@Martin Pilkington: One big issue on the Mac is that layer backed views don't support sub-pixel rendering
That's true in general and it's a good point to make. That said, I've found that using floor() to filter the x and y values of the layer's "position" property can produce vastly better text rendering results.
@Paul Warren: initially layer-backed and was getting poor looking results with NSTableView (flickering contents on resize etc
It shouldn't do that. It might be a bug, but I'd have to see the code to say for sure. One thing that can cause this is mixing layer-backed views and standard views in non-ideal ways.
@Harvey: One reason not to use Core Animation is the lack of any Accessibility support.
Accessibility is an important topic, but I think it's (unintentionally) misleading to say that Core Animation lacks accessibility support.
It's true that a built-in view like NSTableView or NSTextView has accessibility support that a custom view built from CALayers does not, but it's mostly the same for a custom view whose entire contents is drawn directly into a graphics context. I think this is really more about implementing accessibility support in custom views in general.
You can add accessibility support to Core Animation-based user interfaces, and there was actually an entire session about this exact topic at WWDC 2007. I don't remember offhand if there was one at WWDC 2008.
@Dan: This is completely off topic, but I have been pondering it for a while. Where did the name 'Theocacao' come from
It's basically a contraction of "Theobroma Cacao". I thought it was sort of clever at the time. In retrospect, it's fairly hard to pronounce.
by Scott Stevenson — Oct 03
That's true in general and it's a good point to make. That said, I've found that using floor() to filter the x and y values of the layer's "position" property can produce vastly better text rendering results.
@Paul Warren: initially layer-backed and was getting poor looking results with NSTableView (flickering contents on resize etc
It shouldn't do that. It might be a bug, but I'd have to see the code to say for sure. One thing that can cause this is mixing layer-backed views and standard views in non-ideal ways.
@Harvey: One reason not to use Core Animation is the lack of any Accessibility support.
Accessibility is an important topic, but I think it's (unintentionally) misleading to say that Core Animation lacks accessibility support.
It's true that a built-in view like NSTableView or NSTextView has accessibility support that a custom view built from CALayers does not, but it's mostly the same for a custom view whose entire contents is drawn directly into a graphics context. I think this is really more about implementing accessibility support in custom views in general.
You can add accessibility support to Core Animation-based user interfaces, and there was actually an entire session about this exact topic at WWDC 2007. I don't remember offhand if there was one at WWDC 2008.
@Dan: This is completely off topic, but I have been pondering it for a while. Where did the name 'Theocacao' come from
It's basically a contraction of "Theobroma Cacao". I thought it was sort of clever at the time. In retrospect, it's fairly hard to pronounce.