Apple has announced a range of new tools and technologies at its annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), including making Xcode Cloud open to all members of the Apple Developer Program.

Xcode is Apple's integrated development environment for macOS. It can be used to write in a number of languages including AppleScript, C, C++, Java, Objective-C, Python, Ruby and Swift, and has tools for building, testing, and delivering apps using cloud services.

Xcode was first announced at last year's WWDC, and has until now been available in various paid tiers. The lowest tier, which until now has cost $14.99 a month for 25 hours will now be free until December 2023.

Xcode 14 has been improved so that project builds make use of better parallel support to be up to 25 percent faster, and the Xcode application is now 30 percent smaller to download, with downloadable simulator runtimes for watchOS and tvOS.There's a new multiplatform target that creates a single SwiftUI interface for use across iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and tvOS.

Apple also unveiled widgets on the iPhone Lock Screen that mean developers can share the same code between their widgets on the Lock Screen and complications on Apple Watch, which are based on the same new WidgetKit API

A new WeatherKit API can be used to integrate Apple Weather forecast data directly into apps, and the SKAdNetwork has been improved so that ad networks and developers can see more clearly how ads perform while still preserving user privacy..

Another major announcement at the conference is Metal 3, the latest version of Apple’s graphics framework. This makes better use of Apple silicon to improve gaming performance. Better rendering is possible using MetalFX Upscaling, which lets developers render complex scenes faster by using less compute-intensive frames, then apply high-quality spatial upscaling and temporal anti-aliasing.

More Information

Apple Developer Website

WWDC Videos For XCode

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