SwiftUI tutorial: Building a complete project
Updated for Xcode 16.4
This is a complete, free SwiftUI tutorial designed to take you through lots of its functionality in a single project. It’s aimed at people who have existing programming experience with UIKit, but most things are explained in detail so newcomers ought to be able to follow along.
Important: This was written for iOS 16.1, so you’ll need at least Xcode 14.1 to follow along. This is available as a free download from the Mac App Store if you don’t already have it.
The project we’ll be making is called iDine, and is a restaurant app that lists items in a menu and helps folks place orders. I’ve designed the project specifically so that it covers as many different techniques as possible to give you a good grounding in how things work in SwiftUI. Of course, we’re also building a real project at the same time – it’s going to be busy!
Note: If you’d like to see my completed version of this project, you can find it here on GitHub: https://github.com/twostraws/iDine.
To get started, please create a new iOS project in Xcode called “iDine”, choosing the App template. You should also select SwiftUI for the Interface, but please leave all the checkboxes unchecked.
There are quite a few assets provided for this project that you need to copy in before you start. These are all in the assets for this project, which you can download here: https://www.hackingwithswift.com/samples/idine.zip.
Please copy them into your project like this:
- Drag Helper.swift into your project navigator. This contains a helper extension that makes it easier to decode
Codabledata from a bundle. This is not related to SwiftUI, so we won’t be covering it here. - You should also drag Order.swift and Menu.swift into the project navigator. These are custom types that store the data we’re using in the app.
- And drag menu.json into your project navigator too – this describes all the menu items our restaurant offers, and will be decoded into instances of
MenuSectionandMenuItem. - Drag the contents of the Images directory into your asset catalog, so we have all the pictures we need.
OK, that’s it – we’re ready to go!
Tip: At the end of each chapter I’ve added a “Further reading” section that suggests links to other chapters in this book. You don’t need to read them in order to follow along; they are there to provide extra information and detail if you want to understand the bigger picture more thoroughly.
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