I'm looking for a Cocoa UI widget for timeline/graph editing (Like the graph editor in After Effects, or the Timeline patch in Quartz Composer), and I haven't found anything similar.
Any suggestions? I was hoping to avoid reinventing the wheel on this one :)
Take a look at the CorePlot project, they say it's,
Core Plot is a plotting framework for Mac OS X and iOS. It provides 2D visualization of data, and is tightly integrated with Apple technologies like Core Animation, Core Data, and Cocoa Bindings.
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I've been prototyping some behaviour by using Keynote and I was wondering if it's possible to use Core Animation animations in a SpriteKit (OS X) app. I can't really find any info that suggests this is possible or not possible. Hopefully this is not a dumb question. If it is possible, what steps are necessary to set it up in a SpriteKit project to do something like an "anvil drop" animation on a sprite?
I've created many types of interfaces using the Cocoa API — some of them using documented basic animation techniques and others simply by experimenting (such as placing an animated .gif inside an NSImage class) — which had somewhat catastrophic consequences. The question I have is what is the correct or the most effective way to create an animated and dynamic GUI so that it runs optimally and properly?
The closest example I can think of that would use a similar type of animation would be something one might see done in flash on any number of interactive websites or interfaces. I'm sure flash can be used in a Cocoa app, although if there is a way to achieve a similar result without re-inventing the wheel, or having to use 3rd party SDKs, I would love to get some input. Keep in mind I'm not just thinking of animation for games, iOS, etc. — I'm most interested in an animated GUI for Mac OS X, and making it 'flow' as one might interact in it.
If u wish to add many graphics animations, then go for OpenGLES based xcode project for iOS. That helps u to reduce performance problem. You can render each of the frames in gif as 2D texture.
I would recommend that you take a look at Core Animation. It is Apples framework for hardware accelerated animations for both OS X and iOS. It's built for making animated GUIs.
You can animate the property changes for things like position, opacity, color, transforms etc and also animate gradients with CAGradientLayer and animate non-rectagunal shapes using CAShapeLayer and a lot of other things.
A good resource to get you started is the Core Animation Programming Guide.
I have been reading for several hours now documentation about drawing two dimensional graphics in a objective-c cocoa application. There appears to be several different technologies all specific to certain tasks. My understanding is that the following technologies do the following things. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Quartz 2D: The primary library for drawing shapes, text, and images to the screen.
Core Graphics: this is the name of the framework that contains Quartz. This can be used as a synonym for Quartz.
QuartzGL: A GPU acceleration mode for Quartz that is not enabled by default and not necessarily faster for drawing things on the screen.
OpenGL: The most low level library, talk directly to the graphics card at the cost of more lines of code. More suited for 3D graphics.
Core Image: A library for displaying images and text, but not so much for drawing shape primitives.
Core Animation: A library for automatically animating objects. Apparently not suited for moving large numbers of objects. Nor for continuous animation of objects.
QuickTime: A library that apparently also does images and text in addition to video, but probably not good for drawing primitive shapes.
What I would like to do is create a browser for some specific type of data. The view would not very complicated and would consist of drawing rectangles at specific locations. However, the user should be able to move around by dragging the view to the left or the right and the this movement should be fluid. Here is a example that is very close to what I'm trying to make:
http://jbrowse.org/ucsc/hg19/
What drawing technology would you recommand I start coding with?
You want Quartz. Unless your graphing MASSIVE amounts of data, any Mac (I'm assuming Mac not iOS) should handle it easily. It is easy, efficient, and will probably get you where you need to go. For the dragging movement, you'll probably manage that with Core Animation layers.
Note: Everything in the end is handled by AppKit (Mac) or UIKit (iOS) and, eventually, Core Animation. If you're doing graphics, you will encounter Core Animation at some point, as it manages everything displayed.
Note: If you are graphing that much data, you can use OpenGL, but even then, the need shouldn't be too much until you start displaying, probably many millions of vertices or complex visualisations.
I want to use 'marker reader' technology in my iPhone application (you have a piece of paper, you point the iphone camera at it and information is bein drawn up from it). What API kits can i use/are availible?
The closest SDK I can think of is ARToolKit which should help in a Framework Solution for finding Markers and deriving information. There are a couple of other Frameworks which could be used and I've listed below:
Layar
ARToolKit
Popcode
SGAREnvironment
I'm working in Objective-C for a Mac cocoa application. It's a pretty simple question, but I can't find an answer. I just want to move a sprite across the screen, like in a Snake game. Do I need to use NSTimer or NSAnimation, and how would I use it?
Thanks
You could use Core Animation. It provides a unified way to move and animate visual elements on the screen.
If you plan to create a simple game, "Cocoa with Love" has a nice "Asteroid" example:
http://cocoawithlove.com/2009/02/asteroids-style-game-in-coreanimation.html
Another game-related Core Animation project is Apple's Geek Game Board:
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#samplecode/GeekGameBoard/Introduction/Intro.html
Well, actually it depends on how you imagined your application, there's a lot of way to make things move. If you do not need anything complex or particularly efficient you may just access and modify the NSView frame property. Otherwise you should consider use Core Animation or OpenGL.
Core Animation Programming Guide
OpenGL Programming Guide for MacOSX