Lessons learned converting Sketch to SwiftUI

#podcast #swift #swiftui

Season 3 Episode 9

In this episode, I go into some lessons learned and ideas from a recent live stream on CompileSwift.com, where I created some swift UI layouts.

I had a design that I had been working on in Sketch.app, one of my favorite all-time UI prototyping, layouts, design screen apps, and the problem that I always have with Sketch is that there’s no great way to be able to say export this to a SwiftUI view for me, please.

I dived into a couple of things that I found in GitHub; all those failed miserably. I couldn’t even get them to work and all sorts of library conflicts.

So that’s a separate conversation for another day. It took me longer to try and get this automated conversion thing to work than it would to do the conversion manually.

Okay, I popped open Xcode and the design in Sketch. And I said I’m just going to do this. I’m going to build this out in Xcode. I already had the primary controls on the screen that looked nothing like the design. I started applying modifiers and kudos to the chat room, the chat room, the folks that come to the chat room on the CompileSwift live stream.

Love you guys and girls, you’re just fantastic. So lovely and so helpful. I Just wanted to add that in there as a side note.

I started applying modifiers to figure out how to get the controls in SwiftUI to look like the design. We got there. Not entirely. It’s about 90% done.

So that was about an hour, an hour and a half, really not bad going at all. The lesson learned here is that sometimes it’s better to dive into creating something from scratch. Trying to export across is not always the answer, at least today.

Other advantages to this approach are, learning more about Swift and SwiftUI. You are going to learn more about using Xcode. You’re going to learn more about your design and how you implement those in apps.

These are all good things, folks. Right?