InfoQ Homepage Apple Content on InfoQ
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AWS Now Offering Mac Mini-Based EC2 Instances
Announced at re:Invent 2020, AWS new EC2 Mac Instances enable running macOS on Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute to build, test, package, and sign Xcode applications for Apple platforms, including macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS, and Safari.
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How x86 to arm64 Translation Works in Rosetta 2
Along with its plan to transition their Macintosh line from Intel CPUs to its own CPUs, dubbed Apple Silicon, Apple announced Rosetta 2, a binary translation software that aims to smooth out the process. Thanks to Rosetta 2, most x86 programs will be able to execute after an initial translation step.
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Apple's ML Compute Framework Accelerates TensorFlow Training
As part of the recent macOS Big Sur release, Apple has included the ML Compute framework. ML Compute provides optimized mathematical libraries to improve training on CPU and GPU on both Intel and M1-based Macs, with up to a 7x improvement in training times using the TensorFlow deep-learning library.
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New Electron Release Supports New Apple Silicon Chips
The Electron team recently released the 11th iteration of the popular cross-platform native desktop application framework. Electron 11 introduces support for the new Apple silicon hardware (Darwin arm64). Electron 11 also updates the versions of Chromium, Node, and its JavaScript engine.
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Swift Aims to Become a Data Race-Free Concurrent Language
The Swift team has published its roadmap to improve concurrency support in Swift. In a first phase, Swift will gain the async syntax and actors, while in a second phase focus will be on eliminating data races and deadlocks.
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Apple Open Sources System, Swift Library Interfacing with System-Level API
System is a low-level library Apple introduced at its last WWDC conference to provide an idiomatic and type-safe interface to system calls and currency types usually available at the OS level. In keeping with Apple's aim to push Swift as a cross-platform development ecosystem, System has been open-sourced to make it easier for programmers to contribute to its further development across platforms.
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Google Engineer Tailors Swift for Windows
The vision for Swift to become a cross-platform programming language has moved one step further with the introduction of a Swift toolchain for Windows 10. Early adopters can now use Swift to create Windows 10 programs that interoperate through the C ABI with existing libraries available on the platform.
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Swift 5.3 Brings New Language Features, Better Developer Experience, and Improved Performance
Swift 5.3, which has recently become available with Xcode 12, includes a number of significant new features at the syntax level, including support for multi-pattern catch clauses, increased availability for implicit self, and more. Additionally, the Swift team has worked on improving runtime performance, especially when using SwiftUI, and developer experience.
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iOS 14 Now Available, Developers Forced to Rush to Submit Apps
Apple has released the first public version of iOS 14, which brings a number of new features such as app clips, widgets, improved Swift UI, ARKit, Core ML, and more. Developers received the iOS and Xcode GM version a mere 24 hours in advance, though, which led to some frustration.
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Apple Rejects NFC, Bluetooth and 14 More Web APIs, Citing Privacy Reasons
In the frame of its tracking prevention policy, Apple recently communicated its current refusal to implement 16 web APIs, citing privacy concerns. Apple emphasized that the decision could be reconsidered if the proposals evolve to reduce the fingerprinting attack surface.
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Apple's Rosetta Move
Apple has announced that future Macs will be built on an ARM platform, known as Apple Silicon. What does this mean for application developers on the Mac platform, and the wider picture of the development community? Read on to find out what's new and what the future holds.
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0-Day Vulnerability in Sign In with Apple Rewarded with $100,000
Earlier this year, security researcher Bhavuk Jain disclosed a 0-day vulnerability in Sign In with Apple that could easily allow an attacker to get full control of a victim's account by only knowing their email address. Apple patched the vulnerability and stated they could find no evidence of exploitation.
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Apple Releases iOS 13.5 with Exposure Notification Beta and Best Practices Sample App
The latest release of iOS, iOS 13.5, includes beta support for the Exposure Notification API Apple defined jointly with Google to enable contact tracing apps. Apple also published a sample app to showcase best practices in contact-tracing apps.
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Swift 5.3 Will Expand Officially Supported Platforms to Windows and Additional Linux Distributions
Swift 5.3 has recently entered the final stage of its development with the creation of the release/5.3 branch. One of the major goals for the upcoming Swift release is extending official platform support, including additional Linux distributions and Windows.
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Google and Apple Publish Exposure Notification API Draft
Only a few weeks after its initial announcement, the partnership between Google and Apple to provide their mobile OSes with solid foundations for contact tracing applications has reached a key milestone, a preliminary draft of the Exposure Notification API and beta release for iOS.