New features for development in iOS 26 and MacOS 26 - Part 2

iOS 26 Beta, MacOS 26 Beta and iPadOS 26 Beta

Writing Tools

Writing Tools is the implementation of text generation Apple introduced in the previous WWDC.

In the new version, Writing Tools can invoke ChatGPT if your OS is configured to use it. I observed this “free” feature by recompiling my library management application and asking Writing Tools to generate a summary for a book that I have in my library.

This is basically free since you do not have to do anything in coding, as long as you use a standard SwiftUI (or UIKit) text view.

In this specific case I am running this on an empty text, but if I had text in the field already, I could have used the text and the options in the Writing Tools pop-up menu to generate something using existing text. In this case the application is going to ask if it should invoke ChatGPT, since my OS is already configured to use ChatGPT when necessary.

Once you approve ChatGPT use, it is invoked and the result comes back shortly. The speed and quality of the response depends on your (the user’s) ChatGPT membership if any.

ChatGPT also offers various improvement suggestions on the Writing Tools window and you can further refine the result. At the end, the text field takes the text from the response subject to any refinements you might have selected.

Xcode - Coding Intelligence

Xcode 26 Beta 7 has introduced some improvements to the use of AI in Xcode (named Coding Intelligence by Apple)

The first one is the setting of ChatGPT 5 as the default Intelligence tool within Xcode. The extent to which it can be used, the quotas etc. depend on your membership level with OpenAI.

It is also possible to set up Claude as the Coding Intelligence option. It should also be noted that there is a parameter to set up other external models, thus this list of two models should be extensible in the future.

I tried ChatGPT 5 to check on code that has given me some problems since I updated to iOS 26.

This was code I had moved to due to some navigation classes becoming obsolete by iOS 18, but implementing the recommended changes resulted in erratic behaviour in my book man-agement application Atheneum. I asked ChatGPT how to improve it.

This was actually impressive. In addition to the navigation problems I encountered, the suggested code also solved the issue of deleting objects from a filtered list, which caused some problems with SwiftData, and this was solved by the second part of the suggestion from ChatGPT.

So, my first trial of the new Coding Intelligence function using ChatGPT ended positively, however I will have to use this extensively to be able to evaluate it objectively. The final code is simpler and works well.

I will work on the new Foundation Models introduced and try to use it productively in a new project of mine, in the next instalment of this series.