Render advanced 3D graphics and perform data-parallel computations. Get fine-grained access to the GPU while minimizing CPU overhead. The Metal Framework provides extremely low-overhead access to the GPU, enabling incredibly high performance for your sophisticated graphics rendering and computational tasks. Metal eliminates many performance bottlenecks—such as costly state validation—that are found in traditional graphics APIs. Metal moves all expensive state translation and compilation operations out of the critical path of your most performance sensitive rendering code. It provides precompiled shaders, state objects, and explicit command scheduling to ensure that your application achieves the highest possible performance and efficiency. Graphics, compute, and blit commands can be used together seamlessly and efficiently. Metal is specifically designed to exploit modern architectural considerations, such as multiprocessing and shared memory, to make it easy to parallelize the creation of GPU commands.

The UserNotifications framework (UserNotifications.framework) supports the delivery and handling of local and remote notifications. You use the classes of this framework to schedule the delivery of local notifications based on specific conditions, such as time or location. Apps and extensions also use this framework to receive and potentially modify local and remote notifications when they are delivered to the user’s device.

Apply computer vision algorithms to perform a variety of tasks on input images and video. The Vision framework performs face and face landmark detection, text detection, barcode recognition, image registration, and general feature tracking. Vision also allows the use of custom Core ML models for tasks like classification or object detection.

Core Audio is the digital audio infrastructure of iOS and OS X. It includes a set of software frameworks designed to handle the audio needs in your applications. Read this chapter to learn what you can do with Core Audio.

Core Image is an image processing and analysis technology designed to provide near real-time processing for still and video images.

Work with image and video assets managed by the Photos app, including those from iCloud Photo Library and Live Photos. Fetch and cache full-sized assets or thumbnails asynchronously, revise content, and sync revisions to multiple devices. In iOS and macOS, the Photos framework provides classes that support building photo editing extensions for the Photos app. In iOS and tvOS, the Photos framework also provides direct access to the photo and video assets managed by the Photos app, including the iCloud Photo Library. Use this framework to retrieve assets for display and playback, edit their image or video content, or work with collections of assets such as albums, moments, and iCloud Shared Albums.

The powerful programming language that is also easy to learn. Swift is a powerful and intuitive programming language for macOS, iOS, watchOS and tvOS. Writing Swift code is interactive and fun, the syntax is concise yet expressive, and Swift includes modern features developers love. Swift code is safe by design, yet also produces software that runs lightning-fast.

The Address Book framework provides access to a centralized contacts database, called the Address Book database, that stores a user’s contacts. Applications such as Mail and Messages use this database to present information about known and unknown persons.

The Address Book UI framework provides controllers that facilitate displaying, editing, selecting, and creating records in the Address Book database.