Re: Core animation

FROM : Brian Christensen
DATE : Mon Jun 30 23:58:26 2008

Am Jun 30, 2008 um 07:04 schrieb Papa-Raboon:

> I was wondering if many of you have had a go at core animation yet?
> I am personally looking at making a piece of text fade in and fade 
> out as a
> confirmation that something worked in my latest project. Currently I 
> am just
> popping a bit of text on screen using:
> [succcessFlag setStringValue:@"Record Added"];
>
> I presume we are talking pretty simple here but the question is how 
> simple.
> If any of you knows of any cool tutorials on really quick and simple 
> core
> animation text effects could you please give me the heads up.


It's difficult to know exactly what you need based on what you wrote 
above. Do you really need to drop down to Core Animation layers or 
would AppKit's animation proxies be good enough for your purposes? Is 
there a reason you would need to manipulate a CATextLayer directly? Is 
"successFlag" supposed to be a layer or is it an NSTextField?

If successFlag is in fact an NSTextField (or, for that matter, any 
NSView or subclass thereof), then [[successFlag animator] 
setHidden:YES] (or setHidden:NO) should give you a default fade 
effect, provided a superview somewhere up the view hierarchy is layer 
backed.

Here are some excellent starting points for learning OS X animation 
technologies. I highly recommend reading these guides. A "cool 
tutorial" should not be a substitute for reading Apple's 
documentation, IMHO:

<http://developer.apple.com/documentation/GraphicsImaging/Conceptual/Animation_Overview/Introduction/chapter_1_section_1.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40004952-CH9-SW1
>

<http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/CoreAnimation_guide/index.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40004514
>

<http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/AnimationGuide/index.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40003592
>

Following that, Bill Dudney is authoring a Core Animation book 
(currently in beta, available in PDF form right now) that seems to be 
coming along nicely so far: <http://www.pragprog.com/titles/bdcora/core-animation-for-os-x
>

/brian