What’s New in Xcode 8 for a Swift App Development Company

Customer experience would be the key business differentiator in the coming years. Brands and their business decision-makers, customer service analysts and scholars around the world share this common opinion when it comes to exploring ways of gaining a competitive advantage in the marketplace. The same endeavor found a reflection in the Apple’s modus operandi in the concluding WWDC 2016. With the announcement of iOS 10, which is expected to hit the market by the fall of the year, Apple plans to fuel its customer experience strategy and make a bigger impact in the market. Undeniably, it’s not going to materialize without the active support of every Swift app development company and their development teams.

Let’s take a look at the prominent resources made available by the company in its latest IDE (Integrated Development Environment), i.e. Xcode 8.0 Beta to favor the development of iOS 10-compatible apps.

Source Editor Extensions

Xcode 8 adds support for Xcode Source Editor Extensions. Application Extensions provide additional commands in the Xcode Editor menu. The extensions can be used to modify texts and selection areas. Swift app developers may use the Xcode Source Editor Extension Target Template in the macOS Application Extensions section before getting started with any project.

Interface Builder

Migration to auto layout is easier with the built-in Interface Builder. No longer a developer is in need to generate implicit constraints for views without constraints. He or she can also zoom in and zoom out the interface across iOS, tvOS, and watchOS, as well as edit the coding. Xcode 8 offers a completely redesigned workflow for working with trait variations (for example, size classes) and favors designing UI in terms of a real device size rather than by using intentionally abstract rectangles. The canvas let developers watch interactions between iOS views as they appear at runtime, including accurate compositing of UIVisualEffectView.

Runtime Sanitizers

Xcode renders a new Thread Sanitizer feature to help Swift developers with compiler instrumentation and runtime monitoring. This will help in detecting and eliminating data races and other concurrency bugs in Swift or Objective-C programs. It can also catch memory corruption errors that get triggered by using types such as UnsafeMutablePointer.

Static Analyzer

It helps in checking nullability violations at both aggressive and less aggressive levels. The more aggressive level examines nullability violations in all calls. It stays active by default for new projects. The less aggressive level checks for nullability violations in calls to project headers. However, it fails to do so with system headers.

Playgrounds

Xcode Playgrounds aimed at macOS will now run with open-source Swift toolchains from Swift.org. However, Playgrounds targeting iOS or tvOS will rely on Xcode 8.0 toolchain. The video tag associated with Playgrounds will also render support to remote URLs.

Hope this latest IDE in association with the powerful Swift 3.0 language will help Swift app development companies and their developers to build quality apps matching the needs of their clients. Undeniably, the focus must not dilute the comfort and convenience of end-users as Apple is not going to take any hit on that front.