Introduction to Animation Types and Timing Programming Guide

This document describes the fundamental concepts involving the timing and animation classes used with Core Animation. Core Animation is an Objective-C framework that combines a high-performance compositing engine with a simple to use animation programming interface.

You should read this document to gain an understanding of working with Core Animation in a Cocoa application. The Objective-C 2.0 Programming Language should be considered a prerequisite because Core Animation makes extensive use of Objective-C properties. You should also be familiar with key-value coding as described in Key-Value Coding Programming Guide. Familiarity with the Quartz 2D imaging technologies described in Quartz 2D Programming Guide is also helpful, although not required.

Organization of This Document

Animation Types and Timing consists of the following articles:

• “Animation Class Roadmap” provides an overview of the animation classes and timing protocol.

• “Timing, Timespaces, and CAAnimation” describes in detail the timing model for Core Animation and the abstract CAAnimation class.

• “Property-Based Animations” describes the property-based animations: CABasicAnimation and CAKeyframeAnimation.

• “Transition Animation” describes the transition animation class, CATransition.