Core Animation Tutorial: Window Shake Effect
Core Animation is really the buzz among Cocoa developers these days and we are no different from the rest. Learning to do simple fades and frame movement is trivial, but figuring out the more complex effects is quite a challenge. We decided to venture out and try to create some really concise examples of effects you might find used in Leopard. And while these effects may not be done with Core Animation where they are found in the OS, we’ve set out to duplicate them in Core Animation regardless. Our first challenge? Shaking a login window.
NSOperation Example
Forget Mandelbrot sets (Apple coding headstarts) and Expression Trees. NSOperation is really not that hard.
In his post, Marcus introduced how to use NSOperation to greatly simplify multi-threading tasks in your application. I am now going to provide a step-by-step walk-through sample application that uses NSOperation, NSOperationQueue, and QTKit.
While looking around the Internet, I noticed that the only examples of using NSOperation available were related to scientific applications. I wanted something that I could relate to a little better and since I’ve been working with QTKit a lot lately, I figured it would be a good framework to build from. This application simply grabs images of a movie while it is playing back and saves them out to a file. It’s pretty simple, but it shows how to do something fairly practical.
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Cocoa Coding Practice: Old School vs New
This post is in response to a few queries that I have received regarding my last post showing an NSOperation example. One of the questions raised that I will focus on is my -(void)dealloc method in the NSOperation subclass. The questions boiled down to:
Why are you using releases at all. Garbage collection is the future!
and
You should be just doing [self setVar:nil] instead of that [var release], var = nil; crap.
Cocoa Tutorial: NSOperation and NSOperationQueue
Threading is hard in any language. And what is worse, when it goes wrong, it usually goes wrong in a very bad way. Because of this, programmers either avoid threading completely (and refer to it as the spawn of the devil) or spend a LOT of time making sure that everything is perfect.
Fortunately, Apple has made a lot of progress in OS X 10.5 Leopard. NSThread itself has received a number of very useful new methods that make threading easier. In addition, they have introduced two new objects: NSOperation and NSOperationQueue.
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