WWDC: Xcode 9 Adds Wireless Development for iOS Devices

Reflecting the more public-focused nature of the main WWDC keynote, Apple’s Platforms State of the Union address at WWDC included a whole host of information around Swift deployments, including news that over 1 million people are now coding with Swift Playgrounds.

Unwired

It also raised a cheer when developers learned that Xcode 9 supports wireless development so you can use the best and most appropriate way to connect dev machines to mobile devices for deployment and testing. Until now, you had to use a USB cable. Such a chore.

Swift Improvements

Apple’s developer language is an international success story, the company hinted. Over two-thirds of developers using Swift are based outside of the US.

What have they been doing? Well, it looks as if they have been developing, using Swift to make over 250,000 apps that have been submitted to the App Store so far.

There are a range of improvements in the language, line-by-line highlighting, content update notifications, new Playground pages, better error messages, MapKit support, and much, much more.

Apple also confirmed that Swift Playgrounds 1.5 (which is available now) will allow developers to create and control even more robots than the company announced last week.

When it comes to Swift itself, Apple confirmed Xcode 9 will indeed include Swift 4.0. It said that in contrast to the process of moving them from Swift 2.0 to 3.0, moving projects from Swift 3.0 to Swift 4.0 should be very simple.

Metal 2

The session also introduced Metal 2, which will run on hundreds of millions of devices from launch. Metal has already had a big impact, with Ian Bullock of Feral Interactive saying,  “Metal’s richer feature set and lower overhead have allowed us to bring cutting edge games to the Mac with frame rates and effects that simply weren’t possible before.”

Get this, GitHub

Developers will also be excited (I think) at a useful and powerful usability improvement around GitHub.com and GitHub enterprise, both of which have been integrated within Xcode 9. This means it has become incredibly easy to grab, submit and share the data you need around GitHub from within Xcode.

Developers can begin working with the first Xcode 9 betas, while the Swift Playgrounds 2 beta (which supports iOS 11 SDK and Swift 4.0) is available to registered developers requesting TestFlight access.

There’s a whole bunch more information across a range of other topics, including machine intelligence and ARKit,  here.