It's easy to forget that UIViews are backed by CALayers and the interesting things you can do with CALayers and CALayer subclasses. One of those — CAShapeLayer — lets you draw Bezier splines. So you essentially create a UIBezierPath instance and assign it to the CAShapeLayer instance, configuring how you want it to be displayed, such as fillColor, and strokeColor. For e.g. the following playground code will draw a square with a dotted outline and animate drawing the outline:

import UIKit
import XCPlayground
XCPSetExecutionShouldContinueIndefinitely()

var path = UIBezierPath(rect: CGRectMake(50, 50, 100, 100))

var layer = CAShapeLayer()
layer.path = path.CGPath
layer.fillColor = UIColor.clearColor().CGColor
layer.strokeColor = UIColor.blueColor().CGColor
layer.lineWidth = 2
layer.lineDashPattern = [10, 3]

var animation = CABasicAnimation(keyPath: "strokeEnd")
animation.duration = 3
animation.fromValue = 0
animation.toValue = 1
layer.addAnimation(animation, forKey:"whatever")
layer.strokeEnd = 1

var v = UIView(frame: CGRectMake(0, 0, 200, 200))
v.backgroundColor = .whiteColor()
v.layer.addSublayer(layer)
XCPShowView("layer animating", v)

There's an issue though. If you paste the code into a Playground, you'll notice that the square doesn't animate. You might also see this error:

MyPlayground[98066:1375145] Error sending deferral props: 0x10000003

Notice the use of XCPSetExecutionShouldContinueIndefinitely(). In addition to that, you'll have to enable Run in Full Simulator in the Playground's inspector (View > Utilities > Show File Inspector). This is mentioned in Xcode's release notes. Once you do that, re-run the playground and it should work.

Also note the use of XCPShowView() which displays the view live. If you only inspect the value of v, you will only see a snapshot and hence not see the animation.

Your feedback is valuable: Do you want more nuggets like this?   Yes   or   No