What's new in SwiftUI?

What's New in SwiftUI

SwiftUI has introduced a plethora 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 by a given amount.
   • Custom Shaders: Ability to precompile shaders before their first use to avoid frame drops caused by lazy shader compilation.

2. Scroll View 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 programmatic control over scroll positions, including scrolling to the top edge and turning off bouncing along a given axis.

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:

   • 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 the setup of animations on UIKit or AppKit views and driving them with SwiftUI, including fully custom animations.

5. 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.

6. Xcode Previews:

   • Dynamic Linking Architecture: Switch between a preview and build and run without needing to rebuild your project, increasing iteration speed.
   • Previewable Macro: Use state directly in previews using the @Previewable macro, eliminating the boilerplate of wrapping your preview content in a view.

7. Text and Selection:

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

For a detailed overview,