Core Animation Programming

You probably don’t (can’t) know that I subscribe to two Mac-oriented magazines, Macworld, and MacTech. Macworld is more for the everyday users and MacTech is more for the developers in the Mac Community. The most recent MacTech had an introduction to Core Animation in it that contained an exercise to run through with Xcode. This exercise gives you the basics of how to programatically animate your user interfaces (Interface Builder also lets you add animations without writing a line of code) using the Core Animation technology of Leopard. I just spent the better portion of this Saturday exploring that exercise and expanding upon it. At the end, I just can’t believe how simple (for those that are already used to Objective-C code that is) the Core Animation API is to take on as another OS X API that you know how to use. I also see the enormity of the abilities it provides to developers just from seeing this small glimpse of Core Animation. If I could post to this blog the source code I probably would to let you all see not only a glimpse of the code side of Core Animation, but also the running side of it (when the app is running and you can see the animations in action). Enjoy, Alex.