macOS Big Sur takes the most advanced operating system in the world to a whole new level of power and beauty, and makes your apps look better than ever. Widgets and the widget gallery help you deliver more value to your users. Adding intelligence to your apps with machine learning is simple with extensive tools, models, training capabilities, and APIs. You can create more powerful Mac versions of your iPad apps with Mac Catalyst. And you can easily bring your extensions to Safari — and to the App Store.
Starting today, customers can run macOS Big Sur (11.2.1) as Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) on EC2 Mac instances. MacOS Big Sur is the current major macOS release from Apple, and introduces multiple new capabilities and performance improvements over prior macOS versions. MacOS Big Sur will support running Xcode versions 12.5 and later, which will include additional SDKs for iOS 14.5, iPadOS 14.5, tvOS 14.5, watchOS 7.4, and macOS Big Sur 11.3. The Mac OS Big Sur is expected to bring about a large change in the user interface and display to make it look much better than ever before. There have also been new changes added to pre-existing features like Messages and Maps that will definitely make them work much better than before. Since the introduction of Mac OS X 10.0 in 2001, Apple has been using a numerical OS versioning system based on 10.x, with 16 major releases between versions 10.0 and 10.15. Even when Apple transitioned from “Mac OS X” to “macOS” in 2016, the 10.x numbering system persisted. Apple’s next version of the Macintosh operating system MacOS 11 Big Sur will be released November 11, 2020 replacing macOS 10.15 Catalina. Please do NOT update to Big Sur until you’re ABSOLUTELY POSITIVE all your existing software is compatible with macOS 11 Big Sur.
macOS Big Sur brings a new design that’s been finely tuned for the powerful features that make a Mac a Mac. Core features, such as the menu bar and Dock, take advantage of the large Mac display, with translucent backings and spacious pull-down menus. The new Control Center, designed just for Mac, provides quick access to controls while keeping the menu bar clutter-free. Notification Center puts recent notifications and powerful new widgets together in a single view for at-a-glance information as you work. And a streamlined new design for apps features full-height sidebars and integrated toolbar buttons.
Easily build widgets using the WidgetKit framework and the new widget API for SwiftUI. Widgets now come in multiple sizes, and users can visit the new widget gallery to search, preview sizes, and add them to Notification Center to access important details at a glance.
With support for the popular WebExtension API, it’s even easier to bring powerful extensions to Safari. Xcode 12 even includes a porting tool to streamline the process.
The new Extensions category on the Mac App Store showcases Safari extensions, with editorial spotlights and top charts to help users discover and download great extensions from the developer community.
With macOS Big Sur, creating apps that leverage the power of machine learning is even easier and more extensive with additional tools in Core ML for model deployment, new models and training capabilities in Create ML, more APIs for vision and natural language, and improved resources for training on Mac and converting models to Core ML format.
Create even more powerful Mac versions of your iPad apps. Apps built with Mac Catalyst now take on the new look of macOS Big Sur and help you better define the look and behavior of your apps. You can choose to turn off automatic scaling of iPad controls and layout, allowing you to precisely place every pixel on the screen. Provide full control of your app using just the keyboard, take advantage of the updated Photos picker, access more iOS frameworks, and more.
The Mac App Store helps users better understand apps’ privacy practices. You’ll need to enter your privacy practice details into App Store Connect for display on your product page.
Use Xcode 12 and these resources to build apps for macOS Big Sur.