Exploring WWDC24 new features 🕵️‍♂️

June 20, 2024

A week has passed since Apple WWDC24, and the iOS community is already diving into the new features. Personally, I split my time between reviewing some WWDC24 sessions and following Euro 2024, particularly cheering for my team, Portugal 🇵🇹. Now, let's take a look at some of the exciting new features that Apple has introduced from a dev's perspective. Hope you enjoy 🙌.

👷 Getting Started with Swift Testing

If you got excited about Swift Testing, Apple's new macro-based testing library, like I did, you should definitely take a look at Pol Piela’s latest article. Last week, Pol wrote an article about how you can get started using it and how you can migrate your existing XCTest tests to the new library. I personally enjoy this new method of writing tests, and I believe it will finally make the process enjoyable for me.

👀 What is new in SwiftUI after WWDC24

Majid provided an excellent article exploring the latest features introduced in the SwiftUI framework. He covered topics as the new overloads for Group and ForEach views, the enhanced tab bar experience, hero animations, scroll position handling, the entry macro that allow us to quickly introduce environment values, focused values, etc, without boilerplate, previews and its new @Previewable macro, and more.

🎨 Mesh Gradient Creator

I have been following Stewart Lynch's YouTube series for a while, and once again, Stewart has provided an excellent resource to the community. To better understand the new Mesh Gradient view introduced at WWDC24, Stewart developed a Mac app that lets you experiment with the grid of points, their coordinates, and colors. I highly recommend downloading the app, as it offers an option to either save the code for use in your own projects or to download a desktop image based on your creation.

WWDC24 introduced a variety of updates, with SwiftUI receiving significant enhancements. One notable addition is the new NavigationTransition protocol, which includes the zoom transition. Thoomas Vahter illustrates this feature with a grid view example that opens a DetailView using the zoom transition. To achieve this effect, you can simply apply the navigationTransition view modifier to the destination view and the matchedTransitionSource view modifier to the originating view.

💨 Enhance replace transition for SF symbols in iOS 18

iOS 18 introduces a new feature for the ReplaceSymbolEffect called MagicReplace. This option enables smooth animations for slashes and badges in SF Symbols, improving visual transitions in your apps. Natalia Panferova showcases this feature with an example of a notification toggle, resulting in a seamless magic replace animation on the bell icon when the slash is added or removed.

💻 Helm for App Store Connect

This is the only topic outside WWDC in today's issue, but I really want to highlight it! Pol Piela and Hidde van der Ploeg released Helm last week, a native macOS app designed to make using App Store Connect easier and more enjoyable for shipping apps and updates. I am super excited to try it out and can't wait to upload a new build without needing to open App Store Connect to double-check anything!

Conclusion

Apple WWDC 2024 has set the stage for another exciting year within the Apple ecosystem, and the iOS community has quickly begun diving into these new features. I hope you enjoy the post. Feel free to follow me on Twitter and ask any questions you have related to this content. Thanks for reading, and see you next week!