- Layers and Views
- Layer Capabilities
- Working with Layers
- Summary
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Layer Capabilities
So if CALayer is just an implementation detail of the inner workings of UIView, why do we need to know about it at all? Surely Apple provides the nice, simple UIView interface precisely so that we don’t need to deal directly with gnarly details of Core Animation itself?
This is true to some extent. For simple purposes, we don’t really need to deal directly with CALayer, because Apple has made it easy to leverage powerful features like animation indirectly via the UIView interface using simple high-level APIs.
But with that simplicity comes a loss of flexibility. If you want to do something slightly out of the ordinary, or make use of a feature that Apple has not chosen to expose in the UIView class interface, you have no choice but to venture down into Core Animation to explore the lower-level options.
We’ve established that layers cannot handle touch events like UIView can, so what can they do that views can’t? Here are some features of CALayer that are not exposed by UIView:
- Drop shadows, rounded corners, and colored borders
- 3D transforms and positioning
- Nonrectangular bounds
- Alpha masking of content
- Multistep, nonlinear animations
We explore these features in the following chapters, but for now let’s look at how CALayer can be utilized within an app.