Well...it's not cutting edge...

But I did manage to make the circle colors vary both with an if/else with a modulo, and in a second version using a (mutable) array of UIColor objects.  I feel a bit like I'm back in high school coding class with the Apple II and a sheet of graph paper...if you tacked on iOS memory management issues.  And I learned how to use the cmd-shift-3, cmd-shift-4, and cmd-shift-4 then space then click commands on a Mac to capture what I want.  And I learned Mac users are just as a-holish in many instances as PC developers with their "that's in the documentation, so I'm not going to answer that" and "It's Mac, not MAC. If you can't even do that right, I'm not going to answer your perfectly valid coding question."  These things were not said to me.  I just got to appreciate them in the general postings on the web.