Core Video provides a pipeline model for digital video. Partitioning the processing into discrete steps makes it simpler for developers to access and manipulate individual frames without having to worry about translating between data types (QuickTime, OpenGL, and so on) or display synchronization issues. Applications that do not need to manipulate individual video frames should never need to use Core Video directly.

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.

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.

StoreKit enables users to embed a store in their app. It also process financial transactions associated with the purchase of content and services.

The Watch Connectivity framework (WatchConnectivity.framework) provides a two-way communications conduit between an iOS app and a WatchKit extension on a paired Apple Watch. Apps use this framework to pass files and data back and forth. Most transfers happen in the background when the receiving app is inactive. When the app wakes up, it is notified of any data that arrived while it was inactive. Live communication is also possible when both apps are active.

This document describes the Accelerate framework, which contains C APIs for vector and matrix math, digital signal processing, large number handling, and image processing.

The Accounts framework provides access to user accounts stored in the Accounts database. An account stores the login credentials of a particular service, such as Twitter, that can be used as authentication for the service. By implementing the Accounts framework into your app, you do not need to be responsible for storing account logins yourself. Instead, the user can grant access for your app to use their account login credentials, bypassing the need to type their username and password. If no account for a particular service exists in the user’s Accounts database, you can let them create and save an account from within your app.