Apple’s WWDC Brings OS X Yosemite With New Swift for Cocoa and Cocoa Touch and Advances in App Extensions, SpriteKit, SceneKit, Safari, and iCloud

The announcement of OS X Yosemite brings the new Swift programming language for Cocoa and Cocoa Touch as well as advances in SpriteKit and SceneKit, Safari, iCloud, and more.

Some of the highlights include:

With App Extensions any app can add new functionality to OS X Yosemite, enabling access to app features from almost anywhere. Once a user installs an app from the Mac App Store, the extensions embedded within that app enable new capabilities across OS X.

Widgets for Notification Center: Apps can add custom content to the new Today area within Notification Center, a feature for apps with news or stats that are constantly updated. Users get up-to-date information by swiping to open Notification Center.

Share Extensions: Apps can extend the Share Menu with new destinations to share a webpage from Safari, an image or video from Preview, or an item elsewhere in OS X. New APIs let developers create custom Share Sheets to present a specialized experience for an app’s sharing features.

Action Extensions: Apps can provide special content editing abilities from anywhere within OS X Yosemite, with no need to launch a separate app. Actions launch a custom editor for any content, and quickly return the modified content to the original app.

SpriteKit makes it easier for developers to create graphically rich, fluidly animated 2D sprite-based games that are optimized for iOS and OS X. SpriteKit’s new enhancements let developers create even better games with new levels of realism and expression.

More Flexible Physics: Allows the use of field forces that vary with distance to create springs, magnets, and gravity wells. And the interaction between sprites can be calculated on a per-pixel basis to accurately portray collisions between complex-shaped sprites and scenery.

Level Editor: Xcode 6 includes a new SpriteKit editor that makes it simple to lay out game levels by dragging and dropping sprites into a scene, complete with live simulation that previews the scene’s lighting, animation, and physics.

SceneKit Integration: Tight integration with SceneKit makes it simple to add true 3D geometry into a SpriteKit scene with great performance.

SceneKit is a high-level 3D graphics framework that helps create 3D animated scenes and effects in apps. SceneKit in OS X Yosemite adds new capabilities, including key features for 3D games.

Physics: Modeled on the physics capabilities of SpriteKit, 3D objects can now have physical properties which influence the animated interactions between them.

Improved Animation: Support for inverse kinematics lets 3D models with joints move and respond naturally.

3D Particle System: A high-performance 3D particle system that makes it easy to create visual effects such as sparks, explosions, and smoke.

Alembic Support: SceneKit can now load 3D models stored in the production-friendly Alembic file format.

With WebGL, developers can create immersive, 3D experiences that work natively. Advanced HTML5 video technologies make it possible to deliver high-performance, energy- efficient web video. A new WebKit features facilitates the creation of websites with adaptive layouts that work in Safari on iOS and OS X. Safari has built-in developer tools for building and debugging web apps. And by following a few best practices, developers can make a website work seamlessly with Safari’s new features.

Swift is an new programming language for Cocoa and Cocoa Touch with a concise yet expressive syntax. Writing Swift code within an Xcode 6 playground shows instant results, while finished apps are compiled into high-performance native machine code. The Swift language is fast, modern, safe, and interactive.

Xcode 6 supports storyboards for OS X, taking advantage of new View Controller APIs in OS X Yosemite. With Storyboards, developers can quickly wire together multiple views, define relationships and containers, and choose segue animations, all without writing any code. Storyboards for OS X encourage interfaces that follow Mac standards, so apps behave the way users expect.

With the iCloud and the new CloudKit framework developers can securely store and retrieve app data, like structured data, in a database or assets right from iCloud. CloudKit also enables users to anonymously sign in to apps with their iCloud Apple IDs without sharing their personal information.

The developer preview is available here.