Announcing OS X, tvOS updates, and the new iCloud plugin!

18 December 2015

Announcing OS X, tvOS updates, and the new iCloud plugin!

The holiday season is upon us and once again the Corona engineering team is in a festive mood. This season they have been hard at work giving us some exciting new features and platforms to explore.

OS X initial release

As of Daily Build 2015.2795, we are proud to announce that OS X is no longer in beta! We have the core features working at a level where we feel comfortable encouraging you to release apps to the Mac App store. Platforms like this are never complete and there are more features to add, but this marks a stable point in OS X development where we think you can successfully deploy desktop apps for Mac. To learn more, see our Creating OS X Desktop Apps guide.

tvOS now in beta

Additionally, we are removing the “alpha” label from our tvOS support. We believe that you should be able to publish apps to iTunes Connect for tvOS. Of course there is more to do before we can mark this as fully released, but the core features are now in place. You can pick this up in Daily Build 2015.2795 as well. To learn more, check out our Apple TV and tvOS guide.

The iCloud plugin (beta)

We are also pleased to announce the immediate availability of the new iCloud plugin. This plugin lets you store various data types in Apple’s iCloud service. The three main types of data you can store are:

• Key-Value Storage — This lets you store simple data values like numbers, strings, and tables.
• Documents — This lets you develop apps where you can save whole files to the cloud and sync them with other devices.
• CloudKit — This is a full database implementation where you can have public and private database implementations which your app can access from multiple devices.

In its simplest use, iCloud (all three methods) lets you save data from your app to iCloud and retrieve it later when you need it. In addition, if you have your app installed on multiple devices, for example your iPhone and iPad, the app can share data.

To get started with the iCloud plugin, see the documentation and our first tutorial.

Get started!

With this progress on both OS X desktop builds and tvOS builds, now is a great time to consider additional platforms for your existing apps!