John Voorhees (Mastodon):
I’m not a developer, so I’m not going to review Swift Assist (a name that is conspicuously absent from Apple’s developer tool press release, by the way), but the changes are so substantial that the feature I was shown this year hardly resembles what I saw in 2024. Unlike last year’s demo, this version can revise multiple project files and includes support for multiple large language models, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has been tuned to work with Swift and Xcode. Getting started with ChatGPT doesn’t require an OpenAI account, but developers can choose to use their account credentials from OpenAI or another provider, like Anthropic. Swift Assist also supports local model integration. If your chosen AI model takes you down a dead end, code changes can be rolled back incrementally at any time.
It’s also notable that this is Apple’s first stab – in any app – at a chatbot. The chat interface lives in the left sidebar, where you can request code changes, bug fixes, documentation, and other information relevant to a project. Changes proposed by your selected LLM are color-coded to make them easy to review, too.
Previously:
Apple Intelligence Artificial Intelligence ChatGPT Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Programming Swift Assist Xcode
SwiftData: Dive into inheritance and schema migration:
Discover how to use class inheritance to model your data. Learn how to optimize queries and seamlessly migrate your app’s data to use inheritance. Explore subclassing for building model graphs, crafting efficient fetches and queries, and implementing robust schema migrations. Understand how to use Observable and persistent history for efficient change tracking.
I’m glad to see that inheritance isn’t on the chopping block, as some feared, but otherwise this was disappointing. For the second year in a row, there don’t seem to be any new features for Core Data (not even a mention in the session) or for integrating Core Data and SwiftData. Is Core Data frozen in time or still getting maintenance? How are you supposed to migrate when the feature sets—and even IDs—aren’t equivalent? Aren’t there tons of apps built on Core Data? What are they supposed to do? It seems like Apple doesn’t care.
Fatbobman:
SwiftData added only one feature this year—model inheritance—which isn’t widely used by most developers. Other highly requested capabilities, such as additional sync options (shared, public) and dynamic predicate adjustments, didn’t materialize in this release. That said, this update isn’t a failure. By fixing several critical bugs from previous versions and filling in some long-overdue functionality, SwiftData in Xcode 26 has become increasingly viable for real-world apps.
Previously:
Core Data iOS iOS 26 Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Programming Swift Programming Language SwiftData
Juli Clover:
Spotlight got a major overhaul, and you can now use it to do just about anything on your Mac. It supports actions, so you can send emails and messages without ever opening up an app. Spotlight also incorporates a list of all of your apps plus a clipboard manager that keeps track of what you’ve copied and pasted. You can get to Spotlight’s features with the Command Key and 1, 2, 3, or 4, and you can launch actions with short little phrases like SE for send email.
It seems like there’s no way to open the clipboard history with a single keyboard shortcut. You need to press Command-Space followed by Command-4.
Dan Moren:
Speaking of third-party developers, one claim that often gets leveled at Apple is its tendency to “Sherlock” apps: that is, provide functionality in its OS that’s already offered by third-party apps, thus arguably making it harder for those apps to survive.
However, that phenomenon has always been more nuanced, thanks to the fact that Apple more often than not implements only the lowest common denominator version of these pieces of functionality.
For example, take the new Clipboard History feature of macOS. It does only what its name suggests: keeps a history of things on your clipboard. That’s useful enough in and of itself, but what it doesn’t do is any of the features offered by the slew of third-party clipboard managers. Myself, I’m a longtime user of Tapbots’s Pastebot, which not only provides a clipboard history but also lets me store snippets for frequent use or apply filters to text on the clipboard, such as converting it to plain text or turning Markdown into HTML. Those are features Apple’s not about to build into its own Clipboard History feature because they don’t really deal with the stated purpose: keeping track of items that were on your clipboard.
Marcus Mendes (via Simon B. Støvring):
Apple’s new clipboard history only goes back eight hours.
I plan to keep using LaunchBar for this, but it’s nice to have something built in.
Previously:
Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Pasteboard
Tim Hardwick:
In System Settings ➝ Appearance, there are still the standard Auto, Light, and Dark modes, but Apple has added several options that allow you to really mix things up and create your own stylized desktop environment.
[…]
Meanwhile, a new “Icon & widget style” section offers three distinct modes alongside the Default. Like iOS 18, the new Dark option applies black backgrounds to icons throughout the system interface, including System Settings sidebar icons (this works in both Light and Dark modes). You can set this to Always or Automatic, which switches to dark icons at night while maintaining the default appearance during daylight hours.
The new Clear setting emphasizes the Liquid Glass redesign and adds a new transparency by picking up background colors, creating a more translucent interface effect. Clear also includes Light and Dark variants, or it can be set to Auto for automatic day-night switching.
Apple:
You use your favorite design tool to craft the individual foreground layers of your app icon. For iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS icons, you then import your icon layers into Icon Composer, a design tool included with Xcode and available from the Apple Developer website. In Icon Composer, you define the background layer for your icon, adjust your foreground layer placement, apply visual effects like transparency, define default, dark, clear, and tinted appearance variants, and export your icon for use in Xcode. For additional guidance, see Creating your app icon using Icon Composer.
Apple:
The system renders your app icon for the different platforms, appearances, and sizes from the single Icon Composer file located in your app’s bundle. For previous releases that don’t have the same icon and widget style appearances and Liquid Glass material, Xcode generates the app icon images at build time from the Icon Composer file.
If you choose not to use Icon Composer, you can still use an AppIcon asset catalog in your project containing individual app icon images and let the system apply the Liquid Glass material.
I think I read that you still need the old icon file, anyway, since the new .icon file only deploys back to macOS Sequoia.
Create icons with Icon Composer:
Learn how to use Icon Composer to make updated app icons for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS. Find out how to export assets from your design tool of choice, add them to Icon Composer, apply real-time glass properties and other effects, and preview and adjust for different platforms and appearance modes.
Flora Damiano:
Now, with the newest version of its platforms (26) being announced, new appearance modes were introduced alongside the new unified design language, Liquid Glass. There are now multiple ways an app icon can be rendered, depending on the user’s system appearance settings and how it interacts with the background content. They are Default, Dark, Clear Light, Clear Dark, Tinted Light and Tinted Dark.
Simon B. Støvring:
macOS 26 Tahoe replaces the oddly shaped app icons that once brought joy and personality to the Dock with the familiar squircle icons from iOS.
[…]
When you manually assign an app icon through Finder, macOS respects the shape and doesn’t force the glass background. Interestingly, this also works if you just replace the icon with the same one.
[…]
Although squircle icons are now the default, developers can still display a custom-shaped icon in the Dock by setting a view on NSApplication.shared.dockTile.contentView.
People are using this to get their Dock icon out of “squircle jail” if they haven’t updated it yet. But I don’t understand what you’re supposed to do if you want to programmatically set your Dock icon (e.g. to draw a custom badge on top) but you do want to adapt it for the different appearance settings. If I set the applicationIconImage, it seems like macOS displays exactly what I gave it (which makes sense). But does that mean that you have to handle drawing all the different theme combinations yourself?
Previously:
Asset Catalog (.car) Design Icon Composer Icons Mac macOS Tahoe 26
