Core Animation

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Core Animation

Developer:	Apple Inc
OS:	Mac OS X
Use:	System Utility
License:	Proprietary
Website:	apple.com/macosx/leopard/ coreanimation

Core Animation is an Apple Inc technology to create animations, to be released as part of Mac OS X v10.5. Apple showed it in public for the first time on August 7, 2006 during the keynote at Worldwide Developers Conference. While it takes advantage of the multiple cores in most new Intel-based Macs, it is also backward compatible to the earlier chips. Core Animation runs on a separate thread from the main application, resulting in a negligible performance penalty on multiple-core machines. It does, however, require a Core Image-compatible GPU.

Core Animation is a key component of Time Machine and Spaces, but also a significant feature on its own; when a developer modifies an attribute of a layer, Core Animation automatically interpolates the intermediate steps (color, opacity, etc.) between the changes, visually enhancing these applications and reducing the amount of source code that would have been required using traditional Cocoa animation techniques.

Animations with Core Animation are implicit and can be gained with minimal developer effort. For example, setting a visible object's opacity to 0 would result in a fade animation being performed. Changing its size would cause a scaling animation, and changing its position would cause it to slide into place. Cocoa views backed by Core Data can be instructed to perform these animations automatically based on changes to the underlying model. For instance, an array of data displayed as a list view is sorted, the individual display items will reposition themselves with a slide animation.

Core Animation is media-agnostic, meaning that it treats still images, video, Quartz views, OpenGL views, and Quartz Composer compositions interchangeably.