what's changed in swiftui

What's Changed in SwiftUI

SwiftUI has seen several significant updates and enhancements this year. Here are some of the key changes:

1. Graphics Capabilities:

   • Color Mixing: A new mix modifier on Color allows blending colors together by a given amount.
   • Custom Shaders: Extended to allow precompiling shaders 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 Customizations: 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 enables 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:

   • UIKit and AppKit Integration: Improved integration with UIKit and AppKit, including the ability to use SwiftUI animations and gesture recognizers with UIKit views.
   • Gesture Recognition: Gesture recognition has been factored out of UIKit, allowing built-in or custom UI gesture recognizers to be used in SwiftUI view hierarchies.

5. Accessibility:

   • Enhanced Accessibility 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.

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 using the @Previewable macro, eliminating the need for boilerplate code.

7. Text and Selection Management:

   • Programmatic Text Selection: New ways to work with text and manage selection, including programmatic access to and control of text selection within text editing controls.

8. Custom Containers and Mesh Gradients:

   • Custom Containers: New features for creating custom containers.
   • Mesh Gradients: Support for mesh gradients to create more complex and visually appealing designs.

For a detailed overview, you can watch the session What’s new in SwiftUI starting at 15:56.