Custom Interface Controls from Scratch for Mac & iOS

Douglas Heriot, University of Wollongong

Track: Tools & Tech; Audience: Advanced

I’ll present a solid foundation of the understanding required to develop your own custom interface controls on OS X and iOS. It’ll begin with the basics of how OS X composites windows on the screen, the history of NSCell, advantages of Core Animation, and the similarities/differences between OS X and iOS.

The bulk of the presentation will be practical examples of how to go about actually creating different kinds of controls (eg. buttons, sliders, totally new custom controls), showing some of the range of issues that come up to think about. I’ll mostly be sharing my experience on the Mac, but will compare with iOS too.

It will also cover how to handle the Mac’s new retina display, and advances in Mountain Lion to use Core Animation more extensively, moving away from -drawRect: altogether.

Some technologies being covered:

• Core Graphics drawing
• Core Animation, CALayer
• AppKit/UIKit

You can find demonstration projects that accompany the talk on GitHub:

• DrawRectRandomness
• Core-Animation-Slider-Example

Or go to Douglas’s web site.