macOS Catalina by Apple is out! – What’s new for developers on the new macOS SDK

Apple announced their successor to macOS Mojave called Catalina. Catalina is Apple’s latest operating system for the mac line of products.

macOS Catalina’s name is inspired by Santa Catalina Island, popularly known as Catalina a small channel Island off the coast of Southern California. Apple claims, macOS Catalina brings a whole new set of fantastic features for app developers.

Now with the macOS 10.15 SDK, apps can take advantage of Sign in with Apple, Core Data syncing with CloudKit, Apple CryptoKit, and more. Building device drivers with DriverKit that run in the user space, and write modern event processing code with Combine. Now developers can build more flexible and dynamic user interfaces with SwiftUI, and create a Mac version of your iPad app using UIKit.

New macOS Catalina Features

Sidecar

Catalina introduces a new Sidecar feature, which enables iPads to function as secondary displays for your Mac — both wireless and when plugged in. Sidecar will support the Apple Pencil, and support in the Mac versions of apps like Photoshop while using the Pencil. Annotating screenshots or PDFs with the Pencil is also possible.

Sidecar is rumored to only support above 2016 Mac models and late 2015 27″ iMac. Brings in support Touch Bar display for non-Touch Bar Macs. Claims to be faster than third party solutions. Supports native iPad resolution and can run as an app on iPad. It can be switched between only pencil input and select multitouch gestures. It may also support file sharing in the future.

Turn your iPad app to Mac and vice-versa

Now apps share the same project and source code, so developers can efficiently convert iPad app’s desktop-class features, and add more just for Mac. Broadening the reach of an app and deliver it to an engaged audience of over 100,000,000 active Mac users.

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Sign in with Apple

Sign in with Apple now allows setting up a user account in the system, with name, verified email address, and unique stable identifiers that allow app users to sign in with their Apple ID. It is designed and built for working on iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS. Now Sign in with Apple can be embedded on websites or apps running on other platforms.

For apps, the Authentication Services framework lets users set up accounts and sign in to native iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS apps. Games and apps built with Unity can also integrate with Sign In with Apple using a new Unity Asset Store package.

Vision Framework Updates

With macOS 10.15, New functionality features of the framework are:

• Perform saliency analysis on images.
• Detect humans and animals in images.
• Classify images for categorization and search.
• Analyzing image similarities with feature print.
• Perform text recognition on documents.

Source: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/vision/

New features in Metal

The Simulator now uses Metal to speed up the development of iOS apps that either use Metal or on Metal-based system frameworks. This allows transitioning from OpenGL ES to Metal. Metal in iOS 13 and tvOS 13 allows the GPU to create its commands with Indirect Compute Encoding.

Now complete scenes using advanced culling and tessellation techniques can be developed and programmed with little or no CPU interaction. Metal Peer Groups make it straightforward to share data between multiple GPUs in Mac Pro without transferring into the main memory.

And No more iTunes

The most notable shift is the death of iTunes. It will continue to exist in some leftover cases, but for most intent, iTunes is being put to rest with macOS Catalina. iTunes is now broken into separate apps for Apple Music, Podcasts, and Apple TV.

We at TechAffinity always make sure our customers and their apps are future-proof. So that you don’t have to worry about the constant changes made by Apple. We do all the heavy lifting while our customers concentrate on their business goals.

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