Render advanced 3D graphics and perform data-parallel computations. Get fine-grained access to the GPU while minimizing CPU overhead. The Metal Framework provides extremely low-overhead access to the GPU, enabling incredibly high performance for your sophisticated graphics rendering and computational tasks. Metal eliminates many performance bottlenecks—such as costly state validation—that are found in traditional graphics APIs. Metal moves all expensive state translation and compilation operations out of the critical path of your most performance sensitive rendering code. It provides precompiled shaders, state objects, and explicit command scheduling to ensure that your application achieves the highest possible performance and efficiency. Graphics, compute, and blit commands can be used together seamlessly and efficiently. Metal is specifically designed to exploit modern architectural considerations, such as multiprocessing and shared memory, to make it easy to parallelize the creation of GPU commands.

Create view-level services for media playback, complete with user controls, chapter navigation, and support for subtitles and closed captioning.

An Objective C class for zip/unzip on iPhone and Mac OS X.

This document describes the Accelerate framework, which contains C APIs for vector and matrix math, digital signal processing, large number handling, and image processing.

The AV Foundation framework provides an Objective-C interface for managing and playing audio-visual media in iOS and OS X applications.

The Contacts framework provides Swift and Objective-C API to access the user’s contact information. Because most apps read contact information without making any changes, this framework is optimized for thread-safe, read-only usage.

Core Foundation is a framework that provides fundamental software services useful to application services, application environments, and to applications themselves. Core Foundation also provides abstractions for common data types, facilitates internationalization with Unicode string storage, and offers a suite of utilities such as plug-in support, XML property lists, URL resource access, and preferences.

Core Image is an image processing and analysis technology designed to provide near real-time processing for still and video images.

Core Text is an advanced, low-level technology for laying out text and handling fonts.