How to create a loading screen for any SwiftUI app with just two modifiers — Redacted and Shimmer

Learn how to add shimmer effect to text views and card views to make it more intuitive and pretty

Photo by Victor Carvalho on Unsplash

Before we start, let’s get some terms out of the way:

“SwiftUI is an innovative, exceptionally simple way to build user interfaces across all Apple platforms with the power of Swift. Build user interfaces for any Apple device using just one set of tools and APIs. — Wikipedia. The best part is, you can integrate your views with components from UIKit, AppKit and WatchKit framework. SwiftUI has made building user interface straightforward.” — Apple Developer Xcode SwiftUI

Redacted is a SwiftUI modifier that allows you to mark text as a placeholder in your view. What does that mean? When the text gets rendered, redacted will mask it to show that it is just a placeholder and not the content. You can use it in several ways:

• You can redact a single Text

Text("Redact Me").redacted(reason: .placeholder)

• You can redact an entire View

VStack {
    Text("Redact")
    Text("Me")
}.redacted(reason: .placeholder)

• You can un-redact a redacted View

Image(systemName: "book").unredacted()