Apple releases Xcode 7.3 with iOS 9.3 and watchOS 2.2 SDKs

Apple today announced the release of its Xcode integrated development environment (IDE) for building apps that work on Apple devices. The new 7.3 release features software development kits for the new operating systems that were announced today: iOS 7.3 for iPhones and iPads, watchOS 2.2 for the Apple Watch, and tvOS 9.2 for the most recent Apple TV.

The new version of Xcode has a whole bunch of new features, including many related to Apple’s Swift programming language. For instance: “You can guard statements and declarations with a new #if swift(>=x.y) build configuration: if the Swift language version is at least ‘x.y‘, code in the active branch will compile,” Apple says in the release notes.

Indeed, the software ships with Swift 2.2, which is “the first official release of Swift since it was open-sourced” in December, as Ted Kremenek, senior manager of languages and runtimes at Apple, wrote in a blog post. The new Swift release offers support for Linux, with binaries available for Ubuntu 14.04 and 15.10, Kremenek wrote.

The new Xcode also comes with plenty of bug fixes, including one where “Swift 2.1 had an issue where targets with large numbers of files would fail to compile under whole-module optimization,” according to the release notes.

And Xcode now has better code completion. The editor can now “help you enter symbols, methods, and property names with less typing,” Apple says. “Code completion now provides more intelligent suggestions by using partial matches and the first letter of each word, in addition to prefix matching.”

And for those developers who are interested in seeing how Force Touch works in iOS and Watch apps they’re building, Apple’s Simulator.app now lets them test this out with a “Force Touch trackpad,” according to the release notes.

Developers can download Xcode from the Mac App Store here.

Xcode 7.2 came out in December, and Xcode 7 was released in September.