How can I callback as a CABasicAnimation is animating? - iphone

I have an animation I'm using to snap a rotatable UIView to a circular grid. As the view animates, I need to update another view based on the rotating views position.
How can I go about getting the position of the rotating view as it animates into position?

When animation starts you can start a function that will be polling current view position using a timer (I suppose you will need to get presentationLayer from view's layer and get position values from it).
There's no callbacks for CAAnimation other than animationDidStart and animationDidStop so it seems that's the solution (if I'm not mistaken it was also mentioned so in one of WWDC videos).

Related

UIView 3D transform final frame location

I have a UIView which has an X origin that makes it off screen to the right. Then, I do a keyframe animation with CATransform3D:
[NSValue valueWithCATransform3D:CATransform3DMakeTranslation(-view.width, 0, 0)]
The problem is, after the animation completes, the view's frame is visually in the correct place, but it still thinks it's off screen, so I can't interact with it. Logging its frame property also shows that it's offscreen, but visually, it's not.
The fill mode for the animation is kCAFillModeForwards, so the final value of the animation sticks.
What is the solution to this problem, that is, interacting with this view after the animation and notifying the view that it is indeed visible?
You can use CAAnimation delegate method -animationDidStop:finished: to fix it when the animation done:
- (void)animationDidStop:(CAAnimation *)anim finished:(BOOL)flag {
...
}
The better answer is to use UIView animation methods like animateWithDuration:animations:completion: (and variants on that method.)
Those methods let you do animations on the actual view properties, and when the animation is complete, the view is at it's actual destination location.
The center property is the easiest way to move views around. The frame property isn't valid if you've applied a transform, but the center property IS always valid for both reading and writing.
Core Animation only creates the illusion that your views move. The animation takes place on a display-only copy of the layer tree. You can query the properties of an animating layer by reading those same properties from the layer's presentationLayer. However, the view objects will not respond to the user interaction at their apparent location. The views still think they are at their original locations.
As the other poster said, you could use the animation completion delegate method to move the view to it's final location once the animation is over, but that's a lot of fussy work to do something that UIView animation does for you much more cleanly and simply.
Can you interact with the view even before you animate it?
is the view.userInteractionEnabled is set to YES??

Determining which subview was touched

I'm trying out the animation stuff with the iPhone and I have a small app that has circles falling from the top of the screen to the bottom. I added the UIViewAnimationOptionAllowUserInteraction option to the animation and set userInteractionEnabled = YES on both my sub views and my main view. I am generating the subview programmatically everytime my NSTimer fires, which makes the circles.
The problem I am having is that even if I implement - (void)touchesBegan:(NSSet *)touches withEvent:(UIEvent *)event on my main view and my subviews, the event only ever fires on the main view regardless of how hard or how many times I smash the falling circles.
How do I get that event to fire on my circles instead? Why doesn't the touch fire on the view on top?
The problem is that when you perform a "tween" animation with Core Animation (which occurs implicitly when you use the UIView animation methods), the new value is immediately applied to what's known as the model layer tree.
The animation is committed to Core Animation, and the next time the main run loop occurs, Core Animation does the necessary rendering to make it look as if an animation is occurring. In reality, though, the model values of your view (e.g., its frame or transform properties) are changed immediately.
Try tapping at the bottom of the screen where the buttons land (assuming they finish on screen). If you do this, it should respond to the interaction event as you expect.
You could manually change the frame of your circles by constantly firing a timer and applying small changes at each step. This, however, is likely not ideal.
Another option is to make use of your view's layer's presentationLayer method. This layer represents the state of the layer at any point in time, as we see it on the screen. Off the top of my head, I imagine that your main view's touch handling method can iterate through each subview and check to see if the touch point intersects the frame of the subview's layer's presentation layer. If it does, then that means someone "touched" your subview.
for (UIView *subview in self.subviews)
{
CALayer *presentationLayer = (CALayer *)[subview.layer presentationLayer];
if (CGRectContainsPoint(presentationLayer.frame, touchPoint)
{
// Found the subview the user touched
}
}
I should note that presentationLayer returns id, because the presentation layer may be CALayer or any of its subclasses. So, for example, if you're using CAShapeLayer, then -presentationLayer will return a CAShapeLayer. Still, it's fine to just cast it to a CALayer since all you care about for the purposes of this task is to check its frame property.

How can I pause a currently running animation?

I have a Core Animation running and want to pause it when a button is pressed. So there is a method -pauseAnimation. When the animation is paused, I want the animated view to stay in the state as it currently was while animating. i.e. if a view moves from top left to bottom right, and somewhere in the middle the animation is paused, the view should stay in the middle.
Is there a way to do this?
as far as i can remember there is an setAnimationsEnabled=NO option, but that doesn't work when the animation runs, right?
You can pause layer animations by setting the speed of the animation to zero, see How to pause the animation of a layer tree.
You can do this by disabling animations and then setting the model layers' values to the presentation layers' values (for all properties that define your animation).
eg. layer.transform = layer.presentationLayer.transform;
Resuming the animation = re-enable animations and animate from current positions to the desired final positions (you might have to adjust curves, etc to get something acceptable).

How do I suppress animation during AutoRotation

I'm making an app where one of the objects needs to appear not to move or rotate during AutoRotation, but everything else needs to rotate and be repositioned. The way I did this is by manually rotating the object, and moving it into the same position, relative to the device, that it had prior to rotation. The problem is that it looks funny, appearing to rotate into the same position it had before.
If I suppress the animation effects during rotation, it would appear that the object never moved, and everything else just snapped into place, which is what I want. I haven't been able to find anything in the documentation that tells me how to do this though. How do I do this?
When it comes to UIViewController rotation there are two ways you can set up so you get a chance to rotate and move your own views.
In the one-step process, in your UIViewController-derived class provide an implementation of willAnimateRotationToInterfaceOrientation. It gets called and you can kick off your object rotation so while the system is rotating everything else your object is getting counter-rotated so it looks like it's staying put. You'll want to calculate how much to counter-rotate and in which direction based on current interface orientation vs. new orientation.
The other way is to get notified to do custom rotation in two steps. For example, in the first half you can shrink the object down, move it, and rotate it part way then in the second half finish the rotation as you scale back up to normal size. It's a pretty clever way to make the rotation animation look smoother to the eye.
For the two-step process, you need to define two methods. willAnimateFirstHalfOfRotationToInterfaceOrientation gets called for the first half of the rotation (i.e. up to 45 degrees for a 90 degree rotation and at 90 degrees for an upside down flip). Once past that point the second half is called via willAnimateSecondHalfOfRotationFromInterfaceOrientation.
If your object has a 1:1 aspect ratio (i.e square or round) and in the middle of the view then the one-step process will probably work fine. But if it's a non-square object and has to move position (for example if it's at position 40, 60 in portrait but moves to 20, 100 in landscape) and maybe even needs a bit of scaling to look better then you may want to try the two-step process and see if it looks smoother.
If your object is inside its own individual UIView then it's pretty easy to schedule the rotations through UIView animations. Just create a transform through CGAffineTransformMakeRotation, then inside a pair of UIView beginAnimations/commitAnimations blocks set the transform property of the view to this value. You can tweak the timing through setAnimationDuration.
EDIT: Based on the comments, I'm adding some code to show how you could attach the view to the top-level window instead of to the view controller. Your object would then reside in this view instead of the one managed by controller (which is getting rotated). You still need to over-ride the UIViewController rotate methods, but instead of rotating an object under control of the view controller you would trigger a counter-rotation in the object on the top-level.
To add a view to the top-level window:
YourAppDelegate* windowDelegate = ((YourAppDelegate*) [UIApplication sharedApplication].delegate);
[windowDelegate.window addSubview:yourView];
Keep a reference to yourView somewhere you can get to, then in the UIViewController's willAnimateRotationToInterfaceOrientation counter-rotate yourView, i.e. calculate how much to rotate the view in reverse to where you're going--if the phone is turning 90-degrees clockwise, you'll want to rotate the view back 90 degrees counter-clockwise, etc. Then use UIView animations on yourView.
If you don't want rotation animations, overload -shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation: in your UIViewController and return NO. You can then observe UIDeviceOrientationDidChangeNotification to receive manual orientation change notifications.
This may work:
Listen for willRotateToInterfaceOrientation
[UIView setAnimationsEnabled:NO];
Listen for UIDeviceOrientationDidChangeNotification
[UIView setAnimationsEnabled:YES];
Untested, but I know that does work for some cases.

Halting In Progress CAKeyframeAnimation

I'm animating a UIView's frame property using a CAKeyframeAnimation on the view's CALayer and animating the "position" property. I'd like to be able to halt the animation at it's current state when the user taps the screen, but I'm unable to do so.
I can halt the animation easily enough by calling
[view.layer removeAnimationForKey:kFrameAnimationKey];
The problem is that neither the view's frame not it's layer's position are updated directly by the animation. If I look at the position property at the time the animation starts and when it ends in
- (void)animationDidStop:(CAAnimation *)animation finished:(BOOL)finished
it has not changed.
It seems that you need to do that explicitly when the animation stops. But if the animation stops at some arbitrary point, you don't know how far it's gone. So the question is either how to make the animation update the layer's position property as it goes, or how to know how far the animation has gone when it's been stopped.
You can achieve this halting of the animation by grabbing the presentationLayer of your animating UIView's layer, then applying its frame to your UIView before removing the animation. For example:
movingView.frame = [[movingView.layer presentationLayer] frame];
[movingView.layer removeAnimationForKey:#"movementAnimation"];
This seems to provide the freezing of the UIView at the current animated position you're looking for.