A UIColor Extension to parse Hex string(for CSS and for KML) to color. Code works for Xcode 6 Beta 5. Based on https://github.com/yeahdongcn/UIColor-Hex-Swift/blob/master/UIColorExtension.swift

UIColorExtra.swift

import UIKit

extension UIColor {
    convenience init(kmlColorString:String) {
        var scanner = NSScanner(string:kmlColorString)
        var color:UInt32 = 0;
        scanner.scanHexInt(&color)
        
        let mask:UInt32 = 0x000000FF
        var a = color >> 24 & mask
        var b = color >> 16 & mask
        var g = color >> 8 & mask
        var r = color & mask
        
        var red = CGFloat(r) / 255.0
        var green = CGFloat(g) / 255.0
        var blue = CGFloat(b) / 255.0
        var alpha = CGFloat(a) / 255.0
        
        self.init(red:red, green:green, blue:blue, alpha:alpha)
    }
    
    convenience init(rgba: String) {
        var red: CGFloat   = 0.0
        var green: CGFloat = 0.0
        var blue: CGFloat  = 0.0
        var alpha: CGFloat = 1.0
        
        if rgba.hasPrefix("#") {
            let hex = rgba.substringFromIndex(advance(rgba.startIndex, 1))
            let scanner = NSScanner.scannerWithString(hex)
            var hexValue: CUnsignedLongLong = 0
            if scanner.scanHexLongLong(&hexValue) {
                if (hex as NSString).length == 6 {
                    red   = CGFloat(hexValue & 0xFF0000 >> 16) / 255.0
                    green = CGFloat(hexValue & 0x00FF00 >> 8)  / 255.0
                    blue  = CGFloat(hexValue & 0x0000FF) / 255.0
                } else if (hex as NSString).length == 8 {
                    red   = CGFloat(hexValue & 0xFF000000 >> 24) / 255.0
                    green = CGFloat(hexValue & 0x00FF0000 >> 16) / 255.0
                    blue  = CGFloat(hexValue & 0x0000FF00 >> 8)  / 255.0
                    alpha = CGFloat(hexValue & 0x000000FF) / 255.0
                } else {
                    print("invalid rgb string, length should be 7 or 9")
                }
            } else {
                println("scan hex error")
            }
        } else {
            print("invalid rgb string, missing '#' as prefix")
        }
        self.init(red:red, green:green, blue:blue, alpha:alpha)
    }
}