At its heart, Core Animation manages a collection of 2D layers. It also goes to great pains to make this functionality available to existing applications with extremely minimal changes to the code.Ĭore Animation's original name, Layer Kit, reveals a lot about its design. It does a few well-chosen things and does them very well. Like FSEvents, Core Animation is a pragmatic API. Thankfully, Apple's taken a different route with Core Animation.
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It'll probably also be late, incompatible, buggy, and slow-not to mention being met with resistance by developers who are not keen to rewrite their GUI code from scratch using the new animation-based APIs. After all, isn't a static interface element simply the degenerate form of an animation? Let's reimplement everything in terms of our new animation framework! It'll be awesome! It gets a snazzy purple sphere icon to go with its friends.Īnimation frameworks can easily blossom into full-blown redesigns of the entire GUI API. Though it may have the talent on staff, Apple would be much better served by having its graphics experts work on APIs that everyone can use, rather than adding custom cross-fade code to yet another first-party application.Īnd so, in Leopard, Apple has introduced Core Animation. But it really is inefficient to have all these developers trying to write custom code far outside their areas of expertise.Īnd for that matter, it's not such a great idea for Apple to be doing the same thing. Broadly speaking, this is not something that should be discouraged. The motivation seems admirable: third-party developers want their applications to look as cool as Apple's.
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And for what? Pizzazz?īut try they did, rapidly increasing the number of Mac applications containing Core Graphics and/or OpenGL code of questionable quality, for dubious purposes. What does all that have to do with editing text? Sure, Apple can afford to have one of its graphics gurus add whizzy effects, but it's another thing for small developers to take the time to learn a bunch of new APIs unrelated to the actual functionality of their applications. A developer creating, say, a text editor may want to use that cross-fade in his preferences dialog.īut doing so takes him far from his comfort zone, into the world of graphics APIs, perhaps even OpenGL. Take something as simple as the cross-fade between preference panes in the System Preferences application. Understandably, third-party developers have long tried to ape these effects. But in the best cases, these animations actually help usability by providing an explicit visual explanation of state changes while also adding an undeniable sense of pizzazz. Too much animation can be harmful and grating. Examples are everywhere: items in the iChat buddy list fade in and out and visually reshuffle themselves as new items appear switching preference panes triggers a cross-fade and an animated window resize items in the Dock shuffle and squirm around when a new item is dragged towards it. In the post-Mac OS X era, Apple has been a big fan of adding animation to its applications and the OS itself.
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