Chapter 8. Core Animation basics
This chapter covers
- Cocoa animations
- Using the CALayer class
- 2D views in 3D space
- Adding animations to a Twitter client
Great Mac OS X applications not only look beautiful, but also have subtle touches that make them stand out to the user. Think about maximizing and minimizing a window and the associated animation effect: Apple paid amazing attention to detail for that simple, common task. Even hovering your mouse over the dock applies an impressive magnification effect to the application icons.
Apple includes this attention to animation detail throughout most of its applications. As you watch a movie on QuickTime you’ll notice that the frame of the window fades away to give you a better viewing experience. Even in the relatively simple System Preferences application you can see a smooth transition when you go from one setting to another. Another great example is Time Machine, which uses Core Animation to zoom you in and out to view different documents that have been backed up.
You might not have paid much attention to the animations you’ve seen in the past. This is because they’re so subtle and effective. When you create MacRuby applications you can take advantage of Core Animation to provide this same kind of experience for your users. Throughout this chapter we’ll be taking a close look at Core Animation and how you can use it to enhance your applications.