Introducing Inferno: Metal shaders for SwiftUI
Blazing-fast special effects for your SwiftUI apps.
SwiftUI for iOS 17 and macOS Sonoma come with a fantastic new superpower: the ability to transform any SwiftUI view with Metal shaders, all hardware accelerated so complex effects run at lightning fast speeds even on old devices.
I want to help folks get started with Metal, so I've produced two free resources that will help everyone:
- Inferno is an open-source library of Metal shaders written for SwiftUI, giving you a range of powerful special effects in just a few lines of code.
- I released a new YouTube video where I walk through how to create Metal shaders for SwiftUI from scratch. It lasts over an hour, so there's lots of detail there.
Inferno is a project that makes Metal shaders easy for everyone to use, but I've also gone a step further and added comprehensive documentation explaining exactly how each shader works so that others can learn too.
I've also produced a walkthrough video for Inferno so you can get an overview of the project before downloading it.
But there's more: over on Hacking with Swift+ I'm working on a large tutorial series teaching exactly how to build your own shaders, piece by piece, going into lots of detail on the Metal shading language. Part 1 of that series is already available – check it out!
This is all powered by new APIs introduced in iOS 17 and other coordinated releases – we get complete control over how our views are rendered, and now with only a handful of lines of Metal shading language we can produce some really remarkable results.
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