Apple announces 2023 App Store Awards finalists

Apple announces finalists for annual App Store Awards. Finalists are references in several categories – iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV apps of the year, iPhone, iPad and Mac games of the year, Apple Arcade game of the year and cultural impact.

App Store Award winners will be selected from this year’s outstanding group of finalists and will be announced in the coming weeks.

Apple Newsroom

Apple Newsroom: Meet the 2023 App Store Award finalists

Apple Developer: App Store Award finalists announced

Apple releases macOS Sonoma 14

Apple releases next major release of macOS – Sonoma.

macOS Sonoma brings all‑new capabilities that elevate your productivity and creativity. Discover even more ways to personalize your Mac with stunning screensavers and widgets that you can add to your desktop. Elevate your presence on video calls with a new way to present your work that keeps you a part of the presentation. Safari profiles and web apps help you organize your browsing in all-new ways. Game Mode boosts your gaming performance. Sonoma also brings big updates to Messages, Keyboard, and Accessibility. And when you upgrade, you get the latest security and privacy protections available for Mac.

Screen Savers

  • Stunning screen savers of locations from around the world seamlessly become your desktop wallpaper when you log-in
  • Shuffle settings for rotating through screensavers by theme including Landscape, Cityscape, Underwater, and Earth

Widgets

  • Widgets can be placed anywhere on the desktop and adapt to the color of your wallpaper while working in apps
  • iPhone widgets can be added to your Mac when your iPhone is nearby or on the same Wi-Fi network
  • Interactive widgets let you take actions directly from the widget such as running a shortcut, pausing media, and more

Video Conferencing

  • Presenter Overlay keeps you front and center while sharing your screen in FaceTime or third-party video conferencing apps (Mac with Apple silicon)
  • Reactions layer 3D effects like hearts, balloons, confetti, and more around you in video calls and can be triggered with gestures (Mac with Apple silicon, Continuity Camera with iPhone 12 and later)

Safari and Passwords

  • Profiles keep your browsing separate for topics like work and personal, separating your history, cookies, extensions, Tab Groups, and favorites
  • Web apps let you use any website like an app, complete with an icon in the Dock for faster access and a simplified toolbar for easier browsing
  • Enhanced Private Browsing locks your private browsing windows when you're not using them, blocks known trackers from loading, and removes tracking that identifies you from URLs
  • Password and passkey sharing allows you to easily share accounts with trusted contacts

Messages

  • Live Stickers sync from iOS and iPadOS to macOS, giving you access to the Live Stickers you create on your iPhone and iPad
  • Search filters for people, keywords, and content types like photos or links help you more easily find what you are looking for
  • Swipe to reply inline on any iMessage bubble

Gaming

Game Mode gives games the highest priority on the CPU and GPU, delivering more consistent frame rates and lower latency to wireless controllers and AirPods (Mac with Apple silicon)

Keyboard

  • Improved autocorrect accuracy makes typing even easier by leveraging a more powerful transformer-based language model
  • Inline predictive text shows single- and multi-word predictions that you can add by pressing the Space bar
  • Improved Dictation experience supports using your voice and keyboard together to enter and edit text

AirPods

  • Adaptive Audio delivers a new listening mode that dynamically blends Active Noise Cancellation and Transparency to tailor the noise control experience based on the conditions of your environment (AirPods Pro (2nd generation) with the latest firmware)
  • Personalized Volume adjusts the volume of your media in response to your environment and listening preferences over time (AirPods Pro (2nd generation) with the latest firmware)
  • Conversation Awareness lowers your media volume and enhances the voices of the people in front of the user, all while reducing background noise (AirPods Pro (2nd generation) with the latest firmware)
  • Press to mute and unmute your microphone by pressing the AirPods stem or the Digital Crown on AirPods Max when on a call (AirPods (3rd generation), AirPods Pro (1st and 2nd generation), or AirPods Max with the latest firmware)
  • Improved AirPods automatic switching now detects Mac up to 2X faster (AirPods (2nd and 3rd generation), AirPods Pro (1st and 2nd generation), AirPods Max with the latest firmware)

Privacy

  • Sensitive Content Warnings can be enabled to help prevent users from unexpectedly viewing sensitive images in Messages
  • Expanded Communication Safety protections for children now detect videos containing nudity in addition to photos shared through Messages and the system Photos picker
  • Improved sharing permissions let you choose which photos to share and add calendar events without providing access to your entire photo library or calendar

Accessibility

  • Live Speech lets you type what you want to say and reads it aloud in FaceTime calls or in-person conversations
  • Personal Voice helps users at risk of speech loss create a voice that sounds like them in a private and secure way using on-device machine learning
  • Made for iPhone compatible hearing devices can be paired and used with Mac (MacBook Pro (2021), Mac Studio (2022), and Mac computers with M2 chip)

This release also includes other features and improvements:

  • One-Time verification code AutoFill from Mail helps you quickly sign into sites in Safari, without leaving the browser
  • Inline PDFs and document scans in Notes are presented full-width making them easy to view
  • Grocery Lists in Reminders automatically group related items into sections as you add them
  • Visual Look Up for recipes helps you find similar dishes from photo
  • Visual Look Up in video helps you learn about objects that appear in paused video frames
  • Pets in the People album in Photos surfaces individual pets just like friends or family members
  • Option to say "Siri" in addition to "Hey Siri" for a more natural way to activate Siri (Mac with Apple silicon, AirPods Pro (2nd generation))
  • High performance mode in Screen Sharing supports color workflows and improves responsiveness while remotely accessing a Mac (Mac with Apple silicon)
  • Item sharing in Find My allows you to share an AirTag with up to five other people
  • Activity History in Home displays a recent history of events for door locks, garage doors, security systems, and contact sensors
  • Battery health management updated on 13-inch MacBook Air with M2 chip to better optimize long term battery health

Some features may not be available for all regions or on all Apple devices.

macOS Sonoma also includes several important security fixes.

Apple Newsroom: macOS Sonoma is available today

Release notes: macOS Sonoma 14 Release Notes

References:

CrossOver 23 brings support for EA and DirectX 12 games to Mac

CrossOver allows Mac (and Linux) users to run Windows applications. New update brings support for EA and DirectX 12 games. Update provides geometry shaders support.

Compared to Game Porting Toolkit, CrossOver provides better user experience so far, but it is also expected that both technologies will evolve and provide Mac users with more options to run games natively.

CodeWeavers Blog: Level up with CrossOver 23

Reference: CrossOver update brings EA and DirectX 12 game support to Mac

Game Porting Toolkit gets first update

Game Porting Toolkit gets update to beta 1.0.2. This update brings significant performance improvements as long as some important compatibility enhancements bringing support for games previously failed to be ported.

Researches highlight that some games are running better on Apple Silicon Pro and Max chips rather than Ultra chips.

Andrew Tsai made some tests with this update and was able to confirm these performance improvements.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl12azxMbFc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl12azxMbFc

Download: Game porting toolkit beta 1.0.2

References:

Game Porting Toolkit is evaluated by developers

Apple's Game Porting Toolkit is now being evaluated by developers and journalists. It turns out that even without any code changes some of the games could run pretty well on the Mac.

Some additional tweaking by game developers could help improving performance and minimize overhead caused by this translation layer. Essentially, Game Porting Toolkit is Wine patch that allows DirectX 12 commands translation into Metal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIPl71ZeOYk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIPl71ZeOYk

Apple Developer: Apple technologies for game developers

WWDC23:

References:

Winners of Apple Design Awards are announced

During first day of WWDC23 Apple announced winners of annual Apple Design Awards.

This year has six nominations both in apps and games:

Apple Developer: Apple Design Awards 2023 winners and finalists

Apple Newsroom: Apple announces winners of the 2023 Apple Design Awards

Users download less games now

Sensor Tower published a report on mobile gaming.

The U.S. mobile games market has faced significant challenges during the first half of 2022. Overall U.S. mobile game revenue fell by 9.6 percent Y/Y to $11.4 billion, while downloads declined by 2.5 percent to 2.4 billion. Looking at just 2Q22, revenue decreased by 11.4 percent Y/Y to $5.6 billion, though downloads were largely flat at 1.2 billion.

Sensor Tower
Sensor Tower

Sensor Tower: Most Mobile Game Genres See Revenue Declines in the U.S. During H1 2022 as Industry Headwinds Bite

Reference: We’re downloading fewer mobile games as lockdowns end and inflation bites