Core Animation for Mac OS X and the iPhone: Creating Compelling Dynamic User Interfaces (Pragmatic Programmers) (Paperback)

by Bill Dudney (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Mac OS X Leopard introduces a fantastic new technology that makes writing applications with animated and cinematic user interfaces much easier. We'll explore this new technology by starting with the familiar concepts you already know from the pre-Leopard development kits.

Then we'll see how they apply to the new frameworks and APIs. We'll build on your existing knowledge of Cocoa and bring you efficiently up to speed on what Core Animation is all about.

With this book in hand, you can add Core Animation to your Cocoa applications, and make stunning user interfaces that your user's will be showing off to their friends.

About the Author
Bill Dudney is a software developer and entrepreneur currently building software for the Mac. Bill started his computing career on a NeXT cube with a magneto-optical drive running NeXTStep 0.9. Over the years, Bill migrated into the Java world, where he worked for years on building cool enterprise software. But he never forgot his roots and how much fun it was to write software that did cool things for normal people. Bill is back to AppKit to stay. You can follow him on his blog at http://bill.dudney.net/roller/objc.

Product Details

• Paperback: 188 pages
• Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf; illustrated edition edition (October 28, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1934356107
• ISBN-13: 978-1934356104
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 7.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #33,321 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THE Book to read if you want to understand Core Animation, December 30, 2008

By	J. Lamarche (New Hartford, NY United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Core Animation is one of the coolest technologies to come out of Cupertino in many years. It makes doing all sorts of cool things in your application not just possible, but downright easy. Core Animation opens up worlds of possibilities for your applications' user interface.

The problem is, Core Animation is not intuitive. Even an experienced programmer can expect to spend a lot of time with Apple's documentation before he or she will grok the terminology and concepts of this new framework well enough to use be proficient.

Fortunately, the author has already gone through the trouble of doing that and has taken the time to break it all down into digestible chunks, explaining the concepts and terms in plain English, and setting out exercises that reinforce your understanding of those concepts.

As previous reviewers have mentioned, the bulk of the book focuses on using Core Animation when writing Mac programs, however both the basic concepts and the practical use of Core Animation are the same when programming the iPhone. The iPhone chapter explains the differences between using it on the two platforms and shows how to apply the stuff you've already learned earlier in the book when developing on the iphone.

I think this book probably reduced the amount of time I needed to learn Core Animation by at least half, probably more, and I'm an experienced programmer who's accustomed to learning from Apple's documentation.

Just a quick note of something that's probably obvious: You should already have a decent grasp on Objective-C and Cocoa before picking up this book if you want to get the most out of it.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Animation is Hard to Teach in a Book, February 24, 2009

By	J. Ambrose Little "Microsoft MVP; INETA Speak... (Princeton, NJ USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I got this title just to get a feel for the animation capabilities and how the APIs are for this platform. The book was just fine for that. The author's style is fairly readable, and he has a good tone.

I think any graphics book really should be in color; it makes a big difference, and trying to teach animation in a book is tough anyways. The reason to buy a tech book is to learn something away from the computer (IMO), so it can be hard to learn animation this way.

Would I recommend it? Hard to say. Depends on what you're after. He does have some good tidbits for folks to go beyond the mechanics of animations and think about the experience the animations provide. I think that could be handled more deeply, too.

So, take a look at the TOC, read a sample chapter, and decide if you think it's for you.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The definitive textbook on the topic, December 31, 2008

By	Brad Larson (Waupaca, WI United States) - See all my reviews

Core Animation is a new technology in Mac OS X Leopard that has not been as widely adopted as I would have expected, I believe in large part because of the lack of documentation for it. This book is the only printed guide devoted to the topic, and I have found it invaluable in the development of several products. The Pragmatic Programmers series of books are always written and edited well, and this is no exception.

It is assumed that you are already familiar with Objective-C and the Cocoa APIs at the start of the book, so learning those fundamentals is required for new Mac and iPhone developers. The book also progresses as if you were an existing Mac programmer who will gradually incorporate more and more of Core Animation into your applications. This might cause a little impatience from those who want to jump right in to working with some of the more advanced capabilities, but those people can easily skip ahead to the relevant sections.

All of the important concepts are covered, although a couple of the tricks that I frequently use in my Mac and iPhone development are not mentioned. This is understandable, as they are not documented well and I only learned them from other developers. iPhone developers may be a little disappointed in the relatively small iPhone-only chapter, but that's simply because layer-based animations and the like are handled identically between the Mac and iPhone and there's little that is unique in the iPhone's implementation of Core Animation.

Source code examples for all exercises in the book are available at the publisher's website [...] and they contain many useful code snippets.

This book has earned its place on my desk.