What’s New in SF Symbols 6: New Features and Stunning Animations
Learn how to create captivating animated symbols to make your app stand out.
SF Symbols has revolutionized how iOS developers incorporate icons into their apps, offering a robust and versatile system of vector-based icons seamlessly integrated with Apple’s ecosystem. With the release of iOS18, SF Symbols has received exciting new updates and enhancements. In this blog, we’ll explore the basics of SF Symbols 5, and what’s new in SF Symbols 6 and guide you through creating captivating animated symbols to make your app stand out.
Instead of importing external assets for the Navigation Bar, Tab Bar, Status Indicators, and Button Icons, use SF Symbols.
Prerequisites
- Requires macOS Ventura or later
- iOS 18 and above
- Basics of SF Symbols 5
Let’s first understand SF Symbols 5 and then we will explore SF Symbols 6.
Basics of SF Symbols 5
With SF Symbols 5, Symbols reach new dimensions of expressiveness.
Symbols expand the icon set and introduce variable color and multicolor symbols for richer visuals. It enhances SwiftUI integration and accessibility while improving faster loading and rendering performance.
The best way to explore all the new animations is the SF Symbols app.
We can even copy dot-separated effect names to be used directly in our code.
In SwiftUI, there is a new view modifier, symbolEffect. Let’s add these awesome effects to our Appkit, UIKit, and SwiftUI apps.
We can configure/modify/combine any animation effect using the dot syntax.
Animated types we can create with Symbols
There are four different behaviors. In the Symbols framework, each behavior corresponds to a protocol:
Customizing Symbol effects
The SF Symbols app offers many options for customizing the sign and its effect. Before including the animation in our code, we can select the most practical symbol and see a preview of it. For developers, “copy the configuration,” is a treasure.
We can utilize the proper animation when needed, as shown in the example animations below.
What’s New in SF Symbols 6
Apple has added several new capabilities to SF Symbols 6 beta, which increases the power and adaptability of these symbols.
Symbols can now respond to human input, communicate status changes, and indicate ongoing activity in new ways thanks to features like wiggle, rotate, and breathe.
Animate an SF Symbol using symbolEffects
New, configurable animations make Symbols even more expressive. Wiggle, rotate, and breathe provide new ways for Symbols to respond to user input, convey status changes, and signal ongoing activity. Symbols 6 library consists of unique presets, each of which is configurable.
These animated effects and transitions bring vitality to interfaces and provide user input feedback while communicating status changes and ongoing activity.
Magic Replace
The MagicReplace option is automatically applied to the replace symbol effect when possible, and it works specifically with related SF Symbols.
Although we can define the new magic option explicitly along with a desired fallback alternative, it is applied by default.
Conclusion
SF Symbols offers developers new opportunities to enhance app UI with dynamic, visually appealing icons. Use the new features and animated symbols to make your app more engaging and user-friendly. Start integrating these powerful tools into your projects today!
Check out Apple’s guidelines for using SF Symbols.
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