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 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.

A download manager for iOS. Actually, all that you need to download files without any external library.

The Audio Toolbox framework provides interfaces for recording, playback, and stream parsing. In iOS, the framework provides additional interfaces for managing audio sessions.

The AV Foundation framework provides an Objective-C interface for managing and playing audio-visual media in iOS and OS X applications.

Create view-level services for media playback, complete with user controls, chapter navigation, and support for subtitles and closed captioning.

A proper CSV parser for Objective-C.

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.