nicklockwood

Hacking UIView animation blocks for fun and profit

In this article, I'm going to explore a way that we can create views that implement custom Core Animation property animations in a natural way.

As we know, layers in iOS come in two flavours: Backing layers and hosted layers. The only difference between them is that the view acts as the layer delegate for its backing layer, but not for any hosted sublayers.

In order to implement the UIView transactional animation blocks, UIView disables all animations by default and then re-enables them individually as required. It does this using the actionForLayer:forKey: method.

Somewhat strangely, UIView doesn't enable animations for every property that CALayer does by default. A notable example is the layer.contents property, which is animatable by default for a hosted layer, but cannot be animated using a UIView animation block.

dulacp

Usage

Requirements

Install the two dependencies, ImageMagick and Ghostscript.

$ brew install imagemagick
$ brew install ghostscript

hassy

Deploying Parse Server on AWS

Note: this is a work-in-progress and will be updated with more information over the next few days.

Intro

This guide will walk you through deploying your own instance of the open-source Parse Server. This would be a good starting point for testing your existing application to see if the functionality provided by the server is enough for your application, and to potentially plan your migration off the Parse Platform.

This guide will walk you through using Elastic Beanstalk (EB), which is an AWS service similar to Heroku. Why use EB rather than Heroku? Elastic Beanstalk does not lock you into Heroku-specific ways of doing things, is likely cheaper to run your backend on than Heroku, and it integrates with other services that AWS offer (and they offer almost everything one needs to run an application these days).