Hacking with Swift Project 15 - Animation

Bring your interfaces to life with animation, and meet switch/case at the same time.

It's time to introduce one of the most important techniques in iOS development: animation. Sadly, many people don't consider animation important at all, which makes for some thoroughly awful user interface design.

Animation – making things move, scale, and so on – of your views is not only about making things pretty, although that's certainly a large part. It's main purpose is to gives users a sense of what's changing and why, and it helps them make sense of a state change in your program. When you use a navigation controller to show a new view controller, we don't just want it to appear. Instead, we want it to slide in, making it clear that the old screen hasn't gone away, it's just to the left of where we were.

You're almost certainly tired of hearing me say this, but iOS has a ridiculously powerful animation toolkit that's also easy to use. I know, I'm a broken record, right?

Well, don't just take my word for it – we're going to try out some animation together so you can see exactly how it works. You're also going to meet switch/case for the first time and learn about the CGAffineTransform struct, both of which will serve you just as well as animations.