WWDC 2014 was held from June 2 to 6, 2014 at Moscone West in San Francisco. Apple claims that this was their biggest update so far since the launch of the App Store. The keynote focussed on OS X’s latest iteration – Yosemite and iOS 8. Given that Apple has been ridiculously restrictive with what developers can do with their platform this was a much welcome change.
Things that popped out from amongst all the updates were mostly extensibility features like Notification Centre Widgets, third-party keyboards, Metal – a new graphics technology for the A7 chip, Swift – a new programming language and a bunch of frameworks suited for various categories of applications. Healthkit is one of the new frameworks that have been included in the new release. It allows for health and fitness apps to communicate with each other and share data, thus, allowing for a more complete picture to be presented to the user. So if there are multiple apps, one handling your blood pressure and the other handling your vitals then the two apps can talk to each other and share data.
Homekit is a framework made in a similar fashion that is geared towards allowing apps that control home automation gadgets. Let’s say you have one app for your doors, one for atmospheric control and another for lights then a fourth app could communicate with all of them and become a main control app that lets you fiddle with
everything from just one place. Or you can simply use Siri to control everything.
Swift is claimed to enable safer and more reliable code
The new A7 chip was introduced with a 64-bit instruction set that wasn’t being utilised to its full potential. With iOS 8 Apple has introduced Metal, a graphics API that is touted to be capable of enabling more draw calls. Other additions include Scenekit for 3D games and Spritekit for per-pixel physics and inverse kinematics.
A new programming language – Swift has been introduced as well. It is purported to help developers to write safer and more reliable code as compared to Objective-C. Playgrounds, a section in Xcode makes for instant display of your code’s output. Touch ID APIs will extend the Touch ID authentication system to apps so you can add an extra layer of security to all new apps provided they are coded to allow the same.
Other new additions include:
Photokit – allows developers to access the features of the built-in photo application with permissions to read and write to the Photos library
Camera APIs – opens up camera parameters like focus, white balance and exposure to third-party apps.
Cloudkit – a solution to enable developers to skip writing server code so your apps can communicate with iCloud. Start with a 5GB storage space and 50MB for the database. Daily transfer limits is at 25MB/day for assets, and it scales with each additional user.
App Store features – app previews, app bundles, free analytics and TestFlight for beta testing app prior to release.
The beta release of iOS 8 and the SDK has already been released to developers. iOS 8 is rumoured to have a launch date in September 2014 so you have plenty of time to start developing your apps.
