Tag: Metal

New video tech talks are published to Apple Developer portal. These videos cover Metal, SharePlay, App Intents, Apple Pay, enterprise apps and more.

Apple Developer: Level up your apps and games

This week is a little bit shorter in US, so weekend good reads come a little earlier. Let's find some good reads for this long weekend.

• Let's start with a pitch to introduce Reflection API to Swift – [Pitch] Reflection by Alejandro Alonso;
  
  
• Natalia Panferova shows how to make graphs similar to Weather app – Area chart with a dimming layer up to the current point in time;
  
  
• And if you want a refresher on Swift Charts – Swift Charts Tutorial: Getting Started by Vidhur Voora will get you covered;
  
  
• Peter Tretyakov continues his set of articles on Metal – Shaders Explained: Dithering;
  
  
• Developing Apps with the HomeKit Accessory Simulator by Moritz Philip Recke explains on how to develop smart home applications for HomeKit ecosystem without actual smart devices present;
  
  
• Leonardo Maia Pugliese guides us on how to work with Objective-C code in Swift – Swift and Objective-C Interoperability With @objc and @objcMembers;
  
  
• Point-Free Pointers share their approach to SwiftUI navigation – Better SwiftUI navigation APIs;
  
  
• Nested reusability in SwiftUI by Magnus Jensen covers interesting design pattern for SwiftUI applications;
  
  
• Lee Kah Seng explains how to properly use concurrency in Swift – A Deep Dive Into the Swift Concurrency Bottleneck;
  
  
• Jordan Morgan shares his experience developing SwiftUI apps – My Real Challenge with SwiftUI;
  
  
• @dynamicCallable in Swift explained with code examples by Antoine van der Lee covers dynamic features in Swift and their potential uses;
  
  
• Two great articles by Marco Eidinger – A critical look at Swift Snippets (Swift 5.7) and Test Your Command-Line Tool In Xcode;
  
  
• If you're still using Combine Cheat sheet on Combine operators for iOS development by Natascha Fadeeva is good to have handy;
  
  
• Sometimes you need to remove onscreen keyboard, SwiftUI Dismissing The Keyboard by Keith Harrison explains exactly this case.

And to wrap up this issue, here is a great video for those who are interested in security – Using A Magic Wand To Break The IPhone's Last Security Barrier by Tihmstar | hardwear.io NL 2022.

Happy holidays and see you next week!

Treat yourself with some really good articles this weekend!

• Implementing Password AutoFill for an iOS application by Natascha Fadeeva explains important aspect of app integration with Keychain;
  
  
• Sarun W. publishes two articles – How to save enum in UserDefaults using Swift on Swift tricks and Custom Layout in SwiftUI explaining new Layout protocol in SwiftUI;
  
  
• Majid Jabrayilov continues SwiftUI layouts topic with Conditional layouts in SwiftUI;
  
  
• Faster StoreKit testing by syncing in-app purchase products by Antoine van der Lee explores in-app purchases testing approaches;
  
  
• Natalia Panferova publishes Large content viewer in SwiftUI on accessibility aspects in iOS applications;
  
  
• Async Let by Jordan Morgan explains Swift structured concurrency feature;
  
  
• And finishing with two articles on Metal – Improve Metal GPU utilization by Geor Kasapidi and another one on integration of Metal gradients to SwiftUI views – SwiftUI Gradient Builder by Peter Tretyakov.

And this is it for today, see you next time!

One beta closer to release of iOS 16 and new weekend brings us new articles to read.

• Peter Tretyakov continues his series on Metal with Shaders Explained: Gradients – really great deep dive;
  
  
• Using UIPasteControl in a UIMenu in iOS 16 by Will Bishop reminds on improvements with pasteboard access in iOS 16;
  
  
• Great tip on debugging main thread stalls by Jesse Squires – Implementing a main thread watchdog on iOS;
  
  
• Sarun W. shares two great articles on SwiftUI layout details – What is the fixedSize modifier in SwiftUI and Responsive layout in SwiftUI with ViewThatFit;
  
  
• Majid Jabrayilov writes another great article on SwiftUI views, this time it is Grid – Mastering grid layout in SwiftUI;
  
  
• How To Create Custom UICollectionViewListCell Using SwiftUI by Lee Kah Seng navigates on use of both UIKit and SwiftUI efficiently;
  
  
• Great cheat sheet on accessibility – Cheat sheet on VoiceOver gestures for iOS by Natascha Fadeeva;
  
  
• Shared with You implementation and testing explained by Antoine van der Lee goes into details of new iOS 16 feature that helps to share app content between users;
  
  
• Point-Free Pointers share new article on adding structured concurrency to Composable Architecture – Async Composable Architecture;
  
  
• Recreating C++ atoi Function in Swift by Leonardo Maia Pugliese shows interesting exercise on using Swift.

Come back next weekend for more interesting topics!

Apple releases C++ wrapper for Metal.

Metal-cpp is a low-overhead C++ interface for Metal that helps developers add Metal functionality to graphics apps, games, and game engines that are written in C++.

Apple Developer

Highlights:

• Drop in C++ alternative interface to the Metal Objective-C headers.
• Direct mapping of all Metal Objective-C classes, constants and enums to C++ in the MTL C++ namespace.
• No measurable overhead compared to calling Metal Objective-C headers, due to inlining of C++ function calls.
• No usage of wrapper containers that require additional allocations.
• Identical header files and function/constant/enum availability for iOS, iPadOS, macOS and tvOS.
• Backwards compatibility: All bool MTL::Device::supports...() functions check if their required selectors exist and automatically return false if not.
• String (ErrorDomain) constants are weak linked and automatically set to nullptr if not available.