What’s new in SwiftUI

100% SwiftUI Apps

We can now build an entire app completely in SwiftUI.

This is a fully functional app:

@main
struct HelloWorld: App {
    var body: some Scene {
        WindowGroup {
            Text("Hello, world!").padding()
        }
    }
}

• We can do so thanks to the new App protocol, which requires a body of type some Scene.

• WindowGroup lets us create scenes easily based on the platform, and more.

• DocumentGroup lets us open, edit, and save document-based scenes.

LaunchScreen

• New Launch Screen Info.plist key

• Lets us declare standard UI components such as images, navigation bar, tab bar, background colors as the app launch screen.

• Replaces the LaunchScreen.storyboard.

Widgets

• Built exclusively with SwiftUI

• Widgets are just like Views, however instead of conforming to View, they conform to the Widget protocol, and the body returns a some WidgetConfiguration instance.

Apple Watch

• We can use SwiftUI to build custom complications

Lists

• Stacks behave more like List by prepending them with with Lazy (e.g. LazyVStack)

• New grid component via LazyHGrid, LazyVGrid, and GridItem

Toolbar and Controls

• New .toolbar modifier and ToolBarItem, those are examples of semantic placements, we describe to SwiftUI the role that these toolbar items have, and SwiftUI will automatically place them properly.

• We can also specify the placement in the ToolBarItem explicitly in its initializer

• Label

  • new View that combines a text and an image (in reality Label accepts two AnyView instances)

  • Labels adapt neatly based on the context and dynamic type size, sometimes the text might not be shown (for example on navigation bars)

• ProgressView

  • can display determinant and indeterminate progress

  • linear and circular style

  • customizable

• Gauge

  • used to display a value relative to a range (min/max)

• Other important modifiers

  • .help

  • .keyboardShortcut

Effects and Styling

• matchedGeometryEffect

• ContainerRelativeShape

• We can add a new AppAccentColor color assets in our bundle to have our app automatically adapt that accent color in all our UI.

• We can also customize some parts of our UI with a different color than the app accent color by using the relative tint modifier such as listItemTint

System Integration

• The new Link view lets open a webpage or deep link to another app, this is the equivalent of creating a button with a UIApplication.shared.open action

• drag and drop support

• SignInWithAppleButton

• More integrations:

  • AVKit

  • MapKit

  • SceneKit

  • SpriteKit

  • QuickLook

  • HomeKit

  • ClockKit

  • StoreKit

  • WatchKit