What’s new in SwiftUI

Key Takeaways

• SwiftUI adopts the new look and feel of the OS out of the box, but provides a variety of tools to customize the behavior.

• Better interoperability with other frameworks across the board (like AppKit, RealityKit, and WebKit) provides additional flexibility and optionality for advanced use cases and incremental adoption.

• New views and functionality open SwiftUI to new use cases that previously required bridging, like rich text editing and web views.

Adopt the new design

Toolbars

• New ToolbarSpacer API to separate buttons.

• borderedProminent appearance for toolbar items supports tinting via the tint modifier.

Bottom aligned search fields on iOS

• Use searchable on the outside of the NavigationSplitView to get the bottom aligned search automatically.

• On iPad, the new search appearance is on the top trailing corner.

• For tab based apps, you can get the morphing search tab by using the role initializer on your Tab: Tab(role: .search) { … }

Custom views

• Custom views can adopt the new look too.

• glassEffect modifier can be applied to reflect the content behind your custom view.

Menu bar on iPadOS

• Using the commands modifier now yields the same result across iPad and Mac.

Adopt fluid resizing

• On iPadOS, migrate off APIs that fix the screen to full size.

  • Remove UIRequiresFullScreen. It is now deprecated.

  • Watch Elevate the design of your iPad app to learn more.

• On macOS, for window resizes caused by content size changes, SwiftUI now synchronizes the animation between content and window sizes.

  • Use the new windowResizeAnchor API to customize where the animation originates.

  • Great for animating tab switching in the settings window on macOS.

To learn more about adopting the new design, watch Build a SwiftUI app with the new design.

SwiftUI performance

Key performance improvement areas:

• Lists

  • Improvements to large lists and incremental updates.

• Scrolling

  • Improved scheduling for updates on iOS and macOS.

• Debugging and profiling

New SwiftUI Performance instrument in Xcode

• Watch Optimize SwiftUI performance with Instruments.

Animatable macro

New @Animatable macro allows you to delete manual custom animatableData property declarations.

You can exclude properties that shouldn’t be animatable as @AnimatableIgnored within your @Animatable annotated type.

@Animatable
struct LoadingArc: Shape {
    var center: CGPoint
    var radius: CGFloat
    var startAngle: Angle
    var endAngle: Angle
    @AnimatableIgnored var drawPathClockwise: Bool
}

SwiftUI on visionOS

More volumetric and spatial layout options.

• To learn more about new layout techniques like the spatialOverlay modifier, watch Meet SwiftUI spatial layout.

• New manipulable modifier allows users to pick up objects.

• To learn more about volumes and scenes, watch Set the scene with SwiftUI in visionOS.

SwiftUI across the system

Scene bridging

• Allows you to request scenes from AppKit and UIKit contexts.

• Mac apps can now render remote immersive spaces using a new scene.

  • Uses CompositorServices under the hood.

  • To learn more, watch Whats new in Metal rendering for immersive apps.

• A new AssistiveAccess scene type allows your app to take advantage of the special mode for users with cognitive disabilities.

  • To learn more, watch Customize your app for Assistive Access.

Enhancements to AppKit interoperability

• You can show sheets in NSWindows with SwiftUI Views in them.

• AppKit gestures can be bridged to SwiftUI using NSGestureRecognizerRepresentable.

• NSHostingView can be used in Interface Builder.

Improvements to RealityKit interoperability

• RealityKit entities now conform to Observable.

  • Makes it trivial to observe changes in SwiftUI views.

• An improved coordinate conversion API.

• Enhanced support for presentations right from RealityKit.

  • For instance, you can present SwiftUI popovers directly from a RealityKit Entity using the new PresentationComponent API.

  • To learn more, watch Better together SwiftUI and RealityKit.

Platform adoption

• Custom Control Center Controls are coming to macOS and watchOS.

• Widgets are coming to visionOS and CarPlay.

  • To learn about additions to widgets, watch Whats new in widgets.

New & updated SwiftUI views

WebView

• New SwiftUI view for showing web content.

• Powered by WebKit.

• Can show URLs or WebPages.

• WebPage is a new Observable type that enables rich interaction with the web.

• To learn more about these APIs and the better WebKit interoperability, watch Meet WebKit for SwiftUI.

3D Charts

• Declared using Chart3D

• Could use z axis specific modifiers like chartZScale to specify e.g. scales

• To learn more, watch Bring Swift Charts to the third dimension.

Drag & Drop

• New variant of the draggable modifier accepts a containerItemID.

• dragContainer modifier makes the target view a container for drag items.

• SwiftUI requests drag items lazily when a drop occurs.

• Customize the drag behavior by adopting the new dragConfiguration modifier.

• Observe drag event updates, use the new onDragSessionUpdated modifier.

• To customize the drag preview for multiple items, you can specify the formation of the items using the dragPreviewsFormation modifier.

Rich text editing

• TextEditor now accepts an AttributedString.

• Introduces abilities to add paragraph styles, transform attributes, and constrain text inputs.

• Watch Codealong Cook up a rich text experience in SwiftUI with AttributedString and Codealong Explore localization with Xcode.