Core Animation for fun and profit!

I’m a speaker at the upcoming 360iDev conference.

I’ll be talking about my favourite subject: the magnificent Core Animation framework.

No one has what we have in Core Animation. There is no similar framework out there, for other platforms, that lets you do animations and compositing like using After Effects and Motion.

As John Harper, the creator of Core Animation said, in 2009, that there are apps like "After Effects", "Photoshop", and "Motion", and that Apple wanted to design the next-generation user interface software, by marrying

• hardware compositing of the Quartz desktop compositor
• with extra level of expressibility of those graphic apps.

On Apple platforms, we have all that power available, so let’s leverage it.

I’ll be covering some topics listed below.

1. How does it work behind the screen? (Render-tree, pixels to triangles, to textures, to GPU)
2. Layer geometry, and how does it translate to UIView / NSView?
3. What properties can be animatable?
4. Difference between animations and transitions.
5. Timing functions and animation functions (callbacks).
6. Making custom properties animatable on a custom CALayer (and wrapping it in a NSView / UIView).
7. Special effects: replicators and particles.
8. 2.5 D geometry and transform matrices (2D i 3D), and perspective
9. Optimisation (write bandwidth, read bandwidth and offscreen rendering)

I’ll run a Twitter poll to help me choose the topics.

See you there!