Today kicked off the into to Project 2. Our fearless teacher @twostraws starts us VStacks, HStacks, and ZStacks. These three Views let us draw multiple views onto the screen in a vertical, horizontal, or depth layout.

After some discussions on colors, we took at look at gradients. This was actually kinda slick. With a tiny amount of code, it’s simple to create a beautiful gradient.

    var body: some View {
        AngularGradient(gradient: Gradient(colors: [.red, .yellow,
            .green, .blue, .purple, .red]), center: .center)
            .ignoresSafeArea()
    }

After gradients it was on to buttons and alert messages. Having written iOS apps in Objective-C previously, alerts in SwiftUI were… different. I just keep telling myself “views are a function of their state” and that puts my mind at ease. Even if I can’t fully wrap my head around it at the moment.

Here’s an example. Take a look at this Objective-C code I wrote in 2012 (don’t laugh).

        [[UIAlertView alloc] initWithTitle: @"Unable to start game"
                                   message: @"Something went wrong."
                                  delegate: self
                         cancelButtonTitle: @"OK"
                         otherButtonTitles: nil];
        [alert show];

Compare that with SwiftUI Alerts

struct ContentView: View {
    @State private var showingAlert = false
    
    var body: some View {

        Button("Danger Alert"){
            showingAlert = true
        }
        .alert("Danger Danger Danger", isPresented: $showingAlert){
            Button("Cancel", role: .cancel) {}
            Button("Bye Bye", role: .destructive) {}
        } message: {
            Text("Lorem ipsum and all that goes with it")
        }
    }
}

So yea, in the last 10 years, iOS development has changed.