Core Animation for Mac OS X and the iPhone

Core Animation for Mac OS X and the iPhone

This book gives a good introduction to the Core Animation framework and some of the slick ways that you can spice up a Cocoa app for Mac OSX or the iPhone. Its assumed that you know your way around Xcode, and that you know the basics of Cocoa programming. So if you are new to Cocoa you may want to have a copy of Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X handy, but you can get your hands on code examples from Pragmatic Screencasts if you want to try and work your way through it.

The book gives a good overview of the Core Animation framework, and helps to get you through some of the less intuitive parts. It walks you through a few different examples of developing animation apps for the mac and then explains the differences and limitations of writing for the iPhone. I would also suggest reading through the apple docs which will help you understand some of the other tools available to you and also read more details on what you are working with.

Personally, I was hoping for a more thorough review and examples for the iPhone, and was dissapointed that there are only like 14 pages in the iPhone chapter, and 7 of them are a full page of a single image. (I think that might have something to do with the time the book was written and the state of the NDA for iPhone developers, but still I was disappointed).

Overall, I think the book gives a good start to some animation concepts, and ways to improve your iPhone apps.

Now I’m looking for something that can give me a good overview of using OpenGL for the iPhone or something like Blender or Unity3d.