Apple Developer News and Updates feed provided by Apple, Inc.
It’s a SwiftUI party — and you’re invited! Join us as we share the latest updates and a glimpse into the future of UI framework design. Discover deep levels of customization, advanced techniques for layout, elegant strategies for sharing, and rock-solid structural approaches for designing an app…
October 10, 2022
Learn how you can speed up common tasks for people using your app when you use the App Intents framework. Discover how you can programmatically bring your app’s content and functionality to system services like Siri and the Shortcuts app. We’ll show you how you can supply metadata, UI information, activation phrases, and other information the system might need. We’ll also explore how App Intents and App Shortcuts work together, and dive deep on the design of a compelling shortcut. Find out how you can use App Intents to change app content and behaviors based on someone’s active Focus state.
Discover how you can create Shortcuts in your app with zero user setup. We’ll show you how App Intents can help you present custom Shortcuts views, and explore how you can add support for parameterized phrases to allow people to quickly express their intent. We’ll also share how you can make your…
Learn how you can surface great features from your app directly in Siri, Spotlight, and the Shortcuts app. We’ll introduce you to App Shortcuts, provide best practices to help you evaluate features in your app that would work well as App Shortcuts, and take you through the process of creating one…
Learn how you can make your app more discoverable and increase app engagement when you use the App Intents framework. We’ll take you through the powerful capabilities of this Swift framework, explore the differences between App Intents and SiriKit Intents, and show you how you can expose your app’s…
Discover how you can customize app behaviors based on someone’s currently enabled Focus. We’ll show you how to use App Intents to define your app’s Focus filters, act on changes from the system, and present your app’s views in different ways. We’ll also explore how you can filter notifications and…
Discover the latest open source Swift package from Apple: Swift Async Algorithms. We’ll explore algorithms from this package that you can use with AsyncSequence, including zip, merge, and throttle. Follow along with us as we use these algorithms to build a great messaging app. We’ll also share best…
As early as October 5, 2022, prices of apps and in-app purchases (excluding auto-renewable subscriptions) on the App Store will increase in Chile, Egypt, Japan, Malaysia, Pakistan, Poland, South Korea, Sweden, Vietnam, and all territories that use the euro currency. In Vietnam, these increases also reflect new regulations for Apple to collect and remit applicable taxes, being value added tax (VAT) and corporate income tax (CIT) at 5% rates respectively.
Your proceeds will be adjusted accordingly and will be calculated based on the tax-exclusive price. Exhibit B of the Paid Applications Agreement will be updated to indicate that Apple collects and remits applicable taxes in Vietnam.
Once these changes go into effect, the Pricing and Availability section of My Apps will be updated. You can change the price of your apps and in-app purchases (including auto-renewable subscriptions) at any time in App Store Connect. If you offer subscriptions, you can choose to preserve prices for existing subscribers.
Like the groundbreaking women it spotlights, the Rebel Girls app has a remarkable story.
It began a mere six years ago with a book called Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls. Written and art-directed by Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo, the premise was simple: amplify the stories of history’s most influential women.
The result? Not so much an amplification as a worldwide shockwave. Good Night Stories quickly became one of the most successful publishing campaigns in Kickstarter history and Favilli and Cavallo soon found themselves with an entire Rebel Girls franchise. To date, the brand has sold more than 8 million books, been translated into nearly 50 languages, and seen more than 18 million downloads of its podcast. And the Rebel Girls app, launched just over a year ago, recently won an Apple Design Award for Social Impact.
“We’re creating an omnichannel for girls,” says Jes Wolfe, CEO of Rebel Girls since April 2020. “The app takes the best of our books, podcasts, and audio stories and puts them into a flagship destination.”
The Rebel Girls app uses immersive audio experiences, gorgeous art, and clever interactive elements to spotlight its historic heroines. The women span cultures and centuries: You can get inspired by the careers of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Amanda Gorman, and Mae Jemison; explore the creativity of Frida Kahlo, Taylor Swift, and Joan Jett; learn about athletes like Simone Biles, Megan Rapinoe, and Chloe Kim; dive into historical icons like the pharaoh Hatshepsut, the pirate Grace O’Malley, and the Egyptian astronomer Hypatia; and much more. Each story is accompanied by immersive soundscapes and original illustrations from female and non-binary artists.
Olympic gymnast Simone Biles is one of the many world-class athletes spotlighted in Rebel Girls.
Rebel Girls also deepens the stories of its paperbound cousins: While book blurbs are around 300 words, a podcast or audio version can number closer to 2,000. “Everything we do needs to be in support of storytelling,” Wolfe says. “We don’t need a whole lot more, because the stories are so rich and empowering.”
Wolfe’s current focus is the new book Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls: 100 Inspiring Young Changemakers, the fifth title in the Good Night Stories series and one that focuses on women under 30. “It’s the first time we’ve done something 100 percent contemporary,” says Wolfe. Arriving Oct. 4 and featuring a foreword by Bindi Irwin, it spotlights such modern luminaries as Greta Thunberg, Bethany Hamilton, Zendaya, and the Linda Lindas. Those stories and others may well cross over to the podcast and app as well. But regardless of where it appears, that story is always the cornerstone.
The Rebel Girls app started out as something very different: hardware. “The initial idea was a speaker with a projector attached to it that would go on a girl’s bedside table,” says Wolfe. “The plan was to showcase the stories on the wall or ceiling.”
But the team had little experience with hardware, and wanted to move faster than the plan allowed. “The thought became, ‘How can we do audio theater?’” says Wolfe. “The app came from that. And Ter’s job was to adapt the artwork.”
The app’s Discover page is filled with colorful illustrations and diverse art styles.
Ter is Terenig Topjian, art director and UI/UX lead for the Rebel Girls app. He’s been with the project since Day 1, art-directing illustrations and backgrounds and aligning the app’s design with the well-established Rebel Girls aesthetic and purpose. “The design is essentially a container for the stories,” says Topjian. “[It] should be beautiful and memorable, but it shouldn’t be flashy. This is really an audio experience.”
The thought became, “How can we do audio theater?’
Jes Wolfe, Rebel Girls CEO
At the time, it was also a very relaxing audio experience. The earliest versions of the app — then titled Rebel Girls Dream On — focused on sleep stories. “That’s part of why you see such toned-down colors and an uncluttered look,” says Topjian. But with time and testing, the team found that kids and parents were listening not just at nighttime but on the way to school, while cleaning up their rooms, or just hanging out. As the use cases expanded, the app became simply Rebel Girls.
While the app’s look and feel might have been quiet, its development pace was anything but. The team typed its first lines of Swift code in early January 2021; just five months later, Rebel Girls soft-launched on the App Store.
“The reason we went from zero code to being quietly live five months later was to get actual data of people using the app,” says Wolfe.
Those early months involved a near-constant flow of prototyping. The team partnered with 80 families who supplied timely feedback on story content, wireframes, and even the color palette. “I remember testing out this one color and asking for the kids’ thoughts, and so many were like, ‘No no no, the book is this color,’ and it’s of course that bold dark,” says Wolfe. “The families helped with everything.”
When it came to visual design, the original Good Night Stories provided much of the inspiration for the app’s interface, typography, and more. “It’s a dreamy style — pastel colors, imaginative illustrations — that’s at the core of the Rebel Girls branding,” says Topjian. “But while it’s dreamy in the literal sense, it’s also metaphorical: We want it to feel aspirational, to convey dreams and confidence.”
Illustrations of nine women profiled in Rebel Girls (left to right, top to bottom): Greta Thunberg, Simone Biles, Jane Goodall, Shirley Chisolm, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Frida Kahlo, Joan Jett, Aisholpan Nurgaiv, and Junko Tabei.
To that end, Topjian and team adopted a running strategy for the work. “We treated each piece of artwork like a little movie poster,” says Topjian. Framing it that way helped the team communicate a piece’s mood while providing a chance to integrate little details about the subject — “just as a great movie poster does,” he says.
The people who create the artwork should be as diverse as the subjects we profile.
Jes Wolfe, Rebel Girls CEO
A typical Rebel Girls story begins with the company’s in-house creative teams, who select subjects and match them with a writer, illustrator, and producer. At any given time, there are a half dozen or so stories in the works; two new ones appear in the app every week.
That creative team is diverse by design. “We pride ourselves on creating a platform for a plurality of voices,” says Wolfe. “Representative storytelling — having this huge stable of illustrators, writers, editors, narrators, and producers — is in our DNA.” To date, Rebel Girls has worked with more than 400 artists from more than 50 countries; their Good Night Stories book 100 Real-Life Tales of Black Girl Magic was illustrated entirely by Black artists, while 100 Inspiring Young Changemakers was drawn by artists under 30. “The people who create the artwork should be just as diverse as the subjects we profile,” says Wolfe.
The app’s illustration of indigenous rights activist and clean water advocate Autumn Peltier integrates visual hints about her work.
Each story features interactive elements and Easter eggs to enhance the narrative. The artwork for indigenous rights activist and clean water advocate Autumn Peltier integrates colorful waves; illustrations for designer Isabella Springmuhl Tejada are based on her own clothing and work. “For [meterological scientist and entrepreneur] Paige Brown’s illustration, we created a patterned skyscape full of the balloons that carried her experiments,” says Topjian. “This piece was also a sleep story, so we created an illustration with darker tones and a beautiful night sky.”
The interface feels almost tactile — all the buttons and icons are hand-drawn — and is geared mostly toward the primary audience of 6- to 12-year-olds. But Wolfe says 60 percent of Rebel Girls books and 70 percent of their podcasts are experienced together. “We design everything to be enjoyed by parent and child,” says Wolfe. “That’s why it’s not really a kids’ design.”
Establishing that balance — the sense of being a kids’ app that doesn’t entirely feel like a kids’ app — is part of what drew Topjian to the job in the first place. “We think of it as an elevated kids’ app,” Topjian says. “It’s sketchy but it doesn’t feel scribbled. As a designer, I really appreciated how they treated the child as a person who’s growing.”
As you might expect from such a young app, Rebel Girls is a work in progress. “We’re learning and trying and experimenting,” says Wolfe. “It’s kind of like a live demo.”
Currently, the team is experimenting with more interactive content like polls, quizzes, and solicitations for reader submissions — like art for a soundscape on a bird sanctuary. The app is also leaning into shorter, snackable stories that clock in around five minutes. And Rebel Girls’ new paper book will feature QR codes that link to the audio version of a subject’s story in the app.
Though the styles may change, the app’s illustrations are designed to feel “part of the Rebel Girls universe,” says CEO Jes Wolfe. Pictured (left to right, top to bottom) are: Ada Lovelace, Megan Rapinoe, Grace O’Malley, Madam C.J. Walker, Josephine Baker, Autumn Peltier, Yoky Matsouka, Isabella Springmuhl Tejada, and Wang Zhenyi.
Wolfe is certainly pleased about the attention the app has received in such a short time from young girls and families, but she says her most surprising feedback came from a demographic she wasn’t expecting. “We get emails quite frequently from 14-year-olds and 19-year-olds who say, ‘Look, we may be too old for this, we’re not your target audience, but we love these stories so much. They’re just like a constant source of inspiration in our lives.’ That’s pretty great.”
Download Rebel Girls from the App Store
Behind the Design is a weekly series that explores design practices and philosophies from each of the 12 winners of the 2022 Apple Design Awards. In each story, we go behind the screens with the developers and designers of these award-winning apps and games to discover how they brought their remarkable creations to life.
Discover how you can build Live Activities for your apps using the new ActivityKit framework, now available in iOS 16.1 beta and Xcode 14.1 beta. Live Activities help people keep track of your app’s content with real-time updates. Your app’s Live Activities display on the Lock Screen and in Dynamic Island — a new design that introduces an intuitive, delightful way to experience iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max.
Live Activities and ActivityKit will be included in iOS 16.1, available later this year. Once the iOS 16.1 Release Candidate is available, you’ll be able to submit apps with Live Activities to the App Store.
The beta versions of Xcode 14.1, iOS 16.1, iPadOS 16.1, tvOS 16.1, and watchOS 9.1 are now available. Get your apps ready by confirming they work as expected on these releases. And to take advantage of the advancements in the latest SDKs, make sure to build and test with Xcode 14.1 beta.
To check if a known issue from a previous beta release has been resolved or if there’s a workaround, review the latest release notes. Please let us know if you encounter an issue or have other feedback. We value your feedback, as it helps us address issues, refine features, and update documentation.
WeatherKit brings valuable weather information to your apps and services through a wide range of data that can help people stay up to date, safe, and prepared. It’s easy to use WeatherKit in your apps for iOS 16, iPadOS 16, macOS 13, tvOS 16, and watchOS 9 with a platform-specific Swift API, and on any other platform with a REST API. Up to 500,000 API calls per month are included with Apple Developer Program membership. And now, Account Holders can subscribe for more calls in the Apple Developer app.
The murder mystery game Overboard! is a whodunit with a killer twist: You done it… and now you have to get away with it.
In Overboard!, you play not as the detective but the murderer most foul — Veronica Villensey, a fading 1930s starlet who’s tossed her husband off a cruise ship. Now, you have just eight in-game hours to pin the crime on somebody else. Chat with unsuspecting (and suspecting) shipmates, eliminate problematic evidence, blackmail a spy, seduce a potential ally, show up to breakfast on time, cheat at a card game, visit a chapel (awkward), and lie — to everyone, basically all the time. (Did we mention the game won its 2022 Apple Design Award for “Delight and Fun”?)
To get away with the crime, you’ll need to keep your story straight.
The upside-down narrative noir mystery is full of vintage style, stabs of dark humor, and a proper cast of murder-novel players. You might speak with the fetching dame in the Lauren Bacall hat, the dashing ship commander, the crusty old woman with many axes to grind, and more. Made in just 100 pandemic days, it’s also a relatively breezy game that you can play in about 20 minutes — and then promptly replay to properly discover all of its multiple storylines and endings.
“We looked around and thought, ‘How has no one done Agatha Christie yet?’” says Jon Ingold, co-founder of game studio Inkle and the game’s author. But the magic is how Overboard! takes on Christie from the other side — while the Death on the Nile-inspired chess pieces seem familiar, the construct certainly isn’t. “I definitely had the most fun job here,” he says.
Generally you don’t see this type of behavior from non-guilty people.
The game’s development came as a surprise — even to the studio itself. Inkle’s acclaimed portfolio includes titles like Sorcery!, Heaven’s Vault, and Jules Verne adventure 80 Days, and Ingold and studio co-founder Joe Humfrey had been heads down on their next release: a game set in the Scottish highlands. In December 2020, however, Ingold turned up with an idea about a golden-age throwback mystery — a palate-cleansing side hustle that could be hammered out quickly.
“When you’re working on a big project, you’re always dying to work on something smaller,” says Humfrey. “So we thought, let’s just do a one-month game jam! It’s not like it’ll destroy the other project! It ended up taking three months instead of one, but the attitude was refreshing. You don’t labor over your decisions, and you’re ruthless about coming up with elegant design.”
For Ingold, that speed became a delightful mechanic in of itself. “We had this bizarre constraint of trying to go as fast as we could,” laughs Ingold. “We kept saying, ‘This isn’t even what we’re supposed to be doing right now! We can’t let this get out of the box!’” Luckily, they had a studio full of tools that gave them a big head start.
Twelve years ago, Humfrey and Ingold left company jobs to launch their own game studio — and became accidental inventors in the process. “Inkle is a bit unusual in that we have a narrative engine that we built for ourselves,” Ingold says.
That proprietary engine, Ink, is essentially a word processor that lets Ingold and the Inkle team write a branching narrative story straight through — “like a film script,” Ingold says — before going back to flesh it out, expand the story, and sprinkle in all the choices, branches, and detours. “It’s like Markdown for interactive fiction,” says Humfrey.
Meet Clarissa, Anders, and Subedar-Major Singh, three of the game’s characters / victims / accomplices / suspects.
They wanted to create a tool that prioritized words rather than structure. “Most branching story editors are presented as flowcharts,” says Ingold. “But the truth about flowcharts is that they make things seem more complicated than they actually are; they’re spread out all over the page.”
Ink, by contrast, scrolls like a traditional document. “When you’re writing a scene with choices, you have a beginning, middle, and maybe multiple ends. But they’re all going in one direction,” says Ingold. As a lightweight markup language, Ink uses symbols to indicate elements: an asterisk is a choice, a → shifts to another part of the story. “You can essentially write a linear script, then go back through and say, ‘OK, I’m gonna pull this out,’ or ‘I’m gonna branch this bit,’ or ‘I’m gonna make this a long sidetrack that eventually joins back up.’” Bonus: Changing the script is a matter of copy-and-pasting, not rejiggering an entire flowchart. If this sounds interesting, you can check it out yourself: Ink has been open-sourced for the past five years, where Humfrey notes that “hundreds” of games have put it to good use.
(Ink is) like Markdown for interactive fiction.
Joe Humfrey, Inkle co-founder
With Ink, Ingold could focus on the 75,000-word script and its pacing. “Good interactive scenes aren’t good because they have a funky structure. They’re good because they’re well-written,” he says. “The most important thing is allowing the human at the keyboard to get on with [the game].”
Veronica threatens the good commander — at least in this version of the script.
In just about three weeks, Ingold had knocked out a “minimum viable story” on Ink before a single line of Overboard! code was written. “I basically scribbled the opening scene out as is — Ink works really well as a notepad,” he says. “But that scene ends when the steward knocks on the door, and you have to ask yourself: Are you going to lie? It’s such a great first decision, and it leads to, OK, if you lie, what’s the consequence of that?” He smiles at the memory. “Naturally, that makes you want to write the next scene.”
With the game-jam timeline marching on — “so fast that we barely had time to think about whether this was a good or bad idea,” laughs Humfrey — the other members of the Overboard! team began to think about populating their boat.
By late January, the team had a rough prototype ready to go. “It was very unpolished,” says Humfrey. “It wasn’t even a minimum viable product. But you could play it through, and because the core concept was so simple, we could spend loads of time polishing it.”
Wyatt and the Overboard! team tried a number of color combinations to set the appropriately sinister mood, eventually settling on the last.
While historically a jack-of-all-trades for Inkle games, Humfrey served strictly as art director for Overboard!, while Tom Kail handled the UI and artist Anastasia Wyatt drew up the cast of shady shipmates. To kick off art direction, Humfrey went back to Inkle’s rich catalog. “The aim was to build it like a sequel to 80 Days,” says Humfrey. “Of course, it diverged and had its own unique UI requirements. But the technology we’d developed internally was already set up for a project like this,” he says.
In addition to the 80 Days skeleton, the team was able to repurpose existing Inkle systems for testing, gathering feedback, and creating animations; Ink even plugs right into Unity. “That’s one of the reasons we could do this in 100 days,” says Humfrey.
People would say, ‘I wonder what happens if I take this object and show it to that person?’ and I’d be like, ‘Yeah! Good question!’
Jon Ingold, Inkle co-founder and *Overboard!* writer
Once the game was technically operational, playtesting started remarkably early, when the script was only about 30% finalized. “It was like pouring water into a bucket to find the cracks,” Ingold says. “Everything has to make sense. People would say, ‘I wonder what happens if I take this object and show it to that person?’ and I’d be like, ‘Yeah! Good question!’”
Can characters who drink martinis this dramatically be trusted?
Even Ink did its part to help test and polish gameplay. Ingold added a feature that automatically speed-ran the game in Ink to explore the varying branches, so plot holes could be plugged before they even made it into the Unity build. In the final version, the software even keeps track of not only what you know (for instance, that you tossed a diamond earring out of a porthole), but what the other characters know too (for instance, that you’re acting real squirrelly about when you were up on the deck). It’ll also show you the choices you made before, in case you maybe wanna steal those sleeping pills this time around.
“The replayablity mechanic is one of the features we’re most proud of,” says Humfrey. “It’s so easy for a narrative game to feel repetitive, like you’re seeing the same thing multiple times.” To get around it, he looked to films like Groundhog Day, the 1993 comedy about a guy doomed to relive the same day over and over. “That movie cut things down really tightly, so every time they did a time loop you saw just enough context to understand where you were in the loop. I think we managed to make that work quite well.”
As the guilty Veronica, you’ll have to plead your case to more than just a few shipmates.
The speedy timeline meant the script didn’t require much editing, since anything extraneous never made it there in the first place. Instead, revisions involved adding dialogue, sprinkling in a few zingers, or testing the boundaries of the game’s tone. (A slapsticky scene in which Veronica finds out a higher power is disappointed with her life choices stayed in; a scene where she attacks someone with a cross did not.)
But sometimes, Ingold just wanted to fit in a scene he liked. “And that’s just sheer joy, because all you’re doing is saying, ‘I wish there was a scene where I could break into the old lady’s room, so I’ll slot that in here.” The characters also lent themselves to wild interactions. “Everybody clashes on the boat,” Ingold says. “Veronica wants everyone to be in awe of her, but the old lady isn’t bothered by her at all. It’s essentially a comedy.”
Humfrey puts it another way. “The thing that Jon’s managed to crack is that Overboard! doesn’t take itself too seriously,” he says.
The job of bringing those clashing characters to screen fell to artist and designer Anastasia Wyatt, who, from her home office in Manchester, raced to bring the Overboard! cast to life; in fact, what you’re playing on your device is probably pretty close to what she initially dreamed up. “In a lot of cases, I went with the first design that came into my head,” says Wyatt.
For those designs, Wyatt trawled into the rich potential of the game’s vintage setting, pulling designs from 1930s fashion, magazines, and even sewing pattern books to outfit background players like the irritatingly effective detective Subedar-Major Singh, the curiously sad Clarissa Turpentine, and Veronica (who required extra care since she essentially never leaves the screen). “I saw a picture of this particular hat and the way it sat on a woman’s head,” Wyatt says, “and I could visualize the whole character from that one piece of clothing.”
Wyatt’s early takes on Veronica Villensey were all about hats and hairstyles.
For the backgrounds, Wyatt found herself drawn to the art deco style of vintage British railway posters, all promising exotic globe-trotting adventure. “They were all advertising — ‘Visit Aberystwyth!’ — but they had this great palette of bright, hyper-cheery colors,” says Wyatt.
Wyatt and the design team took pains to make it an inspiration, rather than full recreation; Humfrey also brought in a bit of the comic book pop-art style from the ‘50s (all bold colors and slant-edged panels) to add a bit of playfulness to the dark surroundings. “We tried to push the boundaries, but not so much that it don’t look like the ‘30s anymore,” she says. “You have to find that balance between cartoonifying people and keeping them recognizable in real life.”
Early versions of the caustic but stylish Lady H, complete with outlandish furs.
Wyatt also worked in a few Easter eggs — like Veronica’s stylish hat, which casts an exaggerated shadow. “It’s definitely what you’d see in a character you can’t trust,” says Wyatt (even if, as the game goes on, you learn more about the character’s backstory). Wyatt also draped Lady Honoria Armstrong’s shoulders in an enormous fox fur, a grotesque touch of overamplified high society that’s intentionally out of place. “Obviously you wouldn’t wear a big fur coat with a whole dead fox around your neck in the summer,” Wyatt laughs, “but that’s the sort of person she is.”
Overboard! is designed for maximum replayability; even if you get away with murder the first time, there’s plenty of story left to unpack. “With any of our games, you might only see 20% of the material on the first playthrough,” says Humfrey. You can replay to score insurance money, check off a list of in-game objectives, or discover hidden storylines. According to the internet, some players have even been known to play through to try and eradicate everyone on the ship.
Justice is served — in this ending, anyway.
All of that replayability, the sense that the mystery is yours to do with as you please, is the best possible outcome for such a mystery, says Ingold. Overboard! is done; no updates or additional content are planned, though Humfrey admits to thinking about a sequel. If it happens, Ingold is on board. “As a writer, you should always trade up,” he says. “Is Overboard! what I started off with? No, it’s a version that’s been traded up and up and up.”
Download Overboard! from the App Store
Behind the Design is a weekly series that explores design practices and philosophies from each of the 12 winners of the 2022 Apple Design Awards. In each story, we go behind the screens with the developers and designers of these award-winning apps and games to discover how they brought their remarkable creations to life.
Now that you’ve watched the Apple Event, get ready for the release of iOS 16, tvOS 16, and watchOS 9. Learn how you can submit apps for each platform and explore how you can support the latest software features in your apps and games.
