What's new in Xcode 7

https://developer.apple.com/xcode/

by yconst • 11 years ago

252 174 11 years ago

developer.apple.com

glhaynes• 11 years ago

Unexpected: "Xcode 7 and Swift now make it easier for everyone to build apps and run them directly on their Apple devices. Simply sign in with your Apple ID, and turn your idea into an app that you can touch on your iPad, iPhone, or Apple Watch. Download Xcode 7 beta and try it yourself today. Program membership is not required."

asendra• 11 years ago

They have also merged both iOS and OS X developer programs under the same roof. 99$/y gives you access to both now.

vvanders• 11 years ago

Does this mean you now need to pay $99/y to develop OSX apps?

TillE• 11 years ago

Oh, that's excellent. I was just contemplating whether I really want to pay $99/year just to be able to sign a little Mac app, but if I can get all the iOS stuff too, I'll probably do it.

xirdstl• 11 years ago

Maybe this explains the recent bug I experienced where, when attempting to renew my iOS developer program for $99, the system added the Mac developer program to my cart for an additional $99 (which I didn't want).

vbezhenar3• 11 years ago

What? It means that anyone can download XCode, any app from github and run it on their devices? That's very nice.

sohailk• 11 years ago

you could potentially bundle xcode + xctool + github into some sort of adhoc app store, no?

Osmium2• 11 years ago

Program membership is not required.

Though note that there's a current bug listed that looks like accounts with expired developer memberships currently can't use free provisioning.

(For me, this is mildly irritating, because I let my membership lapse a few days ago on a hunch that they'd combine the developer programmes. And then they did, but I can't use the free provisioning, and the re-enrolment form doesn't seem to be working right now either.)

Really nice to see this though.

vbezhenar3• 11 years ago

You can try to create a new Apple ID while they fixing the bug.

tiernano• 11 years ago

wonder will the same work for Mono Develop? Build on Windows or Mac with VS or Mono Develop and deploy to an iPhone with a Mac...

giarc3• 11 years ago

I love this. I'm thrifty and haven't paid for a dev account but am deep into an app build. When I show clients, there's a bit of an awkward conversation when I explain that I have to show them on my macbook. If I could demo directly on my phone/tablet that would be amazing. Can't wait to use this feature!

laydownlarry• 11 years ago

you misspelled cheap

serve_yay• 11 years ago

I'm sure HN will find a talking point to replace that one :)

carlosrg• 11 years ago

FINALLY. I don't understand why they didn't do it earlier.

fierycatnet• 11 years ago

This is awesome. I might get back into iOS app development. I didn't feel like paying money for prototyping just so I could run it on my own device. Emulator wasn't doing it for me. Time to pickup Swift.

shurcooL• 11 years ago

Color me interested. With this, and https://github.com/rakyll/go2xcode, I might actually try making some apps to run on my iOS device now.

downandout2• 11 years ago

This was the big news IMO. Many would-be developers reside in countries where $99/year is a huge amount of money that cannot be justified until they have a final, working product they are ready to distribute.

kybernetyk• 11 years ago

Yet those developers somehow can buy a computer for $1000+ and spend an additional $500-$800 on the tablet/phone? :)

hueving• 11 years ago

I think devs that can dump money on apple products but not on the $99/year are a pretty slim slice of the population.

WalterGR• 11 years ago

Not being a developer for Apple products, what has changed?

chc7• 11 years ago

You used to have to get a $99 developer membership to put apps on your iPhone.

mcintyre1994• 11 years ago

Is this a path to non jailbreak sideloading at least for users with OSX and Xcode7? Not exactly likely to make a splash but interesting move if you can share these projects without too much fuss.

More generally, this is an awesome move. Kudos to Apple :)

halayli2• 11 years ago

"Advanced error handling model using try / catch / throw that feels natural in Swift."

yeah try/catch is very advanced.

McElroy• 11 years ago

While try/catch is what is exposed to us as developers, the underlying implementation could very well be advanced.

pilif• 11 years ago

Advanced compared to what was there in previous releases (basically an Error out parameter that you had to check on your own)

Joky• 11 years ago

Advanced != Exclusive/Innovative/...

That said, the spec here is a bit different than C++ exception I believe.

Someone2• 11 years ago

Agreed. Also, it does look different aka innovative to me:

    func loadData() throws { }

    func test() {
      do {
        try loadData()
      } catch {
        print(error)
      }
    }

I guess that you have to prefix any statement that might throw with 'try', and cannot prefix other statements with it.

If so, their motto really seems to be 'explicit over implicit'. I'm not sure that is an improvement, but I'm not sure that it is bad, either, provided that the refactoring tools work fine (for example when one removes that "throws" from the definition of loadData)

pjmlp5• 11 years ago

Some language designers feel it is so advanced that developers working on coal mines should not be allowed to use it.

vog• 11 years ago

Not sure why this is downvoted. I find it totally appropriate to criticize marketing speak that is masked as technical description.

Regarding Apple, I find it inappropriate (and dishonest) to use the word "advanced", when it is just catching up with a commodity feature. Exceptions are provided by almost every other modern programming language in the world.

halayli2• 11 years ago

exactly my point. It's marketing mumbo jumbo.

hhghd• 11 years ago

Incredibly disappointing. Should be a library provided Result type (or hell, even an anointed type like Optional, anything but exceptions).

Dewie3• 11 years ago

They also described Swift's `Optional` type as innovative.

https://developer.apple.com/swift/

smtddr• 11 years ago

You have to understand though, Swift is like a really nice wrapper around Objective-C. Imagine adding try/catch to C programming language? I know python & java and all of today's relevant high-level languages have it since forever, but implementing that in something that wasn't designed for it from the start is a big task. I'm by no stretch of the imagination an Apple fanatic but as a person who is about to send out their first mobile app, which happens to be for iOS, I acknowledge the difficulty of adding try/catch to Swift... and by extension any Obj-C or plain C used in that same XCode project.

hundchenkatze• 11 years ago

While Swift was designed to interface well with Objective-C and runs on the Objective-C runtime, it is not a wrapper around Objective-C. It was written from the ground up, started by Chris Lattner at Apple.

cellularmitosis3• 11 years ago

Obj-C already had try / catch, it just wasn't considered idiomatic to the platform. Amazon caught a bunch of flak when they wrote an Obj-C interface to AWS and all of the error handling was try/catch instead of NSError (probably, they just line-for-line transliterated their Java interface).

nathan_f77• 11 years ago

I'm really excited about code coverage, and the built-in user interface testing support. That's amazing. We currently write our acceptance tests with KIF, but this sounds so much better. Looking forward to playing with the automated test recording.

Entalpi2• 11 years ago

"Xcode 7 has a ENABLE_BITCODE option to embed bitcode in apps, app extensions, and frameworks. The option is turned on by default for iOS and is mandatory for watchOS projects submitted to the store.

When bitcode is enabled for a target, all the objects, static libraries and user frameworks used when linking that target must contain bitcode. Otherwise, an error or a warning will be issued by the linker. (Note: missing bitcode is currently a warning for iOS, but it will become an error in an upcoming beta release of Xcode 7.) ENABLE_BITCODE should be consistently turned on for all the targets. If you use a library or framework provided by a third party, please contact the vendor for an updated version which contains bitcode."

Dear God, do we need to wait for all libs to update? :S

0x07• 11 years ago

Wow, that's quite a change! Is this some kind of intermediate LLVM language? Sounds very Java/.NET-like. I can see how it's nice for future proofing (i bet you can even change from ARM to x86 then!), but you're handing a lot of control and probably something much closer to the original source code over to Apple.

Is there a fundamental change of architecture planned for future iOS devices?

terhechte• 11 years ago

Along those lines, John S. just tweeted "<whisper>ARM Macs…</whisper>" [1], which is interesting, as he also got the Open Sourcing of Swift right a couple of days ago.

[1] https://twitter.com/siracusa/status/608029277963972608

Someone2• 11 years ago

http://llvm.org/docs/BitCodeFormat.html. Way closer to assembly than Java/.NET byte codes. Also potentially processor specific.

My guess is that it is future-proofing towards running iOS apps on Mac OS and/or running (parts of) iOS apps on the Apple Watch. It also might mean that Apple plans to make their own ARM extensions (for example, I suspect having the CPU know about tagged pointers, so that an 'add' instruction can do an indirection, if needed, might be an overall win)

Update: the release notes for the Xcode 7 Beta say:

"• Bitcode. Archive for upload to the App Store in an intermediate LLVM binary representation that the store can then optimize into the 64 or 32-bit executable to be delivered to customers."

This falls under a feature they call 'App Thinning'. It makes the App Store optimize an app for the device it gets installed on, CPU-wise and asset-wise, and also allows your app to download some resources on demand.

pjmlp5• 11 years ago

Apple is just following Microsoft footsteps.

http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Mani-Ramaswamy-and...

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn584397%28v=vs.110...

nekitamo• 11 years ago

Agreed, this is an insane requirement. Our app uses commercial libraries from closed source vendors, some of which are no longer distributing newer versions of their libraries. If this becomes a requirement, we will not be able to ship our app because we can't deliver the entire thing in bitcode.

0x07• 11 years ago

That's not so much of a bitcode problem as a vendor problem. You'd have the same issue when 64bit builds became mandatory, or when uidevice.uniqueIdentifier was banned.

beagle32• 11 years ago

Our app uses commercial libraries from closed source vendors, some of which are no longer distributing newer versions of their libraries

This is the insane part - you're relying on things you have zero control over and zero support for. Apple's requirement is no different than some fatal bug discovered or backdoor discovered in those libraries - except Apple is giving you some notice without immediately putting the liability on you.

zimbatm• 11 years ago

A migrator in Xcode 7 to convert your existing your existing Swift code to use the new Swift 2.0 features and syntax.

woops, repetition !

cellularmitosis3• 11 years ago

Chris seemed to indicate that this migrator will also somehow handle the migration from NSError-style error handling to the new try/catch. I'm very curious to see how sophisticated that will be.

pjmlp5• 11 years ago

Swift is a successor to both the C and Objective-C languages.

This says it all, regarding what the future for Objective-C looks like.

anon1385• 11 years ago

They just added generics to Obj-C, which is one of the biggest new language features in a long time.

pjmlp5• 11 years ago

I guess that is just required for interoperability with Swift.

Generics don't make much sense in Objective-C dynamic model.

ngoldbaum• 11 years ago

Does anyone know if Xcode 7 will include LLVM OpenMP support?

Fargren5• 11 years ago

Not even a mention of refactoring tools for Swift? Right now you can't even do a Rename. This was one of the biggest reasons I bought Appcode, actually. And I'm still waiting for either IDE to implement Extract Method.

It boggles my mind how little I hear people complain about this. Aren't these basic tools by now?

nothis• 11 years ago

Wait, you can't auto-rename stuff? I noticed in an older version of XCode (when I still bothered), that there were really basic refactoring tools missing for C++, but I assumed that was just because Apple hates C++. Apple obviously doesn't hate Swift.

I guess Apple just hates refactoring. Why though?

donarb4• 11 years ago

Most likely Apple is still working out the internals of the Swift compiler. Refactoring requires a thorough knowledge of code paths and object lifetimes.

Once Swift 2 is nailed down, I'm sure refactoring will follow.

santaclaus• 11 years ago

but I assumed that was just because Apple hates C++

Chris Lattner is a bit of a C++ head, no? LLVM is a C++ project...

With that said, yea, refactoring support in Xcode is a drag.

notduncansmith• 11 years ago

I remember having access to Refactoring in an old Objective-C project, but it was far from "refactoring" - it would have been better named "find-and-replace", considering it substituted some occurrences of the word in question in comments, strings, etc, often with incorrect casing.

overgard• 11 years ago

I feel like a lot of basic stuff is broken or non-existent in Xcode. For instance, project text search on my machine freezes up the entire IDE for half an hour, which is ridiculous since A) it's not an unusually large project, and B) it's on an SSD, and it should be running search in a separate thread anyway.. Not to mention last time I used Xcode (6.2) it crashed on me 7 times in the span of an hour on basic things, like unlocking a file. I wish apple would focus on getting the basics right. It sucks because there's not much of an alternative, but it's by far my least favorite IDE to use.

mp_mn• 11 years ago

Is your search scope too broad? Too many Pods maybe? I've never had an issue with project text search. The only time I've ever had that many problems in an iOS dev workflow was years ago when I was briefly running OSX through VMWare.

There's something else going on with your environment, it shouldn't be giving you this many problems.

Entalpi2• 11 years ago

This is amazing how long they can go on without a basic functionality as renaming ...

72deluxe8• 11 years ago

I wonder if they'll implement refactoring tools for C++ first. Really old language, zero support for refactoring in xcode....

BlackLamb• 11 years ago

It would be interesting to see, how Apple manages to stop people from Side loading apps.

dep_b• 11 years ago

Am I the only one excited about nil flags and generics support in Objective-C? I think it's really nice to have an NSArray full of MyObjects that is type checked compile time.

Thiz• 11 years ago

Can I use it on my old mac mini 2011 with 2gb ram and Mavericks?

I really want to start using Swift. And no, can't upgrade.

slm_HN• 11 years ago

I doubt it. The last version of XCode 6 won't run without Yosemite, so I'm guessing 7 will require Yosemite.

Also it's very hard to run with 2gb ram. For example you won't be able to use the iOS emulator because the swapping will take so long XCode will timeout when trying to launch the emulator. It's very painful even with 4gb. 8 is probably the minimum.

donarb4• 11 years ago

It's a simulator, not an emulator. There's a big difference.

72deluxe8• 11 years ago

Ouch. 2GB RAM? Sleeping and resuming must be really fast (no large capacity of RAM to save to disk) but daily running must be painful.

sjwright2• 11 years ago

You say you can't upgrade the computer, but surely you could throw some extra memory in. You could increase it to 8GB for around US$60 and benefit from a substantial improvement in performance across the board.

cerberusss3• 11 years ago

If it's just Swift, perhaps you can try and install the command-line developer tools?

msie• 11 years ago

Stack Views is really cool! I don't need the full power and complexity of AutoLayout.

cellularmitosis3• 11 years ago

I saw them as being more of a replacement for UITableView for the cases where you don't need all of its dynamism (cell re-use, etc), and whipping together half a dozen static table cells involves too much ceremony. In fact I was hoping I'd be able to use Stack Views to get in the ballpark and then do final tweaking with AutoLayout...

arihant2• 11 years ago

Every year the new XCode comes, and I'm less excited about new features and more worried about how many more Macs will I have to buy. Last update on XCode 6 made it impossible for some 2012 models to run it.

This update is almost surely for Yosemite and above. The cost of developing on Apple platform is crazy these days. I miss the days when they could mock Microsoft for having an expensive Visual Studio. Now they make you buy a new Mac per developer every 2 years.

bbrian• 11 years ago

I run XCode 6 fine on a 2011 MacBook Air.

72deluxe8• 11 years ago

2012 Macs couldn't run xcode?

I'm running a 2008 Mac Pro running Xcode 6 and Yosemite. I have a 2012 MacBook Pro at home running Yosemite and Xcode 6 (but my word is the hard disk in that slow - luck of the draw getting a 5200 Hitachi or a Samsung, eh!!!)

Which 2012 Macs can't run Xcode 6?

equoid• 11 years ago

"Last update on XCode 6 made it impossible for some 2012 models to run it"

I find this difficult to believe, care to provide evidence of it being an Apple problem?

arihant2• 11 years ago

Macbook Air 2012 models with 4GB soldered RAM ran fine on Mavericks and XCode 6, until Apple decided the newest XCode 6 to be Yosemite only. Now Yosemite is free, but is absolute abonimation on 2/4GB machines. On top of that, you have to run XCode. Not to mention the time debt required to upgrade.

Now, for indie developer setting, these issues might not be huge. But the problem here is - Apple puts businesses in awkward positions, when they have to bulk buy RAMs and upgrade all the systems just to compile on the newest minor release of iOS. Then, they started soldering RAM, so now to compile on 8.3, buy 25 new Macs or fuck off.

Apple's actions that screws us - solder RAM, make only latest XCode work with latest SDK, make OS impossible to run on low RAM, make XCode run only on newest OS.

iphonedevpinoy• 11 years ago

I wonder if it's possible to do ad-hoc testing on Xcode 7 without joining the developer program?

What's new in Xcode 7

Related Stories