Core Animation for Mac OS X and the iPhone: Creating Compelling Dynamic User Interfaces

Core Animation is a powerful new Apple technology that debuted with Mac OS X Leopard. As it was later revealed, it was a technology that originated for the iPhone. Core Animation is actually comprised of two different technologies: 1) An animation technology 2) A layering (compositing) technology Core Animation makes it easy to animate a "view" object from point A to point B without having to write your own animation loop or timer callbacks. It can be as simple as just saying "move there" and Core Animation takes care of the rest. The layering aspect is the part that caught my attention as an OpenGL developer. Basically, you can think of Core Animation as a textured rectangle engine, i.e. apply a 2D image on a quad, and then can transform it (translate, rotate, scale). Apple leverages OpenGL under the hood so this is all really fast...much faster than the traditional techniques which are CPU oriented instead of GPU oriented. But the real leverage of the technology comes from the fact that you can turn on Core Animation for any existing Apple widget so you can use their buttons and various views instead of reinventing the wheel making your own 2D image quads (not to mention event handling/responder chain). Furthermore, because OpenGL is used as the back end for Core Animation, it is now finally possible to intermix previously unrelated UI pieces together in a single view. So for example, before it was really hard to superimpose an OpenGL view with a Quicktime view and a Cocoa view for building a sophisticated UI. The "layering" part of Core Animation is now the grand unification technology that allows all this to just work together because all can now be rendered via Core Animation layers which is all OpenGL at the bottom. (The technology was originally called LayerKit before Apple renamed it to Core Animation.) I find this particularly compelling for building UI interfaces. Before I might do a lot of the hard painful work of writing 2D stuff in OpenGL directly that required fluid animation and speed. But now Core Animation provides a simple API to do this and already provides me powerful capabilities such as rendering high quality text (always a pain in OpenGL). Unfortunately, documentation is hard to come by for Core Animation. I think it has hurt its adoption rate. Enter Bill Dudney who has addressed that shortcoming by writing the book "Core Animation or Mac OS X and the iPhone". Bill Dudney covers it all, from simple animation and layer-backed views (i.e. using Core Animation with traditional NSView's on Mac) to using Core Animation layers directly for more powerful and expressive capabilities. For anybody needing to deal directly with Core Animation, I think this book is a must-have. However, I have seen some criticisms of the book, mostly from iPhone developers. So I want to be clear on what this book is about (or not about). This book is specifically geared towards Core Animation, not Cocoa or iPhone programming in general. (D

Mac programmers seeking to create dynamic Core Animation applications will find Core Animation for Mac OS X and the iPhone a specific, useful key to using Core Animation in applications to give users strong visual feedback using movement and morphing. From familiar concepts that serve as an introduction to learning the new frameworks and APIs, this provides a fine bridge between old and new routines and is designed to bring programmers up to speed quickly on Core Animation basics. Mac programming libraries need this.

Core Animation is a central technology for the iPhone and Mac OS and can be intimidating for beginners. This book does a fantastic job of walking through examples in a meaningful progression. A reasonable developer will be proficient in Core Animation after digesting this book. There is tremendous value in this book for beginners and for the experienced developer. It's no question the best Core Animation book out there and I highly recommend it.

Core Animation is a new technology in Mac OS X Leopard that has not been as widely adopted as I would have expected, I believe in large part because of the lack of documentation for it. This book is the only printed guide devoted to the topic, and I have found it invaluable in the development of several products. The Pragmatic Programmers series of books are always written and edited well, and this is no exception. It is assumed that you are already familiar with Objective-C and the Cocoa APIs at the start of the book, so learning those fundamentals is required for new Mac and iPhone developers. The book also progresses as if you were an existing Mac programmer who will gradually incorporate more and more of Core Animation into your applications. This might cause a little impatience from those who want to jump right in to working with some of the more advanced capabilities, but those people can easily skip ahead to the relevant sections. All of the important concepts are covered, although a couple of the tricks that I frequently use in my Mac and iPhone development are not mentioned. This is understandable, as they are not documented well and I only learned them from other developers. iPhone developers may be a little disappointed in the relatively small iPhone-only chapter, but that's simply because layer-based animations and the like are handled identically between the Mac and iPhone and there's little that is unique in the iPhone's implementation of Core Animation. Source code examples for all exercises in the book are available at the publisher's website [...] and they contain many useful code snippets. This book has earned its place on my desk.

Core Animation is one of the coolest technologies to come out of Cupertino in many years. It makes doing all sorts of cool things in your application not just possible, but downright easy. Core Animation opens up worlds of possibilities for your applications' user interface. The problem is, Core Animation is not intuitive. Even an experienced programmer can expect to spend a lot of time with Apple's documentation before he or she will grok the terminology and concepts of this new framework well enough to use be proficient. Fortunately, the author has already gone through the trouble of doing that and has taken the time to break it all down into digestible chunks, explaining the concepts and terms in plain English, and setting out exercises that reinforce your understanding of those concepts. As previous reviewers have mentioned, the bulk of the book focuses on using Core Animation when writing Mac programs, however both the basic concepts and the practical use of Core Animation are the same when programming the iPhone. The iPhone chapter explains the differences between using it on the two platforms and shows how to apply the stuff you've already learned earlier in the book when developing on the iphone. I think this book probably reduced the amount of time I needed to learn Core Animation by at least half, probably more, and I'm an experienced programmer who's accustomed to learning from Apple's documentation. Just a quick note of something that's probably obvious: You should already have a decent grasp on Objective-C and Cocoa before picking up this book if you want to get the most out of it.