what is new with swiftUI?

What's New in SwiftUI

SwiftUI has introduced several exciting new features and improvements this year. Here are some of the highlights:

1. Graphics Capabilities:

   • Color Mixing: A new mix modifier on Color allows you to blend colors together by a given amount.
   • Custom Shaders: Extended to allow precompilation before their first use, avoiding frame drops caused by lazy shader compilation.

2. Scroll View Enhancements:

   • Fine-Grained Control: New APIs provide more control over scroll views, including reacting to changes in content, offsets, and content size.
   • Visibility Detection: Detect when a view's visibility changes due to scrolling, enabling experiences like auto-playing videos.
   • Scroll Positions: More scroll positions to programmatically scroll to, such as the top edge.
   • Additional Controls: Options to turn off bouncing along a given axis, programmatically stop scrolling, and control content alignment.

3. Swift 6 Language Mode:

   • Data Race Safety: Compile-time data race safety.
   • Main Actor Annotation: Views in SwiftUI are now marked with the @MainActor annotation, meaning all types conforming to View are implicitly isolated to the main actor by default.

4. Interoperability:

   • Gesture Recognition: Gesture recognition has been factored out of UIKit, allowing any built-in or custom UI gesture recognizer to be used in SwiftUI view hierarchies.
   • Animations: Animations have been factored out of SwiftUI, enabling setup on UIKit or AppKit views and driven by SwiftUI, including fully custom animations.

5. Custom Containers and Mesh Gradients:

   • Custom Containers: New APIs for creating custom containers.
   • Mesh Gradients: Beautiful mesh gradients for more visually appealing designs.

6. Xcode Previews:

   • Dynamic Linking Architecture: Uses the same build artifacts for previews and when you run your app, improving the developer experience.

7. Platform-Specific Enhancements:

   • macOS: Control over window toolbars and backgrounds, and a new text renderer API for advanced visual effects and animations.
   • watchOS: Extensive use in key apps like Workout, Activity, and Sleep.
   • visionOS: Ideal for building spatial apps.

For a detailed overview, you can watch the session What’s new in SwiftUI.

Relevant Sessions

1. What’s new in SwiftUI
2. Platforms State of the Union
3. SwiftUI essentials