14 DAY TRIAL // Developers testing the latest dev-kit from Apple are encouraged to pay the company’s site a visit. Xcode 6 Beta 2 has been released and packs a massive array of fixes in various areas, including the new programming language, Swift.
According to people who are familiar with the beta, Xcode 6 Beta 2 allows objects of a class type (such as NSObject or NSArray) to be downcast to bridged Swift types.
Playgrounds, the feature that displays changes in your app in real time as you lay down the code, is also tweaked. “Playgrounds that use resources via the resource path setting in the file inspector will no longer eventually degrade Launch Services functionality,” according to the seed notes.
Metal, another new technology introduced by Apple at WWDC, is also being tweaked in the new beta. The Compiler build option “Produce Debugging information” now defaults to the correct value in new projects, while the Metal GPU Frame Debugger will now capture a frame when the app attempts to reuse a CAMetalDrawable from a previous frame.
Instruments will now find symbols when using Time Profiler with iOS Simulator, and the window contents in Simulator will no longer become misaligned when switching between resizable and regular devices. This and much more is available in Xcode 6 Beta 2 (including a healthy dose of unresolved issues, mind you).