Alex Does Things Poorly

Alex does a variety of things poorly - swift, data science, datavis, ML, drawing, AR, unity, etc, etc.

23 July 2021

Cupcake Internet

by alex

A bit more 100 Days of SwiftUI done today, but the big news is that I learned a ton about Canvas! I’ll get to that in a minute. Nothing really new with the CupcakeCorner project, we added Codable support to our Order object and did some basic network requests. I hadn’t used REQ|RES before so that was cool to learn about, I’d always used requestbin. I can see advantages for each.

But on to the exciting stuff. I started looking at some of the SVG examples in chapter 2 of the Generative Design book and quickly realized that the approaches I’d been using in SwiftUI weren’t going to cut it. So I went back and finally watched the WWDC video called Add rich graphics to your SwiftUI app and the last 10 minutes or so are a great introduction to using Canvas. I learned so much that I’m already putting into practice. For example, instead of creating a Timer and then attaching it to our view with .onReceive(timer) { }, I can just wrap my Canvas in a TimelineView and then get the time interval out of the timeline parameter to key animations of the drawing operations on my canvas. I also learned about drawing images quickly with context.resolve and blend modes and even went further and explored translation and rotation. And how cool is it that you can make an inner copy of a context and then apply translations or rotations on the inner copy, then do some drawing with the inner copy, then when you go back to using the outer copy, the transformations aren’t applied anymore. Very much like pushMatrix() and popMatrix() in Processing. Oh, what a lovely day.

Here’s a basic animation that I did with SwiftUI using TimelineView, Canvas, and “circle.hexagongrid.fill.”

Animated alignment in a grid with symbols

tags: swift - swiftui - generative-art