Use Your Loaf

WWDC 2026 Viewing Guide

Jun 15, 2026 · 25 minute read

My WWDC 2026 viewing guide to help you plan the sessions you want to watch.

Where Do I Start?

The two big themes for the year are again Liquid Glass and Apple Intelligence. Start by watching the Platforms State of the Union (SOTU) for a summary of what’s new this year. If you only have five minutes try the SOTU recap.

You don’t have to learn everything new today!

There are over 100 sessions and a lot of new stuff to learn. You may feel like you’re getting left behind. Don’t let it overwhelm you. You’ve got time.

Don’t burn yourself out trying to keep up.

Watching The Sessions

I watch the videos using the Apple Developer app. It’s available on macOS and iOS. The video player supports from 0.5x to 2x playback, most videos have transcripts and summaries, and allow copying of the onscreen sample code. You can also watch on YouTube.

There are a lot of sessions, but many are short (15-20 minutes). There’s no padding and Apple’s engineers get to the point quickly.

Swift

Swift 6.4 is here with some quality of life improvements:

  • What’s new in Swift Condense long @available attributes with anyAppleOS, @diagnose to control compiler deprecation warnings. Double-colon module selector. Standard Library task cancellation shield, dictionary mapKeyedValues, new FilePath type. XCTest interop with Swift Testing. Subprocess 1.0. New ProgressManager. @C attribute for Swift-C interop. Compile to WebAssembly. New @inline(always) and @specialized attributes. Iterable protocol for noncopyable elements.

  • Build real-time apps and services with gRPC and Swift gRPC Swift package to generate and deploy network code for remote procedure call services.

  • Explore numerical computing in Swift with MLX NumPy-like API. Examples of computing the Mandlebrot set, heat distribution, and curve fitting.

SwiftUI

Liquid Glass changes and some welcome improvements:

  • What’s new in SwiftUI Liquid Glass is now mandatory. Minimal menu icons by default. Resize live previews in Xcode. Prominent tab role. Toolbar visibility priority, overflow menu and pinned trailing placement. New SwiftUI Document API. Reordable containers for List, LazyVStack, etc. Item binding confirmation and alert dialogs. AsyncImage HTTP caching. @State is now a macro so observable classes are only initialised once (backported to iOS 17). Compiler better at type checking complex views. SwiftUI agent skills.

  • Code-along: Build powerful drag and drop in SwiftUI New reordable modifier and drag container API. Drag/drop configuration API.

  • Compose advanced graphics effects with SwiftUI Building a shader effect with time-driven animation. Comparison of color, distortion, and layer effect functions. Metal domain warping shader. Alignment of an overlay view.

  • Dive into lazy stacks and scrolling with SwiftUI The new reordable API and swipe actions work with lazy stacks. Height of subviews offscreen is estimated from average of placed subviews. Ideal height of LazyHStack is height of first subview. Better to use relative positions of subviews in the visible region than rely on content offset. Avoid conditional content in ForEach (filter at data level and unwrap optionals). Setup subviews before onAppear. Don’t change layout after they appear.

  • Use SwiftUI with AppKit and UIKit AppKit controls like NSSlider and NSSwitch use SwiftUI. Many AppKit and UIKit methods support Observation for view updates. Back deploys to macOS 15 and iOS 18. Use SwiftUI for new views, wrap in NSHostingView. or NSHostingMenu. Mix NSGestureRecognizer with SwiftUI. Add SwiftUI scenes.

Other UI Frameworks

  • Modernize your UIKit app Apps need to be adaptive. iPhone apps mirrored to the Mac or running on the iPad can be resized. UIScene lifecycle is now required. Do not use UIScreen.main. UIRequiresFullScreen is honored on iPhone in resizable environments. Don’t use user interface idiom or orientation for layout decisions (the case since iOS 8). UIView conforms to CoreMotion and CoreLocation Body protocols. iPhone apps can opt-in to sidebar layout. Make any tab prominent. Xcode 27 app modernization skill to help update apps.

  • Modernize your AppKit app Replace mouseDown overrides with control events or gesture recognizers. Support keyboard navigation. Avoid blocking app termination and adopt window restoration. Make view and button corners concentric.

Developer Tools

  • What’s new in Xcode 27 Customizable toolbar and themes. New projects are untitled for a faster start. Launch agent tasks from toolbar. Sidebar shows agent conversations. Device hub unifies simulator and physical devices. Coding agents to generate localizations. Organizer metric goals and agent-powered fixes. Instruments top functions view. Faster onboarding to Xcode Cloud.

  • Get the most out of Device Hub New app for working with devices and simulators. Compact and full window modes. Controls apps running on device or simulator. devicectl command-line tool for script and CI integration.

Coding Agents

  • Create UI prototypes using agents in Xcode Prototype designs using coding agents and Xcode previews. Avoid vague prompts. Ask for multiple options each with a uniquely named preview. Mix and refine. Ask for example content in its own file for easy reuse. Ask agent to build a tuning panel to explore animation features.

  • Xcode, agents and you Using coding agents in Xcode. Ask agent to summarise a project and create architecture documentation. Apple Document search provides latest APIs to agents. Plan mode to outline approach. Queued messages. Inline annotations show where code changes should be made. Localize, add VoiceOver and accessibility labels.

  • Translate your app using agents in Xcode Ask agent to localize project. String catalogs track where a string is used providing context to an agent when translating. Localize when adding new features. Ask the coding agent to preview the new languages and check for truncation. Use TestFlight for real-world feedback from native speakers. Include a glossary for specific words and other instructions in a TRANSLATION.md file.

Instruments

  • Profile, fix and verify: Improve app responsiveness with Instruments New Top Functions mode to identify bottlenecks. New Run Comparisons to show performance regressions from baseline. New Swift executors instrument to visualise the Main Actor, global executor, and other custom executors.

  • Debug and profile agentic app experiences with Instruments Foundation Models Instrument. Captures prompt and response data. Timeline shows request, instructions, model inference, tool usage, and model loading times.

  • Meet the new MetricKit Rebuilt for iOS 27 with Swift-first API. Collects metrics as users run your app and delivers a daily report. Launch time, hangs, and animation metrics show how responsive an app is. CPU, GPU, Disk and network metrics show resource usage. Metal frame rate for games. Create the MetricManager at app startup. Setup a server to collect and aggregate reports.

Testing

  • Migrate to Swift Testing Migrate from XCTest to Swift Testing. New interoperability allows incremental approach. Limited, complete or strict modes configured in test plan. Common migration patterns. Xcode Coding Assistant can help migrate.

Xcode Cloud

SwiftData

Some small but useful updates to SwiftData:

  • What’s new in SwiftData Sectioned fetch requests. Storing Codable types (cannot be used in predicates). ResultsObserver to observe model changes outside SwiftUI views. HistoryObserver to observe persistent history transactions for syncing with external server.

  • Code-along: Add persistence with SwiftData Adding SwiftData to the Wishlist sample app. Defining the schema, relationships and updating the view layer.

Design

  • Principles of great design Choosing what to build is often about what not to include. Foundation principles: Purpose. Agency. Responsibility. Familiarity. Flexibility. Simplicity. Craft. Delight.

  • Communicate your brand identity on iOS Don’t heavily customize the UI, platform familiarity is important. Move color into the content area of your app, into the scroll view. Use color to communicate status, feedback, and selection states. Use sparingly. Custom fonts should scale with dynamic type size.

  • Craft clear names for features and labels in your app How to choose names. Belongs (fit). Expectations (clarity). Works everywhere. What does the audience think, feel, do when they encounter a feature? Use names in a sentence, does it seem natural?

  • Design intuitive search experiences Scope of search can determine best placement, toolbar field or button, or inline. Search tab for global search. Keep iPad and Mac search experience aligned. Show recent searches. Predictive suggestions. Use scope bar to refine search. Show content unavailable view when no results returned (include current search text).

Accessibility

  • Enhance the accessibility of your reading app Making long form content accessibile to VoiceOver and Speak Screen. APIs in iOS 18 to move seamlessly between paragraphs in separate views. Added to SwiftUI in iOS 27. Read all content without having to swipe pages by applying causesPageTurn trait. Add custom action to VoiceOver edit rotor to improve discoverability of text selection actions. Adopt UITextInput for custom views.

  • Refine accessibility for custom controls Making custom controls accessibile. Purpose, value, actions, feedback. Passthrough gesture for fine-grained adjustment. Direct touch support.

  • Discover generated subtitles and subtitle styles Apple AI-generated subtitles created live, locally on device as media plays. Speech transcription from audio (English only). Language translation of existing subtitles (multiple languages). Live streams or local media playback.

  • Prepare your tvOS apps for Dynamic Type tvOS 27 now supports dynamic type text sizes. Avoid fixed font sizes and view widths. Adapt views to avoid truncation.

Apple Intelligence

A big year for the Foundation Models framework:

  • What’s new in the Foundation Models framework Framework is going open source. New on-device model with improved guardrails. Attach images to prompts. Option to switch to Private Cloud Compute (PCC) model with 32K token context window and deep reasoning. Free for developers with < 2M first time downloads. iCloud+ users have larger quotas. New LanguageModel protocol to allow other models to be used. Anthropic and Google to publish Swift packages for access to their latest models.

    BarcodeReaderTool, OCRTool and Splotlight search tool. Dynamic profiles when switching contexts. Evaluations framework to quantify accuracy as you change prompts/models. fm CLI to use models from macOS command-line.

  • Build with the new Apple Foundation Model on Private Cloud Compute Access the server model running on Private Cloud Compute (PCC) for more complex requests. No authentication or API keys. No token costs. Daily limit for users with higher limits for iCloud+ subscribers. Available for accounts with < 2M downloads. Use Evaluations framework to explore when to use local model vs PCC. Xcode can simulate user reaching/exceeding daily limit.

  • Bring an LLM provider to the Foundation Models framework System model rebuilt to be smarter, accepts images in prompts. Private Cloud Compute to use Apple cloud model with a much larger context model. Core AI to run your own local models. Anthropic and Google will supply their own models as Swift packages. Walk through of creating a language model package.

  • Build agentic app experiences with the Foundation Models framework Foundation Models framework utilities. Open source Swift package that will be updated between OS releases. DynamicProfile API to switch configurations. Each profile has instructions, tools, and configuration modifiers. Composable. Trim the transcript to stay within context size limits and redact information if moving to a less private model. History transform applied when prompting the model. Orchestrating agentic experiences - baton-pass and phone-a-friend patterns. Trimming history can invalidate cache and cause confusion.

  • Build AI-powered scripts with the fm CLI and Python SDK New fm CLI preinstalled on macOS 27. Use fm chat for interactive session or fm respond for scripting. Defaults to on-device model but can use Private Cloud Compute. New Foundation Models SDK for Python (see GitHub repo).

  • LLM search using Core Spotlight Make app content available to an LLM. Add content to Core Spotlight search index and then use SpotlightSearchTool from Foundation Models framework.

Core AI

  • Meet Core AI Inference framework and set of technologies to optimize, convert, debug and deploy models. Convert PyTorch models to Core AI. New Swift API for loading and running Core AI models. Core AI Debugger to visualize converted model. Model must be specialized for each device before running which can take time. Compilation can be done ahead of time. Core AI models repository has packages for many popular models.

  • Dive into Core AI model authoring and optimization Converting and running models in CoreAI. Core AI is built around Python and PyTorch workflows. Core AI models GitHub repository with ready to use models and Core AI skills. Optimization to compress a model before converting to Core AI format. Core AI debugger standalone app to inspect, visualize model, execute and validate. Model reauthoring to optimise for iOS.

  • Integrate on-device AI models into your app using Core AI Integrating third-party on-device models. Task specific models give better quality, smaller sizes and can be upgraded independently. Core AI github repo contains many popular models. SAM 3 for vision and Qwen LLM. Use the same FoundationModel API. Handle slow first launch. Use background assets to download model. Core AI can pre-compile model. Use a larger model variant on the Mac.

Evaluations

  • Meet the Evaluations framework Models are non-deterministic so cannot rely on unit tests to test for unexpected or unsafe results. Create evaluations by defining the subject, dataset with expected values, a metric and pass/fail evaluator, and aggregate metrics. Integrates with Swift Testing to test if metric is within expectations. Use a variety of sample data. Framework includes a samples generator. Model judge to rate your features output.

  • Improve your prompts by hill-climbing with Evaluations Iteratively improve using a develop-evaluate-analyze loop with the Evaluations framework. Experiment with one change at a time. Drift is the discrepancy between model and human evaluation. Cohen’s kappa coefficient measures alignment - how two raters agree. Alignment of 0.6 represents a meaningful level of alignment.

  • Create robust evaluations for agentic apps Generate synthetic data to evaluate models. Defaults to on-device model but can use other models including PCC. Tool evaluation to validate if correct tools are being called.

App Intents

App Intents integrate your apps with Apple Intelligence and Siri AI.

  • Discover new capabilities in the App intents framework Key pillar of Apple Intelligence. New ValueRepresentation for making an entities structured types transferable. RelevantEntities to suggest entities to the system for specific contexts. EntityCollection to avoid resolving every entity before an intent runs. SyncableEntity to provide a stable ID that’s the same across devices. New parameter types. LongRunningIntent to run beyond 30s limit. ExecutionTargets to choose where intent runs (main App, widget, extension).

  • Build intelligent Siri experiences with App Schemas Siri can access content in your App’s entities and take action using your App’s intents. Add entities to views so Siri can understand what’s onscreen. Adopt IndexedEntity for Siri semantic search. Tells Spotlight which properties are searchable. When working across apps Siri uses on-screen awareness and content transfer. New AppIntentsTesting framework.

  • Code-along: Make your app available to Siri Walkthrough of adopting App Schemas in a Calendar app that uses SwiftData.

  • Best practises for integrating visual intelligence in your app Walkthrough of integrating visual intelligence using App Intents and the Vision framework. Now also on iPadOS and macOS (primary entry point is screenshots).

  • Explore advanced App Intents features for Siri and Apple Intelligence Customize Siri responses when running your intents. Make Siri visuals match your App’s style. Interaction donations to give Siri context to make smarter decisions. Add ownership to entities that users share or make public. Add entities to the spotlight index and keep it up to date. For larger data sets use an IntentValue Query. System search in app schema to allow users to search in your app with Siri (new in iOS 17). NSUserActivity or View Annotation API to tell Siri what entities are on screen. Collection annotations for lists.

  • Validate your App Intents adoption with AppIntentsTesting New framework to test App Intents. Uses UI Testing target and XCTest. Create and run intents in a test. Test entity queries, multiple intents. Test-Only intents exist only to help your tests (not discoverable). Test Spotlight indexing and view annotations.

Image Playground

App Store and Distribution

  • What’s new in Apple In-App Purchase Monthly subscriptions with a 12-month commitment (iOS 26.5). Requires Xcode 26.5 to test. Bundles are groups of subscriptions offered at a better price than buying individually. Suites are groups of subscriptions which cannot be purchased individually. Group IAP products with other review items into a single submission.

  • Enhance your presence on the App Store Product page can have a header image or video. App Store search results can also show an image or video instead of default screenshots. Use these images or videos to create Ads. Use Product Page Optimization to test different visuals. New asset library in App Store Connect for screenshots, preview videos and marketing assets. Upload to asset library and submit for review without need for new App version.

  • Explore Retention Messaging in App Store Connect Retain subscribers with retention messaging. Remind customers of the benefits or provide an offer when they are considering cancelling. Add in App Store Connect. Testable in sandbox. Real-time retention messaging when you setup server endpoint.

  • Unlock in-game content with StoreKit and Background Assets Apple can host up to 200GB of background assets per app. Localized asset packs are supported in iOS 27 reducing download size. Steam asset converter on macOS ships with Xcode 27. New Unity plug-ins for background assets and store kit on GitHub.

  • Offer subscriptions to groups and organizations Sell subscriptions to groups and organizations. Volume purchasing in Apple Business and Apple School Manager. Group purchasing works in app with customers purchasing multiple seats and then sharing invite links. Requires StoreKit 2. On by default unless family sharing is enabled. Volume pricing to setup bulk discounts.

App Services

  • Elevate your app’s text experience with TextKit Recap of TextKit architecture. New NSTextViewportRenderingSurface API to keep track of views text is drawn in. Using UI/NSTextView in SwiftUI with view representable. Delegate methods to override viewport layout in UI/NSTextView subclasses. UITextView register view provider reuse policy to cache text attachments.

  • Live Activities essentials Create and update live activities to provide immediate, glanceable information. Static and dynamic data. Built using WidgetKit and SwiftUI views. Dynamic Island is visible in portrait and landscape in iOS 27. Environment value isDynamicIslandLimitedInWidth to adjust view body. Add interactivity with App Intents.

  • WidgetKit foundations Recap of Widget fundamentals.

  • Read between the strokes with PencilKit Handwriting recognition support. Supports 29 languages. On device. Path conversion between PKStrokePath and Bézier paths. Stroke IDs are Identifiable. Stroke slicing for programmatic erasing.

  • Unwrap PaperKit PaperMarkup has a new subelements property to access and modify canvas elements. Markup adornments for buttons and annotations.

  • Create live communication experiences LiveCommunicationKit for incoming, outgoing, and group VOIP communications.

System Services

  • Discover container machines Linux container machines running on macOS built on the Containerization framework. Fast, lightweight, and persistent.

  • Extend the capabilities of your Virtualization app Programmatic setup of virtual mac. Accessory Access framework to attach USB devices. VMnet framework for advanced network topologies. DiskImageKit for macOS 27 supports Apple Sparse Image Format. Custom Virtio device for communication with Linux VMs.

  • Find your accessory with Bluetooth Channel Sounding iPhone measures round trip time for signal sent to a Bluetooth device. Process repeated across 2.4GHz band channels. Distance can be obtained using Core Bluetooth. Nearby Interaction measures distance and direction and requires camera assistance. Only works in foreground, needs N1 chip.

  • Rev up your CarPlay app New app category to browse and play video. Lists can now show images. MiniPlayer for now playing template. Voice Control template available for all app categories. Expanded availability of existing templates to more app categories. Navigation apps can create their own panels and share routes between car and device.

  • What’s new in Shortcuts Automations now live directly in the Shortcuts editor. New screenshot, keyboard, and app notification automations. Use model action to access local or cloud models. Storage to save content between runs. Global values are shared across shortcuts.

  • What’s new in Wallet New Poster Generic pass style requires iOS 27. New barcode types EAN-13, Code 39, Codebar, and ITF. Provide multiple barcode formats to fallback for older OS versions. Pass Designer app for Mac. Swift on Server package Pass Builder runs on Mac and Linux.

Photos and Camera

  • Enhance RAW image processing with Core Image Apple now supports 784 RAW models across all major camera vendors. Apple’s RAW version 9 is a major quality improvement. Rendering using on-device CoreML for demosaic and denoise processing. Not all models support RAW 9 but list is growing.

  • Implement high resolution photo capture Tradeoff between processing time and image quality. Typically 12, 24, or 48 megapixels. iPhone 14 Pro has 48MP Quad sensor. iPhone 15 support 24MP photos captured in multiple steps combining 12MP image with 48MP image using photonic engine. Use overlapping captures, deferred processing and fast capture prioritization to reduce shot-to-shot delay.

  • Build a responsive camera app that launches quickly Delay resource and UI creation until preview starts. Create AV capture session in parallel with UI setup. Initializing AV outputs slows launch. Adopt Deferred Start API (iOS 26) to postpone any output not needed at launch. Enable responsive capture to add buffering. AV Pro Video Storage for high data rate video capture.

  • Support the Center Stage front camera in your iOS app Center Stage front camera has a square image sensor with wide 95 degree field of view. Automatic face and gaze detection adapts orientation and narrow and wide views. Center Stage front camera is represented as an AVCaptureDevice with device type builtInUltraWideCamera. Smart framing monitor object gives framing recommendations to change aspect ratio and zoom factor.

Privacy and Security

  • Secure your apps with App Attest App Attest provides cryptographic proof your app is running on genuine Apple hardware and is unmodified. macOS 27 support requires System Integrity Protection to be enabled.

  • Secure your app: mitigate risks to agentic features Protecting against an external attacker. Indirect prompt injection from sources of untrusted context. Threat modelling: identify data sources that feed into prompt. Which actions have side effects? Mitigate prompts and actions. Intercept Foundation Model tool calls to force user confirmation and add spotlight delimiters for untrusted content or redact personal data. App Intents use a risk evaluation system when asking for confirmation. When accessing Siri on the lock screen authentication is required for risky tasks.

  • Meet Trust Insights Detect and defend against social engineering scams. Categories for payment, account updates, resource use, communication, and other. Insight evaluator returns risk assessment for how likely user is being coached to perform action. Device and server based ML models. Must return real-time feedback to report how app responded or app may be rate-limited. Submit confirmed scam reports through Apple Business Register.

Health and Fitness

  • Deliver workout insights with HealthKit workout zones HealthKit now includes heart rate and cycling power zones. Walk-through of adding heart rate zones to a sample app. Notifications when heart rate zone changes. Preferred zones from HealthKit or custom zones in app.

Audio and Video

  • Meet the Music Understanding framework On-device musical intelligence used by Final Cut Pro for beat detection. Analysis of key, rhythm, structure, pace, instrument activity, and loudness.

  • Integrate MusicKit into your app Recap of integrating Apple Music. Earn commissions on Apple Music subscriptions from your app. New Music Picker to browse Apple Music and local library.

  • Build live production tools for Apple Immersive Video Live immersive production pipeline. Video resolution is 32x larger and at twice the frame rate of a 2D production. Apple Spatial Audio can have 64 channels. SMPTE 2110 media transport.

  • Meet the Now Playing framework System Now Playing appears on the lock screen, control center, dynamic island, Standby, and CarPlay. Use Media sessions API to surface media from your app to the system. Media Sharing extensions to route media from iPhone to remote speakers and TVs.

Safari and Web

  • What’s new in WebKit for Safari 27 Focus on improving WebKit quality rather than new features. 1100+ improvements and fixes. CSS Grid lanes. Customizable select. Model element support on iOS, iPadOS and macOS. Safari Web Extension Packager to publish Safari extensions.

  • Create web extensions for Safari Walkthrough of building and distributing a web extension to block sites. Manage in App Store Connect using Safari Web Extension Packager - no Mac required. Native messaging allows the extension to communicate with a native app.

  • Learn CSS Grid Lanes New layout mode to flow items of any size in columns or rows. Available in Safari 26.4.

  • Rediscover the HTML select element Safari 27 and Chrome 135 support customizable select. Style the select button including picker icon. Customize the drop-down menu style and checkmark. Not restricted to text options, can use any content in menu and different layouts like grid.

  • Get started with the HTML Model Element Model element from visionOS now supported on iOS and macOS. Capture, convert, create assets or use generative AI. USDZ format. Fallback to image or polyfill for older browsers.

  • Explore immersive website environments in visionOS Build immersive web experiences - visitor to ticket sales website enters a theater to preview their seat position. HTML model element to embed 3D USDZ models. Immersive API uses same patterns as JavaScript Fullscreen API.

Spatial Computing

Spatial Computing didn’t get much attention in the SOTU but there’s still a large number of sessions. Though I do find them a little repetitive:

visionOS

  • Build next-generation experiences with visionOS 27 New way to bring existing Mac or PC apps to visionOS using Spatial Preview framework to extend 3D content into Apple Vision Pro or with Foveated Streaming to stream OpenXR content from a remote computer or cloud.

    RealityKit new physical space lighting. Projective Texture API. Cloth Simulation. Custom Reverb Mesh. Gaussian Splatting. Reality Composer Pro 3 has new AI Assistant. Script Graph node based editor. Unity and Godot game engine plugins.

    Object Tracking high frame rate tracking and extended training mode. Works on visionOS and iOS (ARKit). Support to build your own accessories. DFRobot and MikroE will release reference hardware.

  • Design immersive environments for visionOS apps and the spatial web Creating your own immersive environments for visionOS.

  • Discover the Spatial Preview framework Preview content from Mac on Apple Vision Pro. QuickLook app on VisionOS receives the content. Document preview sessions for files like Apple Immersive Video. USD preview session to live-edit USD content from a Mac app on visionOS.

  • Use foveated streaming to bring immersive content to visionOS Connect to external devices to stream OpenXR content. X-Plane 12 on visionOS uses ARKit to understand your equipment and streams the experience from a PC. Foveated streaming compresses video based on where you’re looking. NVIDIA CloudXR is built in to visionOS.

  • Explore enhancements to visionOS object tracking High frame rate tracking, extended training mode and metric poses enable accurate object tracking. Track and measure physical spaces using handheld items. Build a spatial accessory with LED constellation for tracking, inertial measurement, bluetooth, and inputs/outputs.

  • Collaborate on structured 3D models in visionOS Preserve structure and hierarchy when exporting models. RealityKit ManipulationComponent API to open and pull apart an object. Clipping lets people see through the asset. Automatic expansion of sub-assemblies. Needs some understanding of vector math and linear algebra.

Reality Composer Pro

  • Iterate your spatial scenes faster with Reality Composer Pro 3 No longer bundled with Xcode. Separate developer download. Create reusable prototype assets. Live preview opens companion app on visionOS. Lightmaps to simulate indirect lighting. AI Assistant can generate new 3D assets and materials from natural language prompts.

  • Supercharge your spatial workflows with Reality Composer Pro 3 Animation Graph is a visual node-based editor for character animation. Behavior Tree creates multi-step behavior. Composites nodes control the flow (sequence, selector, parallel). Action nodes do the actual work (move, rotate, wait). Script Graph visual scripting runs behaviors in response to events such as tap gestures. Navigation mesh defines the walkable surfaces in a scene. Compute graph is a node based tool for building GPU driven particle simulations backed by Metal.

  • Design no-code games with Reality Composer Pro 3 ScriptGraph node-based visual scripting using event-driven logic. Preview in Reality Composer or on Vision Pro.

  • Extend Reality Composer 3 functionality with Xcode Extend Reality Composer Pro with plugins (available later this year). Xcode builds the final app and plug-ins for Reality Composer. Reality Composer sets up the 3D scenes and objects. Plug-ins create custom components for Reality Composer. Use @Scriptable to turn them into custom nodes for Script Graph.

USDKit

  • Discover USDKit and what’s new in OpenUSD Gaussian Splats capture a scene as millions of fuzzy, overlapping particles. New Raytracer renderer for Preview integrates with Spatial Preview framework. Safari Model support to embed 3D content. Swift based USDKit to handle heavy-lifting of supporting USD. RealityKit and Spatial Preview integration built-in.

RealityKit

  • Explore advances in RealityKit Lightmap support to render indirect lighting effects. Projective textures to emulate light shining through a window or under water. Navigation mesh to define traversable parts of a scene. Cloth simulation with realistic creases and folds. Switch between different levels of detail based on distance to camera or screen size of object. Gaussian splats. Custom reverb mesh to model acoustic properties of a room.

Machine Learning and Vision

  • Run local agentic AI on the Mac using MLX Setting up a local agent to run on your Mac. MLX handles the low-level computation. MLX-LM supports loading and running thousands of models from HuggingFace. MLX-LM server is an OpenAI compatible HTTP server that provides standard API access to your local model. Use Xcode, OpenCode, custom scripts, or anything else that can access the agent API. M5 chip has dedicated Neural Accelerators. MLX distributed support can spread large models over multiple clustered Macs.

  • Explore distributed inference and training with MLX Scaling inference and training over multiple Macs (4 x M3 Ultras) with MLX. Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) protocol running over Thunderbolt 5. JACCL communication library for sending data between machines using RDMA. Connect Macs in a ring or mesh.

  • What’s new in image understanding Tap to segment API to isolate any object in an image. Tap, draw bounds, or scribble over objects. Analyze images using Foundation Models. Tools can take image references as arguments. Vision provides barcode reader and OCR tools. Vision now on watchOS.

Business and Education

  • What’s new in assessment on macOS Automatic Assessment Configuration framework on macOS 27. Creates secure, locked down environment for education testing or certifications. Precondition checks. Menu bar and dock are hidden by default, but can be enabled with filters. Dictation and Autofill can be disabled. Restrict Finder to allowed files and directories. Restrict which processes are allowed to run.

  • What’s new in managing Apple devices Apple Business now available in over 200 countries and regions. New APIs to automate device management tasks. New volume licensing for subscriptions in App Store apps. New managed migration assistant. Use declarative device management. Control binary execution in macOS 27. Require Touch ID to login/unlock Mac. Web authentication for platform SSO. iPad support for authenticated guest mode for shared iPads.

Metal and Games

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