Learn about the key technologies and capabilities available in the macOS SDK, the toolkit you use to build apps for Mac. For detailed information on API changes in the latest released versions, including each beta release, see the macOS Release Notes.
macOS 11
With the macOS 11 SDK, your app can take advantage of a redesigned user interface, widgets in Notification Center, and new SwiftUI layouts. Machine learning adds style transfer and action classification to models that are ready to be trained, and offers a CloudKit-based deployment solution. Vision API additions help your app analyze image and video more thoroughly. You can include markups in your emails and websites that help Siri Event Suggestions surface your events. And Safari adds web extensions to further customize the browsing experience, while other browsers can now contribute Screen Time web-usage data.
New User Interface
MacOS Catalina, aka macOS 10.15, is the newest version of the operating system that runs on the Mac. MacOS Catalina's name was inspired by Santa Catalina Island, popularly known as Catalina and one. Nov 15, 2019 The Latest Version is macOS Catalina. Apple’s newest Mac operating system is macOS 10.15, also known as macOS Catalina. This is the fifteenth major release of the Mac operating system. MacOS 10.14 Mojave supports most Macs from 2012 onward. If yours ran macOS 10.14 Mojave, it will almost certainly run Catalina.
macOS 11 introduces a redesigned user interface that enhances usability and approachability, and provides greater consistency with iPadOS. Most existing macOS apps that use system-provided controls automatically adopt the new appearance. If your app has a custom appearance, visit the macOS Human Interface Guidelines to learn how to update your app so it continues looking great for users.
AppKit introduces a variety of changes to interface elements, including alerts, browsers, buttons, menus, search fields, segmented controls, and toolbars. For details, see AppKit Release Notes.
App Store Privacy Information
Privacy is at the core of the entire macOS experience, and new privacy information in the Mac App Store gives users even more transparency and control over their personal information. Later this year, the Mac App Store will help users understand apps’ privacy practices, and you’ll need to enter your privacy practice details into App Store Connect for display on your Mac App Store product page.
Widgets
Widgets give users quick access to timely, at-a-glance information from your app in the macOS Notification Center. macOS 11 offers a redesigned widget experience. Your app can present widgets in multiple sizes, allow user customization, include interactive features, and update content at appropriate times. To learn about designing widgets, see the Human Interface Guidelines. To learn how to support widgets in your app, see the WidgetKit framework.
Mac Catalyst
Apps built with Mac Catalyst automatically adopt the new look of macOS 11 and make full use of the native screen resolution of Mac. macOS 11 has new and improved APIs for keyboards, menus, toolbars, color panels, and more, giving you greater control over the look and behavior of your app. To learn how to get full control of every pixel of the interface and Mac-specific controls, such as pull-down menus and checkboxes, see Choosing a User Interface Idiom for Your Mac App. To learn more about building Mac versions of your iPad apps, see the Mac Catalyst documentation.
Machine Learning
Your machine learning apps gain new functionality, flexibility, and security with the updates in macOS 11.Core ML adds model deployment with a dashboard for hosting and deploying models using CloudKit, so you can easily make updates to your models without updating your app or hosting the models yourself. Core ML model encryption adds another layer of security for your models, handling the encryption process and key management for you. The Core ML converter supports direct conversion of PyTorch models to Core ML.
The Create ML app’s new Style Transfer template stylizes photos and videos in real time, and the new Action Classification template classifies a single person’s actions in a video clip. The Object Detection and Word Tagger templates have new transfer learning options to approve model accuracy when training data is limited. Training control helps you explore models and interact with them during model training. And ML Compute takes advantage of GPUs to accelerate training on the Mac. For more information, see the Core ML,Create ML, and ML Compute developer documentation.
Vision
With macOS 11, the Vision framework has added APIs for trajectory detection in video, hand and body pose estimation for images and video, contour detection to trace the edges of objects and features in image and video, and optical flow to define the pattern of motion between consecutive video frames. To learn more about these features, see the Vision framework documentation. In particular, read Building a Feature-Rich App for Sports Analysis to find out how these features come together in a sample app.
Natural Language
The Natural Language framework has new API to provide sentence embedding that creates a vector representation of any string; word tagging to train models that classify natural language, customized for your specific domain; and confidence scores that rank the framework’s predictions. For more information, see the Natural Language framework documentation.
SwiftUIWhat Is Latest Os For Macbook Air
SwiftUI provides a selection of new built-in views, including a progress indicator and a text editor. It also supports new view layouts, like grids and outlines. Grids and the new lazy version of stacks load items only as needed.
Starting in Xcode 12, you can now use SwiftUI to define the structure and behavior of an entire app. Compose your app from scenes containing the view hierarchies that define an app's user interface. Add menu commands, handle life-cycle events, invoke system actions, and manage storage across all of your apps. By incorporating WidgetKit into your app, you can also create widgets that provide quick access to important content right on the iOS Home screen or the macOS Notification Center. For more information, see App Structure and Behavior.
Safari Web Extensions
Users can customize Safari with new functionality and features by adding your extensions. You can now leverage Safari Web Extensions inside Safari and access migration tools that make it easy to convert popular extensions for other browsers to Safari. Safari extensions also give users privacy control — they can decide which sites an extension can work with and give it access just once, all day, or all the time. The new Extensions category on the Mac App Store showcases Safari extensions, with editorial spotlights and top charts.
Family Sharing for In-App Purchases
Family Sharing is a simple way for users to share subscriptions, purchases, and more with everyone in their household. And with macOS 11, you can choose to offer Family Sharing for your users’ in-app purchases and subscriptions so their whole family can enjoy the added benefits. See the SKProduct and SKPaymentTransactionObserver for the new APIs.
Uniform Type Identifiers
Use the new Uniform Type Identifiers framework to describe file formats and in-memory data for transfer, such as the pasteboard; and to identify resources, such as directories, volumes, and packages.
Accessibility
A new Accessibility framework lets your app dynamically deliver a subset of accessible content to a user based on context.
File Compression
Use the new Apple Archive framework to perform fast, multithreaded, lossless compression of directories, files, and data in macOS.
Screen Time
macOS 11 includes Screen Time APIs for sharing and managing web-usage data and observing changes a parent or guardian makes. For more details, see the Screen Time framework documentation.
Smartwatches have become a huge business over the past several years, evolving past the “Why do people need these?” phase to become trusted health monitors and secondary communication devices for millions of people. Apple currently dominates the global market with watchOS-powered Apple Watches, but Google’s Wear OS is at the core of numerous competing devices, notably including smartwatches from Fossil Group and its many fashion-focused sub-labels. These companies continue to update their hardware and software on an annual or semi-annual basis, seeking to satisfy existing users and win new smartwatch adopters.
As we move into the traditional fall upgrade period for these watches, both platforms feel somewhat stagnant. Apple’s preview of the upcoming watchOS 7 was decidedly underwhelming, following last year’s disappointingly modest tweaks to the Apple Watch Series 5. Google has revealed even smaller improvements for Wear OS, and its simultaneous failure to release a self-developed Pixel Watch has led to speculation that it’s preparing to abandon the smartwatch business. That appears to be unfounded — key hardware partner Qualcomm just announced new Wear OS-ready chips, and Google acquired a watch engineering team from Fossil — but even so, neither platform appears likely to make a truly big leap forward in the immediate future.
I’ve had the chance to use the latest versions of both watchOS and Wear OS, as well as covering Qualcomm’s next-generation Snapdragon Wear 4100 platform launch, so I have some thoughts on where these wearables are and aren’t headed over the next year or two. The good news is that they’ll both keep getting better, if slowly, but the bad news is that one of the biggest potential game changers for business and consumer smartwatch apps — higher-speed 5G connectivity — is likely still at least a year away. Here’s what you can expect this fall, and thereafter.
watchOS 7 for Apple Watch Series 3, 4, 5, and 6
I’ve been testing beta versions of watchOS 7 for nearly two months, and the best thing I can say about the upcoming release is that it’s stable. It adds only a small handful of features, none a game changer, and unless something big happens over the next two months, most users will hardly notice the difference from last year’s watchOS 6. Apple appears to be either unsure about taking big steps forward or limited by the constraints of current-generation hardware.
This is the first year Apple is offering public betas of watchOS ahead of its fall release, and so far the betas have been about as solid as final releases — except for hiccups I’ve experienced in one of the new features. A COVID-19-inspired automatic hand washing timer supposedly uses machine learning to detect the sounds and motion of hand washing, but it has remained uselessly buggy on my otherwise great Apple Watch Series 4. Even in the latest beta, it rarely triggers at all when I’m using a sink and has never in two months completed a single 20-second countdown. (A friend with a Series 5 watch has experienced intermittently better results, so I’m not sure how this will play out in the final watchOS 7 release.)
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Apple’s new Sleep app has remained decidedly underwhelming since the earliest beta, using motion and device usage data to guesstimate time spent in bed and asleep. In post-reveal interviews, Apple executives suggested they deliberately kept the metrics basic to avoid freaking people out about their sleep patterns, which might be true — or might be a convenient excuse. In either case, the only impressive element of the feature is that the Watch and iPhone work together to convince you to stop using them as you settle down to sleep, which is handled more gracefully than the iPhone’s oddly laggy, low-detail sleep reporting.
Curiously, while watchOS 7 is only introducing a single new watch face, Chronograph Pro, Apple has added a feature that lets users publicly share the Apple-permitted customizations they’ve made to faces, such as color changes and complication selections. My best guess is that this is a prelude to offering third-party watch faces — a glaring omission in watchOS — but Apple has disappointed those of us waiting for this feature time and time again, so I’m not holding my breath for it to magically happen with the Apple Watch Series 6. As I’ll explain below, however, it’s a possibility.
Apple is also tweaking the Workouts app with additional types of fitness activities, including dance tracking, ahead of what might be two major fall developments. According to a recent report, Apple will debut a subscription fitness video service that ties into the Apple TV and Apple Watch, potentially using motion data, and may also add blood oxygen level monitoring to the Watch if it can win FDA clearance for the feature. While neither of these features would be legitimately huge, each would tick off a “nice to have” box for some users.
Comparing watchOS 7 directly against the latest release of Wear OS on a Fossil Gen 5 device, two things really stand out about Apple’s implementation: speed and polish. Even on a two-year-old Apple Watch Series 4, literally everything (except the hand washing feature) is faster and smoother than on Wear OS, including Home Screen responsiveness, timepiece-to-Home and timepiece-to-app transitions, and in-app interactions. Bugs that Apple eliminated years ago, such as continued flashing of the heart rate sensor after removal from a wrist, are still obvious in Wear OS, while random full device resets are similarly super rare on the Apple Watch but pervasive on Wear OS. Whatever watchOS lacks in innovation it makes up for in system-level smoothness, and that counts for a lot in something you want to use quickly rather than plodding through.
Wear OS (fall 2020)![]()
If I had to sum up the latest version of Wear OS on Fossil’s Gen 5 watches in two words, it would be “modestly confusing.” Unlike the Apple Watch, which feels almost feature-complete but too limited, Wear OS feels like a work in progress that has the potential for greater functionality — if you’re willing to suffer through some janky issues to get there.
Take, for example, how Google numbers Wear OS versions. After Fossil’s mid-August software update, the “core OS” remained at version 2.17 — originally released in April — with separate version numbers listed for the Home app (2.35), Google Play Services (20.30.19), system (H MR1), and Android security patch level (July 1, 2020). By contrast, Apple’s watchOS is just version 7.0 and will only get a digit more complicated (such as 7.0.1 or 7.1.1) with future updates. With Wear OS, most users are better off ignoring those mind-numbing details.
Like watchOS 7, Wear OS feels more or less feature-complete, with the expected timepiece, health monitoring, NFC payment, music, and communication tools, plus calendar, contacts, and reminder apps. Google includes translation and Assistant features, such as smartphone-tethered capabilities that surpass what watchOS offers. That said, Wear OS apps too often feel underdesigned and unloved compared with watchOS versions — Google uses a flat red heart for heartbeat monitoring, while Apple animates a line tracing the edge of a heart for the same feature and uses a sophisticated 3D pixel model to begin EKG measurement. Google makes features work but rarely makes them pretty.
Last week, the company announced so few user-facing improvements in the upcoming Wear OS fall update that we didn’t think them worthy of a news story. Prominent on the list of “new” features was an already-released hand washing timer. Despite looking much less impressive than Apple’s version and lacking machine learning “auto-activation,” the Wear OS timer actually works, since you can manually turn it on. Unfortunately, the only other announced app change is a redesigned weather experience, which isn’t yet available. It looks nice in screenshots but isn’t exactly a big deal.
Google is also working on under-the-hood performance improvements. Wear OS is supposed to be getting up to 20% faster when starting apps on current processors — while setting the stage for further improvements with future Snapdragon Wear 4100 watches. There’s also the promise of “more intuitive controls for managing different watch modes and workouts,” which Wear OS currently stumbles through. Thanks to Fossil’s just-released Wear OS update, Gen 5 users now have a Wellness app with activity, sleep, and cardio fitness tracking, in addition to Google’s Fit Workout app, with its own pages of workout tracking options. Users are also supposed to manually switch between multiple battery modes to conserve power. Simplifying all of this would be great.
The flip side of Wear OS’ less streamlined approach is greater choice. As just one watchmaker, Fossil ships Gen 5 with around 50 legitimately different watch faces, while third-party apps such as Facer enable thousands of additional free and paid faces. Facer caused crashes and slowdowns on my Gen 5 watch, but a smaller app — Pear Watch Face — has been more stable and includes a handful of Apple Watch-like faces, even one inspired by the Nike+ variant of the Apple Watch.
These two apps perfectly distill Wear OS’ strengths and weaknesses compared with watchOS. You can make a Gen 5 watch’s timepiece look exactly like you want, which is a massive attraction, but you may compromise stability in the process and wind up falling back to a simpler — and Apple-caliber neutral — option just to get something that fully works. Offering broad user customization while guaranteeing a smooth, stable experience is arguably the most pressing challenge Google and Apple face going forward.
The future
Qualcomm’s briefing on the Snapdragon Wear 4100 platform was critically important because it clarifies where flagship smartwatches are headed over the next year. Wear OS will require a version called the 4100+, which includes both a quad-core CPU and a separate coprocessor capable of handling persistent but smaller tasks without consuming CPU-class power. The goal is to eventually evolve smartwatches into miniature smartphones with the ability to independently run phone-class apps over Wi-Fi or cellular connections. In the more immediate future, 4100+ watches will be able to display more sophisticated maps, run Google Assistant and Google Translate natively rather than needing a companion phone, and use up to two integrated cameras for video calls and photography.
Some OEMs are going to embrace almost the full range of these capabilities fairly quickly, bringing video calling and more powerful apps to Wear OS watches within the next six months. Others will upgrade current Wear OS designs to make them faster and smoother while making better use of their screens with more complex and colorful graphics. Wear 4100+ will enable an always-on watch display to show a wider range of colors and features than before without waking up the power-hungry CPU. Though Apple creates its own S series chips that compete with the Snapdragon Wear series, I would be extremely surprised if new Apple Watches failed to match or exceed these enhanced always-on screen features in the near future.
Complete List Of Mac OS X & MacOS Versions - Macworld UK
One big omission is 5G. It appears Qualcomm’s watch-based 5G modem plans are awaiting NR-Light, a future update to the 5G standard focused on devices with lower power consumption, including watches. NR-Light is expected to enable small devices to handle 100Mbps downloads and 50Mbps 5G uploads, on par with common 4G smartphones, without destroying their batteries. Since Apple and Google both depend on Qualcomm’s watch modems, it’s safe to assume they won’t be releasing 5G wearables until 2022, when the 5G Release 17 specification is expected to go final after COVID-19-related delays.
It’s also worth noting that Apple and Google aren’t the only players in smartwatches, though their challenges are representative of the segment’s broader issues. Samsung just released its Galaxy Watch 3, which barely seemed like an advance over its predecessors, and Huawei is just one of many Chinese manufacturers with mostly me-too designs and features. No one is currently proposing a big leap forward, and that general sense of sameness seems to be what forced Fossil to create its own new features to appeal to users, beyond whatever Google was offering.
Keep your eyes open for the Apple Watch Series 6 over the next month and a half, as well as whether Apple moves the Series 4 or 5 to a lower price point, as it did with the Series 3, to great success. As boring as it sounds, it’s entirely possible that this fall’s smartwatch story will be less about innovation than the greater affordability and ubiquity of established technologies. But I’m pretty sure early Snapdragon Wear 4100 OEMs will try to lure new customers in by leveraging camera hardware and Wear OS to deliver “beyond Apple” experiences. We’ll have to see whether mainstream users are willing to bite.
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