Category: Apple Developer News

Level up your apps and games with the Game Controller framework and easily build in support for popular console game controllers and MFi accessories on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV. The precise control and tactile feedback provided by a game controller can deepen the player’s sense of immersion and enhance their gameplay experience. And now it’s easier than ever to help players discover which games support controllers.

With Xcode 12, you can indicate game controller support right when building your app. By indicating controller support, your App Store product page will display controller badging, and your app will be able to access controller input re-mapping options in Settings.

How to add support for game controllers in Xcode 12

To indicate controller support, follow a few simple steps:

1. Open your Xcode project.
2. Navigate to the Signing & Capabilities section of your app target.
3. Add the “Game Controllers” capability in Xcode.
4. Select each of the controller profiles your app or game supports.

Note: “Extended Gamepad” refers to game controllers featuring physical buttons, triggers, and thumbsticks such as the Steelseries Nimbus, Sony Dualshock 4 Wireless Controller, Xbox Elite Wireless Controller Series 2, and others; and “Micro Gamepad” refers to the controls provided by the Siri Remote for Apple TV.

If you are building your app using an older version of Xcode, you can indicate controller support by editing the info.plist for your app. Set the GCSupportsControllerUserInteraction key to true, then indicate each of the controller profiles your app supports.

<key>GCSupportsControllerUserInteraction</key> <true/> <key>GCSupportedGameControllers</key> <array> <dict> <key>ProfileName</key> <string>ExtendedGamepad</string> </dict> </array>

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The Game Controller framework offers powerful features for your apps across Apple platforms. And with iOS 14, tvOS 14, and macOS Big Sur, your app will also gain support for the Xbox Adaptive Controller and Xbox Elite Wireless Controller Series 2, custom haptics for rumble feedback, and keyboard and mouse input on iPad. For more information, be sure to check out “Advancements in Game Controllers” and “Bring keyboard and mouse gaming to iPad.”

Resources

Advancements in Game Controllers

Let’s rumble! Discover how you can bring third-party game controllers and custom haptics into your games on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV. We’ll show you how to add support for the latest controllers — including Xbox’s Elite Wireless Controller Series 2 and Adaptive Controller — and map…

Bring keyboard and mouse gaming to iPad

Level up your iPad games and add in keyboard, mouse, and trackpad controls. Discover how to use the Game Controller framework to augment your existing titles, bring over games from other platforms, or dream up entirely new interaction experiences. Learn how to integrate keyboard and “delta”…

A good document icon aids in the identification of your file on the Desktop, in a Finder window, or in an open dialog, especially when previews aren’t available. These icons may be displayed on screen as small as 16pt or large enough to showcase every glorious design detail.

Depending on the file type and personal preference, document icons can also display document previews. If someone has chosen not to show document extensions in System Preferences, these icons can additionally provide additional context in deciphering their file type and native program.

With macOS Big Sur, you can customize and control how your app’s document icons display across the system. We’ll show you how to design a great icon, integrate it into your Xcode project, and assign document types and type identifiers.

Design a document icon for your app

By default, if you don’t specify a document icon for a file type in your app, macOS will automatically create one for you by compositing your app’s icon together with the correct extension name. This is a common pattern for imported document types or non-proprietary file formats that your application can open such as MP3, JPG or PNG.

You can additionally create a custom document icon if your app supports multiple file types and you’d like to visually distinguish between them. For example, a drawing application may open a jpg file, a project file, a library of drawing components, a plugin or a color swatch.

When creating a custom icon, we recommend keeping its design simple. Try to depict what your icon represents as closely as possible and with as few details as possible. Additionally, think of other document types that your document may commonly be next to, and use distinct shapes and colors that are identifiable even at smaller sizes.

If you plan to create multiple custom icons for different file types, it’s important to make each design distinct and understandable to help people know what to expect when they open them.

The elements of a custom document icon
Beginning with macOS Big Sur, you can generate a new custom document icon with a set of images and a text string.

To create a new custom document icon, you can provide a background fill, center image, or text string. Each of these three elements is optional, allowing you to use just one element or any combination of the three to customize your icon. From there, macOS will automatically layer, position, and mask these elements, then composite them into a page icon with a right corner fold.

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You can download Sketch and Photoshop templates on Apple Design Resources to assist in the generation of the image assets in all their required sizes.

Apple Design Resources

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Fill in the background
The background image allows you to customize the background of your icon. The art should fill the entire drawing area, as shown below, and the system will automatically mask it to the document shape in all sizes.

Background images can not only be used to change the background of your document, but you can also use them to create custom designs that fill the entire page.

The background image should be drawn in the following sizes:

• 512×512
• 512×512@2x
• 256×256
• 256×256@2x
• 128×128
• 128×128@2x
• 32×32
• 32×32@2x
• 16×16
• 16×16@2x

Add a center image
The center image is always half the size of the document canvas. For example, the center image displays at 16pt on a 32pt icon size.

The bulk of the artwork for the center image should be drawn at ~80% of the canvas size. For example, on the 256×256 version, the drawing should be inside a 205×205 area, as shown in the image below. Curves and points can extend into the margin to adjust for optical alignment.

The shape of the artwork should be simple to make it easily identifiable in smaller sizes. The rendering, however, can be as simple or as rich as you’d like.

The center image can be specified in the following sizes:

• 256×256
• 256×256@2x
• 128×128
• 128×128@2x
• 32×32
• 32×32@2x
• 16×16
• 16×16@2x

Add some textual context
The icon’s text string will often be your document’s extension, but can also be something more descriptive. For example, “SCENE” is more descriptive — and easier for someone to understand — than “scn.”

The system will capitalize and scale the text to fit inside the icon, so it’s important to keep the length of your string as short of possible to prevent it from getting too small. The text will also automatically change its color to remain legible against flat colored backgrounds.

Build document icons in your app

To create your document icon types, you’ll need to integrate these elements into your Xcode project.

Bring images into the asset catalog
First, add your background fill image and/or center image into the Asset Catalog as Generic Icons.

1. In Xcode, click the + button within your Asset Catalog.
2. Choose macOS > macOS Generic Icon.
3. Drag your assets into their respective size slots.

If your assets are named using the format icon_[size]x[size][@resolution].png (e.g. icon_32x32@2x.png or icon_32x32.png), they can all be dragged at once and will automatically be assigned to their appropriate size slots.

Configure the Document Type Identifier
Click the Imported/Exported Type Identifier disclosure triangle to add a new Document Type Identifier or open an existing one.

• Icon Image (optional): Select a Center Image from your app’s Asset Catalog.
• Icon Fill (optional): Select a Background Fill Image from your app’s Asset Catalog
• Icon Text (optional): Input the text you want displayed on the bottom of the document icon. This can be the same as the extension or something more descriptive. For example, the scn extension can use scene as its text.
• Legacy Icon (optional): This is either an .icns file or a Generic Icon in your Asset Catalog which will be used if you deploy your application to macOS 10.15 and below or in macOS 11 if Icon Image, Icon Fill and Icon Text are left blank. If a Legacy Icon was specified in the Document Type section, it will override this.

Declaring New Uniform Type Identifiers

Configure your document icons

Here’s how to indicate whether you want to display a legacy document icon, a custom icon, a programmatic option.

1. In Xcode’s Project navigator, select the project file.
2. Select your app’s target from the target list.
3. Choose the Info tab.

Click the Document Type disclosure triangle to add a new Document Type or open an existing one.

You’ll have two options here for iconography:

• Legacy Icon (optional): This is either an .icns file or a Generic Icon in your Asset Catalog. macOS uses legacy icons if you deploy your app to macOS 10.15 or earlier, or if you don’t provide any custom elements for your icon. If you’ve specified a Legacy Icon in the Document Type Identifier, the one in the Document Type will override it.
• Use system generated icons: Check this box if you’ve defined an Icon Fill, Image or Text in the Document Type Identifier for use in macOS 11 and above, or you want the system to use your App’s icon and extension name as your icon. If you leave this box unchecked, macOS will use your Legacy Icon for that document type even when running macOS 11 and above.

Developing a Document-Based App

Validate your app document icons

You can test your new document icons in your app by building and running your app. Here’s what you need to do.

1. Remove all other versions of your app from your test system and empty the Trash.
2. Open your app project in Xcode
3. Build and run your app
4. Gather test assets by creating a new folder and adding one of each document type.
5. Open the test asset folder in Finder.
6. In Finder, go to View > Show View Options to open the “View Options” window for your test asset folder.
7. Make sure that “Show icon preview” is unchecked.

Bring some life into your documents

Document icons in macOS Big Sur are an excellent way to further refine your app’s design on Mac and help people identify the correct file at a glance. For more support on creating these icons, be sure to check out the Apple Design Resources and developer documentation.

Resources

Apple Design Resources

Developing a Document-Based App

Uniform Type Identifier Concepts

Declaring New Uniform Type Identifiers

Adopting Uniform Type Identifiers

Introduction to Uniform Type Identifiers

People expect apps to be secure and their data to be protected. You may need to perform cryptographic operations to implement features such as authentication, message encryption, or to meet regulatory requirements. CryptoKit is a Swift framework that makes it easier and safer to perform common cryptographic operations, whether you simply need to compute a hash or are implementing a more advanced authentication protocol. This year, CryptoKit adds new APIs for HMAC-based Extract-and-Expand Key Derivation Functions (HKDF), support for PEM and DER formats, and with Swift Crypto your code can now run everywhere Swift runs.

HKDF

Key derivation functions allow you to derive one or more secrets of the size of your choice from a master key or passcode. Starting in iOS 14, you can now use standalone APIs for HKDF. Integrate the easy to use one-shot variant for quick tasks such as deriving multiple keys from a master secret, or the two-step extract and expand API with fine-grained control over the key derivation process. In prior versions of iOS, HKDF was supported only when deriving a symmetric key from an elliptic curve key agreement protocol.

HKDF

PEM and DER formats for encoding elliptic curve keys

PEM and DER formats are now supported directly in CryptoKit. You can now directly pass a PEM string or DER-encoded data to initialize CryptoKit public and private keys, without using another library to perform the conversion.

Portability

With Swift Crypto you can create cross-platform solutions using the CryptoKit APIs on all platforms that Swift supports, including Linux and servers. Portability is important when you need to run the same code on your client and server, such as supporting two-factor authentication using a One-Time Password.

Resources

Introducing Swift Crypto

Watch “Cryptography in Swift” from dotSwift 2020

At Apple, we believe that privacy is a fundamental human right. As announced at WWDC20, App Store product pages will feature a new privacy information section to help users understand an app’s privacy practices. Today we are publishing more details for developers on what will be covered in this new privacy section. By the end of next month, you will be able to submit your information via App Store Connect to prepare for this feature rolling out to users by the end of the year.

Learn more about providing app privacy information

In addition, on iOS 14, iPadOS 14, and tvOS 14, apps will be required to receive user permission to track users across apps or websites owned by other companies, or to access the device’s advertising identifier. We are committed to ensuring users can choose whether or not they allow an app to track them. To give developers time to make necessary changes, apps will be required to obtain permission to track users starting early next year. More information, including an update to the App Store Review Guidelines, will follow this fall.

Learn more about asking permission to track