Sams Teach Yourself Cocoa Touch™ Programming in 24 Hours

Hour 9. Layers and Core Animation: Creating a Cover Flow Clone

What You’ll Learn in This Hour:

• Placing layers in 3D space

• Using Core Animation

• Creating a Cover Flow clone

In the previous hour, you started playing with animation. Because Core Graphics based animation is slow, the iPhone provides a Core Animation framework to create smoother and more complex effects using the iPhone’s 3D hardware. To use Core Animation you must understand layers, the basic unit the 3D hardware can render. Then, you’ll learn the Core Animation API and apply it to a new project: the Cover Flow clone shown in Figure 9.1.

Figure 9.1 Cover Flow (animal images courtesy of http://www.public-domain-image.com/)

Placing Layers in 3D Space

Whereas UIViews are the ...