SwiftUI wishlist for WWDC20

We already started collecting our questions for Apple engineers. On the other hand, I decided to share with you my SwiftUI wishlist for WWDC20. This week we will talk about possible additions and changes in SwiftUI. I will show you also API that I expect to see during the next release of SwiftUI.

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ScrollView

ScrollView has a bunch of bugs right now. I believe Apple will fix all of them, but I also hope for a content offset binding option. There is no way to get or set the current content offset of ScrollView in SwiftUI. We need a way to both assign and read the offset, and it is a perfect use-case for a Binding. Let’s take a look at the quick example.

struct RootView: View {
    @State private var offset: CGPoint = .zero

    var body: some View {
        ScrollView(.vertical, showsIndicators: false, offset: $offset) {
            Text("Very long text")
            Button("Jump to top") {
                self.offset = .zero
            }
        }
    }
}

CollectionView and CompositionalLayout

Last year Apple released CompositionLayout that provides us a declarative way of building complex layouts for UICollectionView. The buzzword here is declarative. It feels very natural for SwiftUI to have a similar API, I’m not sure why Apple didn’t release it last year, but I expect to see it soon.

CompositionalLayout introduces a few concepts to manage complex layouts. For example, it has sections, groups, and items. As you know, we already have these concepts in SwiftUI. I think SwiftUI views like Group and Section can behave in another way depending on the context. We already saw that views can behave differently inside a Form or a List. Let’s take a look at how it might work in SwiftUI.

struct AppStoreView: View {
    let featured: [App]
    let appsWeLove: [App]

    var body: some View {
        CompositionalLayout {
            Section(.groupPagingCentered) {
                Group(.horizontal, width: .fractionalWidth(0.5), height: .fractionalHeight(0.5)) {
                    ForEach(featured) { app in
                        FeatureAppView(app: app)
                    }
                }
            }

            Section {
                Group(.vertical, width: .fractionalWidth(0.9), height: .estimated(200)) {
                    ForEach(appsWeLove) { app in
                        SmallAppView(app: app)
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

As I already said multiple times, Navigation in SwiftUI is really problematic. The main rule behind the SwiftUI framework is “view is a function of some state”. SwiftUI doesn’t apply this rule to Navigation. Navigation in SwiftUI looks like uncontrollable magic. In my opinion, it also should be a function of a state where the state describes a navigation stack. Let’s take a look at the example.

enum Destination {
    case master
    case details(Post)
}

struct RootView: View {
    @EnvironmentObject var router: Router<Destination>

    var body: some View {
        RouterView(router: router) { destination in
            switch destination {
            case .master:
                return PostsView()
            case .details(let post):
                return PostDetails(post: post)
            }
        }
    }
}

As you can see, RouterView accepts an instance of the Router class, which describes a navigation stack and a ViewBuilder closure that we use to build a view according to the navigation state.

To learn more about @ViewBuilder in SwiftUI, take a look at my “The power of @ViewBuilder in SwiftUI” post.

Appearance API

SwiftUI provides us styling options by introducing a bunch of protocols. For example, ButtonStyle, ToggleStyle, etc. We create a struct that conforms to the ButtonStyle protocol. After that, we can put it into the environment, and all views inside the environment gain particular styling. I appreciate the way styling works in SwiftUI right now, but we need to expand it to support more views like Form and NavigationView.

To learn more about styling in SwiftUI, take a look at my “Composable styling in SwiftUI” post.

Missing views

SwiftUI provides us a set of very basic views that we can use to build our apps. There are a lot of views that we don’t have in SwiftUI. I hope to see a bunch of new views coming in the next weeks. For example, SearchBar, TextView, RefreshControl, etc.

Conclusion

This week, I share my vision and expectations with you about the future of the SwiftUI framework that we hopefully will see later this month. I hope you enjoy the post. Feel free to follow me on Twitter and ask your questions related to this post. Thanks for reading, and see you next week!