Moonshot Project Intro

Man, it's ups and downs all week. I'm mentally doing well but struggling physically today. Happily, I've stuck with 100 Days of SwiftUI and gotten another day done.

I'd only just started exploring GeometryReader in my generative art experiments recently, so it was nice to see it introduced in 100 Days of SwiftUI today. I guess we have to wait a few weeks to cover it in detail. SwiftUI's ScrollView was new-ish to me as of last week. Only yesterday I started using it in my iNat SwiftUI prototype, so it was nice to get a proper introduction. Meanwhile, the other two main topics covered, NavigationLink and hierarchical Codable data, were not really new at all for me.

I have a bit of an intro for my Generative Art work. Off and on, over the last year, I've been teaching myself to make digitial art and doing digital drawing using some popular tech art frameworks like Processing and P5.js. I briefly tried doing it with Swift a few years ago, but making art out of UIKit view hierarchies was limiting (especially on an iPad in Swift Playgrounds). Happily, SwiftUI comes to the rescue. The new Canvas view type in the beta version of SwiftUI is great for doing dynamic drawing, and it can take hints about the screen size if wrapped in a GeometryReader. After that, all that I needed to do was draw into the Canvas to make a digital drawing, and I was even able to animate my drawing using a Timer that was attached to the View hierarchy using the .onReceive() modifier. Next steps will be to go back and re-implement some of my favorite Processing and P5.js sketches in Swift using this little framework I've spun up.