unveiled in a v.13 preview.

Describing SwiftUI, the company said, "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."

In addition to declarative syntax, the new SwiftUI framework works with Xcode 11 design tools that feature functionality such as:

• Drag-and-drop addition of controls to build components
• Dynamic replacement ("The Swift compiler and runtime are fully embedded throughout Xcode, so your app is constantly being built and run.")
• Previews, providing automatic representations of how a UI will look and behave as apps are assembled, tested and refined. "Previews can also display your UI in any device and any orientation," the company said.

The latest edition of Apple's augmented reality (AR) software development kit, ARKit 3, features Motion Capture (helping developers integrate people's movement into apps) and 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.")

The company also previewed iOS 13, featuring:

• Dark Mode, a new dark color scheme available for all native apps, especially useful in low-light situations
• Advanced photo and camera features, some leveraging on-device machine learning
• Sign-in with Apple ID, which enables developers to protect user privacy with a unique random ID (while giving users the option to keep their email address private and instead share a unique random email address in cases where an app asks for a name and email address)
• An all-new Maps experience

Apple also updated Core ML and Create ML on-device machine learning functionality.

"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, senior vice president, 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."

The WWDC event in San Jose runs through Friday, June 7.