Book Image

Learning iOS UI Development

Book Image

Learning iOS UI Development

Overview of this book

Through this comprehensive one-stop guide, you’ll get to grips with the entire UIKit framework and in a flash, you’ll be creating modern user interfaces for your iOS devices using Swift. Starting with an overview of the iOS drawing system and the available tools, you will then learn how to use these technologies to create adaptable layouts and custom elements for your applications. Next, you’ll be introduced to other topics such as animation and code-drawing with Core Graphics, which will give you all the knowledge you need to create astonishing user interfaces. By the end of this book, you will have a solid foundation in iOS user interface development and will have gained valuable insights on the process of building firm and complex UIs.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Learning iOS UI Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Working with core animation


Core animation is a graphic and animation system that is adopted by iOS to draw and animate visual elements of the user interface. With this framework, the frame-by-frame operations are dramatically simplified by predefined structures and functions, which work as wrappers for complex processes that take place on the graphic hardware.

Layers and animations

The documentation of the CALayer class or any of its subclasses offers a list of properties that are marked in the description with the animatable keyword. This tag obviously means that a property can be animated; some examples of these properties are position and backgroundColor. These properties can be animated from the current value to a defined final value.

Note

You don't have to worry about how the whole animation is generated because core animation performs an interpolation from the initial to the final value, creating smooth and customizable animations for you.

As we saw earlier on, a layer is a model object...