How can we use Assets Catalog Color Sets?

I usually use custom UIColors on iOS using extensions with Swift, but now with iOS 11/ Xcode 9 we can create Colors Sets. How can we use them?

Update - Tip

As @Cœur says we can drag&drop de color, and use it like a UIColor object and a possible solution could be use it as a extension:

UIColor as an extension

Or as a constant:

UIColor as a constant

Now I wanna know if we can access them like an UIImage access to an Asset Image or not, like:

UIImage(named: "image-name") -> UIColor(named: "color-name")

UIColor(named: "myColor") 

Source: WWDC 2017 Session 237 —— What's New in MapKit


Caveat: Your project's Deployment Target needs to be set to iOS 11.0.


(short answer to the question update: there is UIColor(named: "MyColor") in Xcode 9.0)

Answering the original question:

  1. you create your color set

enter image description here

  1. you find your color among your snippets and you drag-n-drop it

enter image description here

  1. it will translate to a color literal when looking at the source code:

    #colorLiteral(red: 0, green: 0.6378085017, blue: 0.8846047521, alpha: 1)

You notice how the values of red, green and blue are different? It's because I defined them using Color Space Display P3, but the colorLiteral is using Color Space sRGB.


In Xcode 11 press command + shift + L , it will open a snippet , select last one like i showed in image drag and drop .

enter image description here


Short Version

Add a colour set to an asset catalog, name it and set your colour in the attributes inspector, then call it in your code with UIColor(named: "MyColor").

Full Instructions

  1. In the asset catalog viewer, click the plus button at the bottom right of the main panel and choose New Color Set

    New Color Set menu

  2. Click on the white square, and select the Attributes Inspector (right-most icon in the right pane)

  3. From there you can name and choose your colour.

    enter image description here

  4. To use it in your code, call it with UIColor(named: "MyColor"). This returns an optional, so you'll need to unwrap it in most cases (this is probably one of the few cases where a force unwrap is acceptable, given you know the colour exists in your asset catalog).