OK, so it looks as if I have found the answer to whether I would be able to use layer backed views, and the answer is that even with layer backing turned on, you can not guarantee the drawing order of overlapping sibling views:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/466297/is-there-a-proper-way-to-handle-overlapping-nsview-siblings This is really annoying because it will require a lot of work to work around, and also since sibling view layering apparently works on IOS, it would have been nice to use that paradigm on OSX. So this means that I have to either: A) See whether having a single view and using the NS animation options and animation proxies will give me the performance and functionality I need, or B) Try to work out the issues with drawing a tiled background canvas layer seamlessly with animated scrolling, resizing and scaling; drawing high quality text; the bug with large layers causing flickering; the problems with CAShapeLayers not always animating paths correctly; smooth scaling and pixel alignment of all the sublayers; having to have completely separate overlay windows for things like text editing which need to react to scrolling and scaling and synchronize them with the main view etc. Option B sounds scary because it includes a couple of bugs that I am aware of but have don't have a workaround for, and lots of work, so even though conceptually it would be nice to use CALayer (or even better, layer backed views if there was some way to get them to order siblings properly), it seems that if the performance is acceptable, I may just have to go with option A. While core animation would be nice, and in the future, 3d transforms etc might be nice, at the moment, my objects just need scale, opacity, and position animations. I guess the next thing to do is some testing with a full screen test app with a few hundred virtual views animating around, and see what sort of performance I get... If there are any comments on these options, or suggestions for other approaches, I'm all ears... Ken _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
