SwiftUI Treasures from WWDC24

A listing of my favorite SwiftUI goodies, as well as a State of the Framework

WWDC24 is already a month and a half behind us. Apple Intelligence took the consumer spotlight, while Swift 6 and its data safety took the developer spotlight.

When talking with fellow developers, they seemed disappointed that there weren’t more SwiftUI features or news being announced. I was surprised by this feedback because I felt there were several significant updates.

State of SwiftUI

Sure, none of the SwiftUI announcements were branded or spotlighted the same as, say, Swift Data was last year. But it signaled a few things to me about the state of SwiftUI:

1. SwiftUI has reached a stable, mature level (already signaled last year).

2. New features and enhancements do not necessarily need to come with fanfare, showing that SwiftUI is maturing.

SwiftUI turned 5 at this WWDC. Even years later, it’s understandable that many developers still want to know if the framework is stable and production-ready. Apple clearly took an iterative approach with SwiftUI, never claiming it would be an overnight replacement for any of its predecessors.

I believe that was wise for a couple of reasons.

First, it allowed for the community to weigh in on many aspects of SwiftUI’s formation. Second, it allowed SwiftUI to evolve alongside Swift’s own evolution. Many features became possible only as the language of a declarative UI framework evolved.

For example, Combine is not the only reactive framework under the hood anymore. The Observation framework is now integrated, strengthened by many of the concurrency and data safety features we saw leading up to Swift 6.

As we continue to watch SwiftUI over the next 5+ years, I believe we can do so expectantly and with wonder.

A Few of My Favorite (SwiftUI) Things (Announced at WWDC24)

Despite the associated name, I clearly took more of a Marie (from The Sound of Music) approach rather than the Captain’s. I couldn’t help but notice all the new goodies as they were briefly shown or even part of other feature announcements.

I won’t be going into detail on all of these, but rather listing them with associated doc links. But I do plan on exploring these more in future posts, so be sure to subscribe so you catch their releases!

Without further ado (cue the music)…

• Previewable States

• Actual Hover Effect in visionOS

• Advanced Window Customizations

• Alt-keys for commands

• Switch between Sidebar and Tabs

• Custom Containers (think your own List, Group, Stack, etc)

• Entry macro

• Text Selection Observation

• ScrollPosition type (OnScrollGeometryChange and OnScrollVisibilityChanged)

• New Transitions (including GPU-enabled ones)

Note: these aren’t ALL the things I liked from WWDC this year. I can’t wait to go deeper with Swift Testing, and I’m actually hopeful for the AI tools coming to Xcode.

Charting Course for September (and beyond)

We’re still a few months away from September, which means we’re still in the summer of Betas. Also worth remembering, many of the new features announced at WWDC are found in the upcoming iOS version, which means app supporting older versions can’t just adopt at a whim.

But, exploring and learning about these goods now helps us plan ahead and begin to shape our designs (and backlogs) for the future.

I look forward to helping navigate those waters with you.