What’s new in SwiftUI in 2024

Generated on 8/2/2024

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In 2024, SwiftUI has introduced several new features and improvements to enhance the development experience and capabilities. Here are some of the key updates:

  1. Graphics Capabilities:

    • Mix Modifier on Color: Allows blending colors together by a given amount.
    • Custom Shader Precompilation: Avoids frame drops caused by lazy shader compilation.
  2. Scroll View Enhancements:

    • On Scroll Geometry Change: React to changes in content, offsets, content size, and more.
    • Visibility Detection: Detect when a view's visibility changes due to scrolling.
    • Programmatic Control: More scroll positions to programmatically scroll to, control over content alignment, and the ability to turn off bouncing along a given axis.
  3. Interoperability:

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

    • Custom Containers: New APIs for creating custom containers.
    • Mesh Gradients: Beautiful mesh gradients for more dynamic visuals.
    • Window Behavior and Styling: Control over window toolbar, background, and new text renderer API for visual effects and animations.
  5. Xcode Previews:

    • Dynamic Linking Architecture: Uses the same build artifacts for previews and when you build and run, avoiding project rebuilds.
    • Previewable Macro: Allows the use of dynamic properties like state directly in an Xcode preview.
  6. Swift 6 Language Mode:

    • Compile-Time Data Race Safety: New language mode to ensure data race safety at compile time.
    • Main Actor Annotation: Views in SwiftUI are now marked with the main actor annotation, isolating them to the main actor by default.
  7. New APIs and Tools:

    • TabView: More flexible TabView APIs.
    • Document Launch Experience: Enhanced for document-based apps.
    • Live Activities: Fine-tuning experiences on watchOS.
    • Volumes and Immersive Spaces: New capabilities for visionOS.

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