Swift Programming

How to Create Advanced Gradients in Swift with CAGradientLayer — iOS Swift Guide

5 steps to create beautiful gradients for your apps

With CoreAnimation and CAGradientLayer, iOS makes it easy to create custom gradients of any style. It is possible to create linear, conic and radial gradients, and to customize as you want its colors and orientation. It even supports animating gradient changes for smooth and colourful apps.

CAGradientLayer is a subclass of CALayer, and has been specially designed to easily and quickly make gradient effects. With literally five lines of code, you can generate a new gradient and add it to your view layers.

Here are 5 steps to create beautiful gradients for your apps.

1. Linear Gradient

Creating a layer with gradient colors is quite simple. For the most basic gradient, it only requires the colors you want to use, and then you can optionally adjust color location. Once you’ve created your gradient, add it simply to your view layer by calling the addSublayer function.