CoreAnimation with and manual animation...

FROM : Jesse Grosjean
DATE : Tue Apr 01 19:44:10 2008

I'd like to create something like a spaceship with core animation. 
That is the object should be animated on screen, but it's velocity 
will always be changing. Because of this I'm not sure if using core 
animations build in animation system makes sense, because it seems 
like most of those animations are mean to be pre-planned from point a 
to point b.

In my app it seems like it would be simpler to just setup a timer and 
just directly update the ships position based on it's velocity for 
each time interval from my timer. I'd still want to use the built in 
core animation animations for other properties such as transparency, 
filters, etc. But for layer position it seems like it would be easiest 
to control that directly...

So my question is does that seem like a sensible approach, or is there 
some aspect of core animation that I'm just not understanding? At the 
moment I haven't done much programming, just reading through the docs 
and trying to figure the best way to approach the problem.

I guess the my question really is, what's the best way to animate a 
layer who's velocity is changing based on user input?

Thanks,
Jesse