Podcast Interview: Marcus Zarra / Core Animation

Marcus Zarra is a well known Mac and iPhone developer and blogger at Cocoa Is My Girlfriend. He’s the author of several books, including Core Animation: Simplified Animation Techniques for Mac and iPhone Development due out in early 2010. He’s also one of the speakers at the upcoming Voices That Matter iPhone Conference in Boston next month.

In this interview, we talk about Core Animation on the iPhone. Topics include its programming model, view translations, Core Animation internals, implicit and explicit animations, hints that Core Image might be coming to the iPhone and user interactions with Core Animation.

You can listen using the Flash player below, download the MP3, or subscribe to the iPhone Developer Podcast using the instructions at the bottom of this post.

For easy scanning of the interview, here is what was covered and when:

• 0:30 Core Animation overview
• 0:45 Originated on the phone, ported to OS-X
• 3:00 Springboard’s use of Core Animation
• 4:30 General programming model
• 5:00 View transition animations
• 8:30 Translated into OpenGL; GPU used
• 9:15 “Tweening” calculating frames that make up the animation
• 11:00 When to use Core Animation
• 13:45 Custom animation programming model
• 15:00 Keyframe animations
• 16:00 Animation timing
• 17:15 Two kinds of animation: implicit animation (Core Animation does the work), explicit animations (only work on layers; manually adding animation to a layer)
• 18:30 “Layer backed” objects
• 19:30 Layer hierarchies
• 22:45 Two dimensional planes in a three dimensional space
• 23:30 Fixed camera, fixed view; move planes in 3D space
• 26:45 Animation transaction
• 29:00 Distortions: not available on the iPhone because there’s no Core Image
• 29:30 Hints of Core Image in future API versions
• 30:00 Threading and Core Animation
• 31:00 Animation events/callbacks
• 33:00 User interactions with Core Animation

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