On the 12th of September Apple released the new Xcode version, Xcode 14.
In this article, we’re going to discuss the changes and improvements that Apple put into its IDE.
Size matters
Apple reduced the size of Xcode, compared to Xcode 13, Xcode 14 is 30% lighter.
Xcode 13.4.1 weighs 10GB while Xcode 14.0 is 7.0GB, this is a big change since there were a lot of complaints from developers regarding Xcode size.
Improved Auto-Completion
An IDE that autocompletes when typing code is a great developer experience and a necessity for every developer.
Xcode 14 is a great improvement from Xcode 13 when it comes to code completion.
For example, Xcode will autocomplete a whole init function for you when you defined the class and the class members:
But that’s not the only new feature, this works also for objects that conform Codable protocol, when you define the init function the Xcode will suggest completing init(from decoder: Decoder) {…} and will automatically autocomplete the entire function for you as you can see in the example below:
And the result will be:
You can notice I also added the encode function, if you start typing encode Xcode will also autocomplete the entire function for you.
Asset Catalog
There are also improvements when it comes to the asset catalog, no more various app icon sizes, in Xcode 14 there is only 1024x1024:
You can now double-click an image from the asset catalog to go to the file.
You can also paste images directly from the clipboard to the asset catalog.
Improved Build Time
More improvements are coming with the new Xcode version, this time it’ll save even more time.
Build times have been improved significantly, with better parallelism algorithms that improved speed by x2, and projects' build time is 25% faster overall.
The more cores you have on your Mac, the greater the improvement you’ll be seeing, Testing on the M1 Ultra studio showed an improvement of 30% in build time.
And that’s not all, document loading improved by 50%, notarizing is 4x faster if you use the Interface Builder, and swapping between iPads and iPhones from the device bar is now 30% faster.
Stronger and faster “Xcode Previews”
When SwiftUI was introduced one of its key features was the “Xcode Previews”, this feature helps developers see all the UI changes in real-time side by side with the code.
This means developers don't need to context switch, go back and forward to the UI, run the application on a simulator just to see what changed, and have a better development experience.
The big change that Xcode 14 brings in is an interactive preview canvas, this means a developer can interact with the canvas (click a button, go between screens, etc).
Xcode 14 comes with whole new specific controls that help the developer view the same UI in different orientations, schemes, or even dark mode, you can even see the same UI with different font sizes up to 12 screens at the same time.
Build Timeline
In the previous versions of Xcode, we could only see build logs as one big list without much information about the steps, with Xcode 14 you can see exactly how much time each step took, and we can see a full timeline.
Simulator
Xcode 14 also improved the simulator, it now supports remote notifications with iOS 16 simulators running on macOS 13 with Apple Silicon or T2 processors.
With that said, the simulator will only support Apple Push Notification within the Sandbox environment.
The APNS tokens will be a unique combination of both the Mac hardware and the simulator.
Summarize
Xcode 14 comes with various new features and improvements, faster coding (due to autocompletion), faster build time, improve simulator usage, and overall a better developer experience.
If you would like to read the full release notes you can find them here.
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