whats new in 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 custom shader feature with precompilation to avoid 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 when they come into view.
   • 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, control content alignment, and more.

3. Interoperability:

   • UIKit and AppKit Integration: Improved interoperability with UIKit and AppKit, including the ability to set up animations on these views and drive them with SwiftUI.
   • Gesture Recognition: Gesture recognition has been factored out of UIKit, allowing the use of built-in or custom gesture recognizers in SwiftUI view hierarchies.

4. Accessibility:

   • Enhanced Labels: Add additional accessibility information to controls without overriding the framework-provided label.
   • Conditional Modifier Support: New accessibility features such as conditional modifier support and app intent-based accessibility actions.

5. Text Management:

   • Text Selection: Programmatic access to and control of text selection within text editing controls.

6. Swift 6 Language Mode:

   • Data Race Safety: Compile-time data race safety.
   • Main Actor Isolation: Views in SwiftUI are evaluated on the main actor, and the View protocol is marked with the @MainActor annotation.

7. Xcode Previews:

   • Dynamic Linking: New dynamic linking architecture allows switching between a preview and build and run without needing to rebuild the project.
   • State in Previews: Use state directly in previews with the @Previewable macro, reducing boilerplate code.

8. Custom Containers and Mesh Gradients:

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

For a detailed overview, you can watch the session What’s new in SwiftUI from WWDC 2024.

Relevant Sessions

• What’s new in SwiftUI
• Platforms State of the Union
• SwiftUI essentials
• What’s new in UIKit