Seb Vidal

Here it is! What's New in UIKit in iOS 26. This was a pretty mammoth undertaking, and it shows – a whopping 64 minute read! I'll be keeping this article up to date over the beta cycle. Possibly littered with errors. Shout at me if I've made any stupid mistakes. Link below 👇

Art of Flora is AVAILABLE NOW! 🌸 🌱 A cosy puzzle game based on historical plant art 🫶 20 % are donated to nature conservation 🦾 Big focus on accessibility 🧑‍🎨 Artist gallery 🎻 Beautiful sounds 🧒Kids mode Exclusive on the @AppStore Link below! ⬇️

@klemensstrasser @AppStore @AppStoreJP Congratulations @klemensstrasser and @polpielladev!

@DylanMcD8 @jacobtechtavern Yup 🥲 Never mind third parties, it's insane than Apple are gonna give up a 1? 2? decade competitive advantage with their silicon so their engineers can...write less code? Some areas of the OS/1P apps are on parr with the quality of platforms they used to mock during keynotes.

@jacobtechtavern @SebJVidal lol have you seen this?? insane

I compared UIKit and SwiftUI performance with the most ridiculous scroll view possible. Memory usage wasn’t dramatic, but was interestingly spiky. Perhaps due to the different numbers of gifs and different resolution of the images rendered on each cell. When it came to profiling peak memory and energy usage, I expected UIKit to yield the same kind of results I saw in SwiftUI: We’re still displaying an enormous number of elements, animating them the same, and these images are not any bigger or smaller, right? Now don’t I look silly. Memory usage hovered around 92MB for UIKit, compared to 248MB in SwiftUI. Read my scientific performance comparison right here 🧪 blog.jacobstechtavern.com/p/swiftui-vs-u…

@DylanMcD8 Yes! Thank you! Gone now 😊

@SebJVidal Just realized I missed this Yeah I wasn't defending this ad at all, I hate it, just wanted to make sure you knew that option was there now

Nice

If you care about UI performance at the deepest level of your soul, you need to use UIKit for scrolling lists and timelines Use SwiftUI for onboarding, settings, modals, etc. x.com/jacobtechtaver…

@No_Wham What? UIVisualEffectView’s effect property?

@SebJVidal it's almost as if, and bare with me here, this API wasn't made for public consumption yet

Relatively trivial fix, although not so trivial to trace... UIVisualEffectView removes its _UIFlexInteraction when you nil out its effect property. This removes its internal _UIFlexInteractionGlowContainerView that houses _UIMultiLayers, CAPortalLayers and CABackdropLayers. Understandably, this can't animate. The fix? Use a non-interactive glass effect and Move™ the flex interaction to a superview. 🫠

@ertembiyik Appreciate your help 🙏

@SebJVidal nice

The tapping of the button while it's hidden looks a little janky, but this is for demonstration purposes only. Once the button dematerialises (thanks AVKit for that buzzword!) it's no longer interactive.

@nathantannar4 No, I’m replicating the effect of _UIButtonBarButton in a UIToolbar. Animating the glass effect, blur radius of the image and alpha of the image. Turns out the jumpiness was caused by UIVisualEffectView removing it’s _UIFlexInteraction when nilling out the effect property 🙃

@SebJVidal Are you just animating the alpha?

Trying to whip up a nice animation for this play control. At some point the UIKit team fixed UIGlassEffect's ability to animate in/out which was broken in 26.0 but it's still not perfect... Notice the transform applied by _UIFlexInteraction resetting without animating. 🥹

@jazzychad @NathanBLawrence @DeepDishSwift @joshdholtz There is BCMeshTransformView (github.com/Ciechan/BCMesh…) that solves this problem, supposedly a more ergonomic API too. Unfortunately, this works by rendering your view as a bitmap aaaand my view is literally an AVPlayerView haha

@SebJVidal @NathanBLawrence @DeepDishSwift Yeah :/ I’ll keep thinking about how I’d solve this for UIKit (maybe a horrible mess of affine transforms) The talk should be recorded! (Right @joshdholtz ??)

I have a legitimate reason to use CAMeshTransform and I could not be more excited.

@jazzychad @NathanBLawrence @DeepDishSwift That's awesome! Hopefully the talk is recored :) Sadly, the transform needs to be applied to a UIKit view so SwiftUI + Metal shaders are off limits.

@SebJVidal @NathanBLawrence I know it doesn’t help UIKit/CA folks much, but I wrote a metal mesh transform shader (primarily as SwiftUI layer effect) and I’ll be discussing and open sourcing it at @DeepDishSwift for my talk about the Genie effect

@No_Wham @jacobtechtavern Send him the repo!

@jacobtechtavern @SebJVidal 8 times out of 10 this is a wrong setup situation, where the id or the initialisation process are wrong, causing the entire list to load eagerly instead of just what’s on the screen

@DylanMcD8 Ooooh I might have to use that wallpaper on my new displays 🤤

Thoughts on new setup?? Gosh I can't wait to be able to have a wraparound / "L" desk again... so cramped rn lol

@ertembiyik Will take a look when I’m back at my Mac. Thanks!

@SebJVidal true, check if it has one if it happens to be so you can swizzle it though

@ertembiyik I guess that would require me to hijack the delegate of the offending layer which _could_ be an instance of UIView?

@SebJVidal in your case you can patch the transform here instead of doing nothing

@ertembiyik Sorry, not sure I follow… Have you got an example?

@SebJVidal hmm, maybe set the actionForKey to a custom action class that does nothing?

Only Views... Isn't there a song by Yazoo about that?

I've tried recursively iterating over the view hierarchy/layer tree and resetting the transforms in my UIViewPropertyAnimator's animations block, but to no avail. This might have to do 🤷‍♂️