iPhone SDK Application Development

Chapter 12. Cover Flow

Chapter 5 introduced you to the Quartz Core framework and how to work with Core Animation to create stunning 3D transformations. It is the basis for Apple’s Cover Flow technology, which you’ll find in the iPhone’s iPod application when flipping through albums in landscape mode. Apple privatized its Cover Flow class so that it cannot be used with the SDK. This chapter will provide you with an SDK-compliant recipe to render a cover flow, but Apple could still reject your application if they believe it too closely copies the functionality of one of its own preloaded apps.

Layton Duncan of Polar Bear Farm, author of Search, Record, Telegram, and other popular AppStore applications, originally wrote code to illustrate an iPhone version of Apple’s CovertFlow example from the desktop Xcode examples. We’ve taken Layton’s original example, cleaned it up, and rewritten it to be compliant with the SDK’s sanctioned interfaces, so you can create stunning Cover Flow effects without using any private APIs.

Apple’s own Cover Flow class uses a private UI Kit object named UICoverFlowLayer to render its content. This class is privatized, so we couldn’t use it to create an SDK-compliant example (otherwise your application would break the rules). As a result, the behavior of our example will be very close to Apple’s own Cover Flow views, but may not be identical. A little fine-tuning should get this example just where you like it for your application.

CovertFlow: SDK Cover Flow Programming ...