Photos Framework

The Photos framework (Photos.framework) provides new APIs for working with photo and video assets, including iCloud Photos assets, that are managed by the Photos app. This framework is a more capable alternative to the Assets Library framework. Key features include a thread-safe architecture for fetching and caching thumbnails and full-sized assets, requesting changes to assets, observing changes made by other apps, and resumable editing of asset content.

For more information, see Photos Framework Reference.

Use the related Photos UI framework (PhotosUI.framework) to create app extensions for editing image and video assets in the Photos app. For more information, see App Extension Programming Guide.

Manual Camera Controls

The AV Foundation framework (AVFoundation.framework) makes it easier than ever to take great photos. Your app can take direct control over the camera focus, white balance, and exposure settings. In addition, your app can use bracketed exposure captures to automatically capture images with different exposure settings.

For more information see AV Foundation Framework Reference.

Metal

Metal provides extremely low-overhead access to the A7 GPU enabling incredibly high performance for your sophisticated graphics rendering and computational tasks. Metal eliminates many performance bottlenecks—such as costly state validation—that are found in traditional graphics APIs. Metal is explicitly designed to move all expensive state translation and compilation operations out of the critical path of your most performance sensitive rendering code. Metal provides precompiled shaders, state objects, and explicit command scheduling to ensure your application achieves the highest possible performance and efficiency for your GPU graphics and compute tasks. This design philosophy extends to the tools used to build your app. When your app is built, Xcode compiles Metal shaders in the project into a default library, eliminating most of the runtime cost of preparing those shaders.

Graphics, compute, and blit commands are designed to be used together seamlessly and efficiently. Metal is specifically designed to exploit modern architectural considerations, such as multiprocessing and shared memory, to make it easy to parallelize the creation of GPU commands.

With Metal, you have a streamlined API, a unified graphics and compute shading language, and Xcode-based tools, so you don’t need to learn multiple frameworks, languages and tools to take full advantage of the GPU in your game or app.

For more information on using Metal, see Metal Programming Guide and Metal Framework Reference, and Metal Shading Language Guide.

Scene Kit

Scene Kit is an Objective-C framework for building simple games and rich app user interfaces with 3D graphics, combining a high-performance rendering engine with a high-level, descriptive API. Scene Kit has been available since OS X v10.8 and is now available in iOS for the first time. Lower-level APIs (such as OpenGL ES) require you to implement the rendering algorithms that display a scene in precise detail. By contrast, Scene Kit lets you describe your scene in terms of its content—geometry, materials, lights, and cameras—then animate it by describing changes to those objects.

Scene Kit’s 3D physics engine enlivens your app or game by simulating gravity, forces, rigid body collisions, and joints. Add high-level behaviors that make it easy to use wheeled vehicles such as cars in a scene, and add physics fields that apply radial gravity, electromagnetism, or turbulence to objects within an area of effect.

Use OpenGL ES to render additional content into a scene, or provide GLSL shaders that replace or augment Scene Kit’s rendering. You can also add shader-based post-processing techniques to Scene Kit’s rendering, such as color grading or screen space ambient occlusion.

For more information, see Scene Kit Framework Reference.

Sprite Kit

The Sprite Kit framework (SpriteKit.framework) adds new features to make it easier to support advanced game effects. These features include support for custom OpenGL ES shaders and lighting, integration with Scene Kit, and advanced new physics effects and animations. For example, you can create physics fields to simulate gravity, drag, and electromagnetic forces using the SKFieldNode class. Physics bodies can now easily be created with per-pixel collision masks. And it is easier than ever to pin a physics body to its parent, even if its parent does not have a physics body of its own. These new physics features make complex simulations much easier to implement.

Use constraints to modify the effects of physics and animations on the content of your scene—for example, you can make one node always point toward another node regardless of where the two nodes move.

Xcode 6 also incorporates new shader and scene editors that save you time as you create your game. Create a scene’s contents, specifying which nodes appear in the scene and characteristics of those nodes, including physics effects. The scene is then serialized to a file that your game can easily load.

For information about the classes of this framework, see Sprite Kit Framework Reference and Sprite Kit Programming Guide.

AV Audio Engine

AV Foundation framework (AVFoundation.framework) adds support for a broad cross-section of audio functionality at a higher level of abstraction than Core Audio. These new audio capabilities are available on both OS X and iOS and include automatic access to audio input and output hardware, audio recording and playback, and audio file parsing and conversion. You also gain access to audio units for generating special effects and filters, pitch and playback speed management, stereo and 3D audio environments, and MIDI instruments.

For more information, see AV Foundation Framework Reference.

Document-Related Data Migration

The iCloud infrastructure is more robust and reliable when documents and data are transferred between user devices and the server. When a user installs iOS 8 and logs into the device with an iCloud account, the iCloud server performs a one-time migration of the documents and data in that user’s account. This migration involves copying the documents and data to a new version of the app’s container directory. This new container is accessible only to devices running iOS 8 or OS X v10.10. Devices running older operating systems will continue to have access to the original container, but changes made in that container will not appear in the new container and vice versa.

Cloud Kit

Cloud Kit (CloudKit.framework) provides a conduit for moving data between your app and iCloud. Unlike other iCloud technologies where data transfers happen transparently, Cloud Kit gives you control over when transfers occur. You can use Cloud Kit to manage all types of data.

Apps that use Cloud Kit directly can to store data in a repository that is shared by all users. This public repository is tied to the app itself and is available even on devices without a registered iCloud account. As the app developer, you can manage the data in this container directly and see any changes made by users through the Cloud Kit dashboard.

For more information about the classes of this framework, see Cloud Kit Framework Reference.

Document Picker

The document picker view controller (UIDocumentPickerViewController) grants users access to files outside your application’s sandbox. It is a simple mechanism for sharing documents between apps. It also enables more complex workflows, because users can edit a single document with multiple apps.

The document picker lets you access files from a number of document providers. For example, the iCloud document provider grants access to documents stored inside another app’s iCloud container. Third-party developers can provide additional document providers by using the Storage Provider extension.

For more information, see the Document Picker Programming Guide.

API Modernization

Many frameworks on iOS have adopted small interface changes that take advantage of modern Objective-C syntax:

• Getter and setter methods are replaced by properties in most classes. Code using the existing getter and setter methods should continue to work with this change.

• Initialization methods are updated to have a return value of instancetype instead of id.

• Designated initializers are declared as such where appropriate.

In most cases, these changes do not require any additional work in your own app. However, you may also want to implement these changes in your own Objective-C code. In particular, you may want to modernize your Objective-C code for the best experience when interoperating with Swift code.

For more information, see Adopting Modern Objective-C.

AV Foundation Framework

The AV Foundation framework (AVFoundation.framework) enables you to capture metadata over time while shooting video. Arbitrary types of metadata can be embedded with a video recording at various points in time. For example, you might record the current physical location in a video created by a moving camera device.

For information about the classes of this framework, see AV Foundation Framework Reference.

AV Kit Framework

The AV Kit framework (AVKit.framework) previously introduced on OS X is available on iOS. Use it instead of Media Player framework when you need to display a video.

Core Image Framework

The Core Image framework (CoreImage.framework) has the following changes:

• You can create custom image kernels in iOS.

• Core image detectors can detect rectangles and QR codes in an image.

For information about the classes of this framework, see Core Image Reference Collection.

Core Location Framework

The Core Location framework (CoreLocation.framework) has the following changes:

• You can determine which floor the device is on, if the device is in a multistory building.

• The visit service provides an alternative to the significant location change service for apps that need location information about interesting places visited by the user.

For information about the classes of this framework, see Core Location Framework Reference.

Foundation Framework

The Foundation framework (Foundation.framework) includes the following enhancements:

• The NSFileVersion class provides access to past versions of iCloud documents. These versions are stored in iCloud, but can be downloaded on request.

• The NSURL class supports storing document thumbnails as metadata.

• The NSMetadataQuery class can search for external iCloud documents that your app has opened.

Game Controller Framework

The Game Controller framework (GameController.framework) has the following changes:

• If the controller is attached to a device, you can now receive device motion data directly from the Game Controller framework.

• If you are working with button inputs and do not care about pressure sensitivity, a new handler can call your game only when the button’s pressed state changes.

Game Kit Framework

The Game Kit framework (GameKit.framework) has the following changes:

• Features that were added in iOS 7 are available on OS X 10.10, making it easier to use these features in a cross-platform game.

• The new GKSavedGame class makes it easy to save and restore a user’s progress. The data is stored on iCloud; Game Kit does the necessary work to synchronize the files between the device and iCloud.

• Methods and properties that use player identifier strings are now deprecated. Instead, use GKPlayer objects to identify players. Replacement properties and methods have been added that take GKPlayer objects.

iAd Framework

The iAd framework (iAd.framework) adds the following new features:

• If you are using AV Kit to play a video, you can play preroll advertisements before the video is played.

• You can look up more information about the the effectiveness of advertisements for your app.

For information about the classes of this framework, see iAd Framework Reference.

Media Player Framework

Two Media Player framework (MediaPlayer.framework) classes are extended with new metadata information.

For information about the classes of this framework, see Media Player Framework Reference.

Sprite Kit Framework Changes

The Sprite Kit framework (SpriteKit.framework) adds many new features:

• An SKShapeNode object can specify textures to be used when the shape is either stroked or filled.

• The SKSpriteNode, SKShapeNode, SKEmitterNode, and SKEffectNode classes include support for custom rendering. Use the SKShader and SKUniform classes to compile an OpenGL ES 2.0-based fragment shader and provide input data to the shader.

• SKSpriteNode objects can provide lighting information so that Sprite Kit automatically generates lighting effects and shadows. Add SKLightNode objects to the scene to specify the lights, and then customize the properties on these lights and any sprites to determine how the scene is lit.

• The SKFieldNode class provides a number of physics special effects you can apply to a scene. For example, create magnetic fields, add drag effects, or even generate randomized motion. All effects are constrained to a specific region of the scene and you can carefully tune both the effect’s strength and how quickly the effect is weakened by distance. Field nodes make it easy to drop in an effect without having to search the entire list of physics bodies and apply forces to them.

• A new SK3DNode class is used to integrate a Scene Kit scene into your game as a sprite. Each time that Sprite Kit renders your scene, it renders the 3D scene node first to generate a texture, then uses that texture to render a sprite in Sprite Kit. Creating 3D sprites can help you avoid needing to create dozens of frames of animation to produce an effect.

• New actions have been added, including support for inverse kinematic animations.

• A new system of constraints has been added to scene processing. Constraints are applied after physics is simulated and can be used to specify a set of rules for how a node is positioned and oriented. For example, you can use a constrant to specify that a particular node in the scene always points at another node in the scene. Constraints make it easier to implement rendering rules in your game without having to manually tweak the scene in your event loop.

• A scene can implement all of the run-loop stages in a delegate instead. Using a delegate often means that you can avoid needing to subclass the SKScene class.

• The SKView class provides more debugging information. You can also provide more performance hints to the renderer.

• You can create normal map textures for use in lighting and physics calculations (or inside your own custom shaders). Use the new SKMutableTexture class when you need to create textures whose contents are dynamically updated.

• You can dynamically generate texture atlases at runtime from a collection of textures.

Xcode 6 also incorporates many new Sprite Kit editors. Create or edit the contents of scenes directly, specifying the nodes that appear in the scene as well as their physics bodies and other characteristics. This scene is serialized to a file and can be loaded directly by your game. The editors save you time because often you don’t need to implement your own custom editors to create your game’s assets.

For information about the classes of this framework, see Sprite Kit Framework Reference and Sprite Kit Programming Guide.

UIKit Framework

The UIKit framework (UIKit.framework) includes the following enhancements:

• Apps that use local or push notifications must explicitly register the types of alerts that they display to users by using a UIUserNotificationSettings object. This registration process is separate from the process for registering remote notifications, and users must grant permission to deliver notifications through the requested options.

• Local and push notifications can include custom actions as part of an alert. Custom actions appear as buttons in the alert. When tapped, your app is notified and asked to perform the corresponding action. Local notifications can also be triggered by interactions with Core Location regions.

• Collection views support dynamically changing the size of cells. Typically, you use this support to accommodate changes to the preferred text size, but you can adapt it for other scenarios too. Collection views also support more options for invalidating different portions of the layout and thereby improving performance.

• The UISearchController class replaces the UISearchDisplayController class for managing the display of search-related interfaces.

• The UIViewController class adopts traits and the new sizing techniques for adjusting the view controller’s content, as described in Unified Storyboards for Universal Apps.

• The UISplitViewController class is now supported on iPhone as well as iPad. The class adjusts its presented interface to adapt to the available space. It also changes the way it shows and hides the primary view controller, giving you more control over how to display the split view interface.

• The UINavigationController class has new options for changing the size of the navigation bar or hiding it altogether by using gestures.

• The new UIVisualEffect class enables you to integrate custom blur effects into your view hierarchies.

• The new UIPresentationController class lets you separate the content of your view controllers from the chrome used to display them.

• The new UIPopoverPresentationController class handles the presentation of content in a popover. The existing UIPopoverController class uses the popover presentation controller to show popovers on the screen.

• The new UIAlertController class replaces the UIActionSheet and UIAlertView classes as the preferred way to display alerts in your app.

• The new UIPrinterPickerController class offers a view controller-based way to display a list of printers and to select one to use during printing. Printers are represented by instances of the new UIPrinter class.

• You can take the user directly to your app-related settings in the Settings app. Pass the UIApplicationOpenSettingsURLString constant to the openURL: method of the UIApplication class.

For information about the classes of this framework, see UIKit Framework Reference.

Video Toolbox Framework

The Video Toolbox framework (VideoToolbox.framework) includes direct access to hardware video encoding and decoding.