What new in SwiftUI

What's New in SwiftUI

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

1. Graphics Capabilities:

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

2. Scrolling Enhancements:

   • Fine-Grained Control: New APIs provide detailed 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 for programmatic scrolling, such as scrolling to 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:

   • Compile-Time Data Race Safety: The new Swift 6 language mode includes 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 the use of any built-in or custom UI gesture recognizer in SwiftUI view hierarchies.
   • Animations: Animations have been factored out of SwiftUI, enabling setup of animations on UIKit or AppKit views and driving them with SwiftUI, including fully custom animations.

5. Accessibility:

   • Accessibility Labels: You can add additional accessibility information to controls without overriding the framework-provided label.
   • Conditional Modifier Support: New accessibility features include conditional modifier support and app intent-based accessibility actions.

6. Xcode Previews:

   • Dynamic Linking Architecture: Allows switching between a preview and build-and-run without needing to rebuild the project, increasing iteration speed.
   • State in Previews: Use state directly in previews with the @Previewable macro, eliminating the need for boilerplate code.

7. Text and Selection:

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

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

Relevant Sessions

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

Feel free to explore these sessions for more in-depth information on the new features and improvements in SwiftUI.