At is annual World Wide Developers Conference on Monday, Apple announced a host of new technologies designed to help developers offer improved user experiences over the entire Apple product line.
Last year, Apple introduced a new framework called "HomeKit" which was designed to enable a seamless way for smart devices to communicate with each other. Instead of a companion app to access house data in the framework, Apple is relying on its Siri virtual assistant.
Briefly mentioned at WWDC, Siri integration lets users create a "scenes" for HomeKit-enabled appliances. By issuing voice commands through Siri, users are able to control connected devices within the home, including recently-announced HomeKit-compatible hardware from Insteon, Lutron, iHome and Philips Hue lighting.
Only a few third-party manufacturers are showing initial support, perhaps due to Apple's strict requirements for program entry that call for hardware encryption, but SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi said consumers will soon see HomeKit-compatible window shades, thermostats, smoke detectors, carbon monoxide sensors and more.
Metal
Announced last year, Metal is a base-level framework or iOS that improves graphics performance up to 50 percent. As reported previously, Apple announced Metal for Mac alongside the introduction of OS X 10.11 El Capitan.
Metal combines OpenCL and OpenGL into a single API, allowing developers an extremely flexible and powerful tool for app creation. Further, the framework draws on the same data resources for both graphics and compute operations, while enabling multi-threading. The end result is a highly efficient interface that gets developers as close to GPU — the "metal" — as possible without jumping through programming hoops.
With Metal, games such as Epic's Fortnite, which was demoed during the keynote, can now be developed for Mac with the same high-performance rendering engine that's available on iOS.
Last year, Apple introduced a new framework called "HomeKit" which was designed to enable a seamless way for smart devices to communicate with each other. Instead of a companion app to access house data in the framework, Apple is relying on its Siri virtual assistant.
Briefly mentioned at WWDC, Siri integration lets users create a "scenes" for HomeKit-enabled appliances. By issuing voice commands through Siri, users are able to control connected devices within the home, including recently-announced HomeKit-compatible hardware from Insteon, Lutron, iHome and Philips Hue lighting.
Only a few third-party manufacturers are showing initial support, perhaps due to Apple's strict requirements for program entry that call for hardware encryption, but SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi said consumers will soon see HomeKit-compatible window shades, thermostats, smoke detectors, carbon monoxide sensors and more.
Metal
Announced last year, Metal is a base-level framework or iOS that improves graphics performance up to 50 percent. As reported previously, Apple announced Metal for Mac alongside the introduction of OS X 10.11 El Capitan.
Metal combines OpenCL and OpenGL into a single API, allowing developers an extremely flexible and powerful tool for app creation. Further, the framework draws on the same data resources for both graphics and compute operations, while enabling multi-threading. The end result is a highly efficient interface that gets developers as close to GPU — the "metal" — as possible without jumping through programming hoops.
With Metal, games such as Epic's Fortnite, which was demoed during the keynote, can now be developed for Mac with the same high-performance rendering engine that's available on iOS.
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