Generating a random color in SwiftUI
In this post, we’ll take a quick look at how to generate a random color in SwiftUI, using the nice random api:s provided in Swift.
Back in the good ol’ Objective-C days, random values involved a lot of arc4random_uniform, which although not hard in itself isn’t really nice to read. You could then use these global functions to generate random values, colors etc., which often involved quite a lot of code.
As Swift later introduced nice random api:s for various numeric values, these things became way less complicated to implement. However, Apple leaves it up to you to add random support to certain types. One such example is the SwiftUI Color struct, which doesn’t have built-in random support.
We can however add this support quite easily, by using the Double random capabilities and the rgb Color initializer that was added in iOS 14.
public extension Color {
static func random(randomOpacity: Bool = false) -> Color {
Color(
red: .random(in: 0...1),
green: .random(in: 0...1),
blue: .random(in: 0...1),
opacity: randomOpacity ? .random(in: 0...1) : 1
)
}
}
This lets you generate a random color and also lets you specify whether you want a random opacity or not. You can use random colors for various features, as a background color to make view debugging easier etc. since it makes it easy to see which views redraw.
Conclusion
This was a short post, but I hope you found it helpful. You can find the source code in my SwiftUIKit library. Feel free to try it out and let me know what you think.