swiftui cool new stuff

Cool New Stuff in SwiftUI

Apple introduced several exciting new features and enhancements for SwiftUI at WWDC 2024. 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 features now allow precompiling shaders before their first use 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 are available to programmatically scroll to, such as the top edge.

3. Text and Selection Management:

   • Programmatic Text Selection: Control text selection within text editing controls programmatically.
   • Text Suggestions: Add text suggestions to any text field, which appear as a dropdown menu.

4. New Effects and Animations:

   • Highlight Effects: Create effects like karaoke word highlighting by applying highlight effects to specific words.
   • SF Symbols Enhancements: New effects like wiggle, breathe, and rotate for SF Symbols, along with enhancements to existing presets.

5. Interoperability:

   • Gesture Recognition: Use any built-in or custom UI gesture recognizer in your SwiftUI view hierarchy.
   • Animations: Set up animations on UIKit or AppKit views and drive them with SwiftUI, including fully custom animations.

6. New APIs and Features:

   • Custom Containers: Create custom containers for more flexible layouts.
   • Mesh Gradients: Use mesh gradients for advanced visual effects.
   • Swift 6 Language Mode: Enables compile-time data race safety and improved API adoption.

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

Relevant Sessions

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

These sessions cover the new features and improvements in SwiftUI, providing a comprehensive look at what's new and how you can leverage these updates in your apps.