Monday, October 15, 2007

An Intro to Quartz and the Core Graphics API's (Updated Links)

Last week I gave a talk at the Des Moines CocoaHeads (Google Groups link) on how Quartz works in Cocoa and an intro to the C Based Core Graphics API's. Some of the topics I got started on was based off of Scott Stevenson's topics raised on Intro to Quartz Part I and II on Cocoa Dev Central and a couple of the Core Graphics examples were based off of samples from the Quartz book written by people in Apple. All in all the meeting covered the following * How Quartz does hardware accelerated drawing * When you would use Core Graphics API's over Cocoa's route to Quartz * A basic intro on to how views work * Basic Cocoa/Quartz Data Structures * Basic Core Graphics Data Structures * How coordinates in Views work * Cocoa Convenience Methods * How to draw Alpha (Transparency) * How paths, strokes and filling works * Using Images in your views * Using PDF's in your views * How to scale images/pdf's non/uniformly * A brief discussion on the Cocoa/Core Foundation Bridge * Places to learn about Quartz Additionally at the meeting we got into some small discussions on how Quartz works on a much deeper level, problems that arise during drawing with floating point widths, etc. The Keynote file from the presentation (for iWork 08) as well as a pdf from the keynote and all the source code examples are available for download below from the Des Moines CocoaHeads Google Groups page: Intro to Quartz Keynote Presentation Intro to Quartz Presentation (Compressed PDF form) Source code from projects demoed Update Updated links from Google Groups Page - if you can't download the files here they are located on the Des Moines Cocoaheads page @ http://groups.google.com/group/des-moines-cocoaheads

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Des Moines CocoaHeads: All about Quartz

The next CocoaHeads meeting will be close to home in Ames @ Iowa State University. I will be giving a presentation about Quartz and specifically using it with Cocoa. Once the meeting is up I will post the Keynote presentation and source code so you can download it. Reposted from http://cocoaheads.org/us/DesMoinesIowa/index.html
The next CocoaHeads: Thursday October 11, 2007 07:00 PM CST at Howe Hall, Room 1246 - Iowa State University Campus. Directions: Howe Hall is located on the north-west corner of Bissell Rd and Marston Ct Ames, IA 50014 [map] "[Howe] is a big building, glass front, you can't miss it". Parking is available in lots north or south of Howe. [parking options] Agenda: Intro to Quartz: a discussion of the more advanced drawing routines available in Cocoa. And as always, general Cocoa geekyness.