Apple quietly bulks up Swift and Xcode in year two

While most people tune in to Apple's WWDC keynote to figure out what's coming in the next version of the company's operating systems, the event is a developer's conference. Apple genuinely uses WWDC to introduce a lot of new technologies that end users will never experience directly. So with the exception of big news like Swift, the company generally does this in later, non-public talks and through the software released via its Developer Connection.

This year was no exception. While some things, like app thinning, found their way into the keynote, most technical details were buried for later. Information on the new version of Xcode was scattered throughout the week's panels, and developers were able to get a copy of a beta with plenty of preliminary documentation. In the time following WWDC, we spent a couple of weeks watching conference sessions and looking through both the software and all this documentation. The research gave us a sense of some of the under-the-hood changes that are coming for developers this fall alongside the shiny, new operating systems.