SwiftUI

Overview

You’ve probably never heard of SwiftUI before, so I’ll clear some things up.

• SwiftUI is a framework, which just means “developer tool.”
• SwiftUI is built using the Swift programming language, which we’ll go over in the next section.
• SwiftUI is the equivalent to HTML + CSS – you write and style views using it.

Credit: Apple

In SwiftUI, there are 2 main concepts: Views and View Modifiers. You compose these together to form a user interface (that’s that the “UI” part stands for in SwiftUI). Here’s the basic structure of a view:

/// 1.
struct ContentView: View {

    /// 2.
    var body: some View {

        /// 3.
        Text("Hello, world!")

        /// 4.
        .foregroundColor(Color.blue)
    }
}

1. This declares a custom view with the name “ContentView.”
2. This is where you put sub-views inside.
3. This is another view, called Text. The “Hello World” part is a parameter, which we’ll go over later.
4. This is a view modifier, which is attached to the Text. As you can assume, it changes the text’s color to blue.

Text is a built-in view. There are several dozen more of these views – here’s a list. However, we’ll only focus on a couple.

At its core, that’s all SwiftUI is – a framework to combine and modify views. In the next section, we’ll go over SwiftUI in more detail.