What’s new in SwiftUI for iOS 14
Text views, grids, color pickers, and more!
SwiftUI was inevitably going to see big changes this year, and I’m really excited to experiment with them all – text views, color pickers, progress views, and even limited support for grids have all landed. Alongside massive improvements to Swift itself (see What's new in Swift 5.3 for more on that), this is a huge leap forward for SwiftUI – we can now make a much wider range of apps.
Please keep in mind that these changes are very new – I'm pushing it as hard as I can, experimenting, refining, sharing, and learning all at the same time. If you have any feedback, please tweet me @twostraws.
You can watch the video below, or scroll down for links to articles.
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The big stuff
- How to create multi-line editable text with TextEditor
- How to position views in a grid using LazyVGrid and LazyHGrid
- How to create a document-based app using FileDocument and DocumentGroup
- How to lazy load views using LazyVStack and LazyHStack
- How to let users select a color with ColorPicker
- How to create a toolbar and add buttons to it
- How to add a sidebar for iPadOS
More welcome improvements
- How to make a scroll view move to a location using ScrollViewReader
- How to show a map view
- How to show progress on a task using ProgressView
- How to play movies with VideoPlayer
- How to integrate SpriteKit using SpriteView
- How to create scrolling pages of content using tabViewStyle()
- How to synchronize animations from one view to another with matchedGeometryEffect()
- How to create expanding lists
- How to hide and reveal content using DisclosureGroup
New property wrappers
- What is the @AppStorage property wrapper? – read and write
UserDefaultseasily - What is the @ScaledMetric property wrapper? – scales values based on Dynamic Type settings
- What is the @StateObject property wrapper? – safely creates reference types in views
- What is the @UIApplicationDelegateAdaptor property wrapper?
And there's more
- How to add an AppDelegate to a SwiftUI app
- How to continue an NSUserActivity in SwiftUI
- How to create grouped and inset grouped lists
- How to run some code when state changes using onChange()
- How to show indeterminate progress using ProgressView
- How to present a full screen modal view using fullScreenCover()
- How to show text and an icon side by side using Label
- When should you use ContainerRelativeShape?
- How to control which view is shown when your app launches
- How to recommend another app using appStoreOverlay()
- How to open web links in Safari
- How to format dates inside text views
- How to export files using ExportFilesAction
- How to make TextField uppercase or lowercase using textCase()
Some existing API has seen improvements too:
- How to use Dynamic Type with a custom font – this is much easier now
- How to create a date picker and read values from it – includes the new
GraphicalDatePickerStyle.
Plus, improvements in Swift mean you can now use if let and switch statements inside function builders. In practice, this means you can unwrap and use optionals like this:
struct ContentView: View {
@State var username: String?
var body: some View {
Group {
if let username = username {
Text("Welcome, \(username)")
} else {
Image(systemName: "questionmark.circle")
}
}
.font(.largeTitle)
}
}More will come soon – watch this space!
Based on what I’ve seen, many features from wishlists are still missing, including:
- No sign of compositional collection views – the new grids are more like flow layouts
- No sign of a way to add a text field to an alert
- No sign of visual effect views
- No sign of WebKit integration
- No sign of tertiary/quaternary colors from UIKit
…but that's okay! We can't get everything all at once, and there's always iOS 15 😅
SPONSORED Would you describe yourself as knowledgeable, but struggling when you have to come up with your own code? Fernando Olivares has a new book containing iOS rules you can immediately apply to your coding habits to see dramatic improvements, while also teaching applied programming fundamentals seen in refactored code from published apps.
Sponsor Hacking with Swift and reach the world's largest Swift community!
About the author
Paul Hudson is the creator of Hacking with Swift, the most comprehensive series of Swift books in the world. He's also the editor of Swift Developer News, the maintainer of the Swift Knowledge Base, and a speaker at Swift events around the world. If you're curious you can learn more here.
