Core Animation: Hands-On @ 360idev. Yes, There is More!

I was surprised and excited to see the standing room only turnout for my in depth Core Animation talk at 360idev this week. I thought it would be a popular topic, but Collin really got people fired up to learn more during his introductory talk. I was able to cover quite a bit of material in my 80 minutes, and I got some awesome feedback from the developers in attendance. The most common thing I heard from developers was some variation of “I didn’t know I could do that!” or “You just saved me X lines of code!” It was simultaneously flattering and disappointing.

SlapHappy! is written entirely with Core Animation, and I’ve dug deeper into the API than most people outside of Apple. I’d forgotten how much of the stuff I know was picked up through a combination of trial and error, debugging, digging into headers, and re-reading books and documentation. I didn’t expect that others have been as intimate with Core Animation as I have, but I was still a little surprised to see the lights go on in people’s heads as I spoke.

My experience presenting at 360idev proved what I had suspected: Many iPhone developers look at Core Animation as a low level framework hidden inside the black box of UIKit. I’d like to change that perception. While you can write an entire iPhone app without even knowing that Core Animation exists, just a basic understanding and application of the API and its concepts can go a long way to separate your app from the other 85,000+ in the app store.

Since I was not able to cover everything I wanted to in my 80 minutes at 360idev, I am putting together a series of blog posts with Core Animation tips, tricks, lessons learned, and code. Consider this the first in the series. I’ll kick it off with my slide deck and a link to the more than 1,400 lines of sample code I prepared for the presentation.

I will be adding to the sample code project as I work on this series so make sure to watch the project on github. Also, if you have any burning Core Animation questions that you’d like to see covered in this series, drop me an email or add a comment to this post.

Oh, and thank you again Tom and John for giving me the opportunity to be a part of such a tremendous show!

3 Responses to “Core Animation: Hands-On @ 360idev. Yes, There is More!”

  1. WordPress › Error

    There has been a critical error on this website.

    Learn more about troubleshooting WordPress.