Custom View Controller Transitions in Landscape

iOS 7’s custom transitions are great — until you rotate the device. A breakdown of the landscape bugs, the hacky workarounds that don’t quite hold up, and why we went back to view controller containment.

SMSquashView

Bringing cartoon-style squash and stretch to iOS views, automatically. The layer tracks its own velocity and distorts along the direction of travel — no configuration needed, volume stays constant.

Spatter and Spark

Shipping a kids’ storybook app with rich animation and a custom framework under the hood. Built on top of our Goodnight Safari codebase, with artist-driven XML animation specs and a parent-facing progress dashboard.

Premature Completion: An Embarrassing Problem

Core Animation runs your completion block early if it doesn’t find any animations. Rude. Includes a sample project to poke at the behavior yourself and avoid hours of confused debugging.

SMShadowedLayer

A CALayer subclass that fakes realistic lighting and shadows during Core Animation. Uses Lambert illumination math and a custom animatable property to keep shading correct mid-transform, specular highlights included.

Goodnight Safari

We shipped a kids’ interactive storybook and learned a ton doing it. Custom animation frameworks, texture atlases, audio — the whole nine yards of getting out of our comfort zone.

CALayer’s Parallel Universe

The view on screen isn’t the view your code talks to. Here’s what Core Animation is really doing. Learn about the model/presentation layer split and how to use presentationLayer to animate from a view’s actual on-screen position.