Elegance and Insanity: A SwiftUI Story

I submitted an app written in SwiftUI to the App Store yesterday. It was the most infuriating, hair pulling, head banging-against-the-wall experience of my life. Also, maybe Swift really is the best language?

Let me rewind a bit. Three years ago I came across this idea called Fractal Music Composition. Basically you take the 8 letters of the musical alphabet — A, B, C, D, E, F and G, map each to another sequence of these 8 letters, take a starting sequence of letters and recursively replace each letter with it’s mapped sequence for as many iterations as you want.

Now you have a musical composition :)

As an iPhone developer, I thought it would be fun to write up a little app that could do this and play it back to you. I called it ‘Fractalator’.

It um…looked really bad. Thankfully I didn’t save a picture.

I also switched out the random Google Image I was using as an icon for this handcrafted, minimalist expression of the fundamental experience of mathematics as applied to music

I never got around to publishing to the App Store at the time, there was still a few kinks to be worked out. Then I went back to school and pretty much forgot about it anyway.

Fast forward to a month ago. With lots of free time and some recently acquired SwiftUI knowledge from Apple’s free tutorials I decided it could be fun to refactor Fractalator into a SwiftUI app. This turned out to be really easy! Fortunately, the app was small — I was able to…