Xcode 14 Improves the Developer Experience

Apple recently released Xcode 14, and it has tons of great new additions with an eye to improving developer experience at the forefront. Improvements range from enhanced code suggestions in the IDE all the way to increased parallelization in application builds that yields a reported 25% decrease in build times.

Xcode 14 Key Points

• Ships with SDKs for iOS 16 and macOS 13.
• Requires macOS Monterey 12.4 or later.

Enhanced Code Suggestions

This latest Xcode release includes improved code completion to help you write cleaner code faster, and it offers suggested snippets on the fly. Code structure stays visible as you scroll through long files, so you can easily find related code when you need it. And there is a new Regex feature for Swift that touts syntax highlighting and can suggest refactoring for complex expressions.

Increased Build Speeds

As Xcode projects increase in complexity, there is always an associated increase in build times, which in and of themselves isn’t usually such a big deal for developers, but when a team working at scale can reduce build times for all developers on the team on every CI run, that’s serious news.

Apple is reporting that projects build up to 25% faster as a result of improved parallel build capabilities in Xcode. And there is even a nifty UI – the Build Timeline – that helps DevOps teams identify potential bottlenecks in the build process.

Multiplatform Support

Xcode 14’s new multi-platform build target creates a single SwiftUI interface for use with iOS, macOS and other Apple devices as well. Because of this, you can now write Swift code that can run easily on multiple platforms, and that can be easily tweaked to take advantage of unique features on distinct device types.

And – maybe it’s a small feature, but it’s sure to please – you can now upload a single icon that is automatically resized for each device type you’re adding to the App Store. Pretty cool, indeed.

Xcode 14 and Orka 2.1

Orka 2.1 has entered a tech preview phase that includes full production-level support, which means users can now combine this powerful, Kubernetes-driven, macOS virtualization platform with this latest Xcode release in production to gain maximum control over your build infrastructure as you leverage this impressive new Xcode build functionality.

Combine with Orka 2.1 for virtualization of macOS Monterey and Xcode 14 for the ultimate macOS and iOS CI experience.

Ready to Get Started?

If you’re already using Orka, you may need to upgrade to Orka 2.1 to take full advantage of these new build-focused features in Xcode. And if you haven’t yet tried Orka, but you’d like to test drive a cluster with this awesome new software, reach out to a sales engineer to get started today.