iOS7 "Slide to unlock" animation on a UILabel - ios

How to make an animation similar to "Slide to unlock" text on a UILabel? (The text gradient is animated left->right) and then the text color adapts to the background.

I think the key to performing this effect is CALayer mask. You can attach a second CALayer to any existing layer as its mask. Then:
The [mask] layer’s alpha channel determines how much of the [parent] layer’s content
and background shows through. Fully or partially opaque pixels allow
the underlying content to show through but fully transparent pixels
block that content.
So the text is going to be the mask and the moving colour is going to be the parent.
The easiest way to deal with the text will be to use a CATextLayer. The easiest way to make the colour gradient will be CAGradientLayer.
To animate the gradient you can use Core Animation, since all properties are animatable. I guess locations is likely to be the best way to achieve the sliding animation.
For convenience you'll probably want to wrap all of that up into a UIView, but you can add layers directly if you prefer.

Related

Make view stand out from the surroundings. Border layer with inverse color?

I have a view (a Button in this case) and the content behind/below it can move around (a ScrollView). The button is just plain white with black text and not bordered with anything. When the content behind the View is white it does not really stand out as I would like it to do. (I can fix this with a black border sure... but...)
I have this idea of having a border around the button that is the opposite color of the view (pixel) behind it. So the border would always contrast with the background and constantly change with the content behind it.
I have googled a bit and looked into visual effects layers and some more complicated (over the top of my head) graphics stuff I don't remember the terminology for.
If you have an idea of how to approach this please tell me. I just really want to see what it would look like.
and have a wonderful day!
I don't think you can create a border that uses colors based on the color of the pixel from the layer behind the current layer using CALayer and borders.
What I would suggest doing is to add a second CALayer to your view's CALayer, inset by -1 in both dimensions (made 1 pixel bigger.) Let's call that the surroundLayer. Then make the surroundLayer's borderColor be white and the view's layer.borderColor be black (or visa-versa.) You can make the surroundLayer's borderColor be 50% opaque so it just lightens/darkens the pixels under it without completely obscuring them, and that is enough to increase the contrast and make your view's border show up regardless of the contents under it.
I've used this technique before and it works well.
Edit:
Check out the project https://github.com/DuncanMC/MaskableImageView.git. The project demonstrates using an image as a mask layer to hide/reveal the contents of a view.
The class MaskableView in that project draws a circular "cursor" that shows where it is revealing/masking the contents of its subview (an image and a label, in the example app.) The cursor is yellow in the middle, with a partly transparent black outer circle around it. This gives good contrast regardless of the colors in the part of the image it is being drawn over.
The MaskableView class has properties that let the caller set the colors use for the "cursor" circle.
Below I posted a short animation of what the eraser tool with a yellow inner circle and an outer, 1/2 transparent black circle looks like.
Without the outer dark circle the yellow inner circle tends to get lost in brighter parts of an image. With the combination of a bright colored inner circle and a partly transparent, dark outer circle, it's easy to see on ANY background:

How can I animate a tile in a UIView

I need to create an animated chevron effect using the bitmap tile below. I am hoping that a UIView with a pattern fill will be sufficient, but I need to be able to animate the origin of the pattern over time, and I can't see that this is possible.
I think this is possible with Quartz, or CoreGraphics at the low level. What would be the best way to do this, and can you provide some example code in Swift that demonstrates the solution?
I would add the image as contents of multiple sublayers (CALayer instances) aligned one below the other and animate those sublayers y position.
The main layer would clip its sublayers on the border and sublayers that go offscreen would move to the bottom to be reused, similarly to how UITableView reuses its cells.
You might also want to look at CADisplayLink to have better control of the rendering.

iOS: How to fill a rectangle except in one area?

I've used the CGContext based routine to fill a rectangle, but this time I actually want to fill all of a rectangle EXCEPT one part of it. I know this is possible in other drawing systems for other platofrm but can it be done with core graphics on iOS?
Both borderWidth and cornerRadius are animatable properties. So you could just animate them directly (using CABasicAnimation). In that rendering, you'd go from no border and no corners to having a border and corners in an animated way.
If you want to animate the rectangular tracing of the border, you'd need to use a CAShapeLayer (because the end of its path is animatable) and provide the illusion that way.

In Swift, is there a way to set a UIView's background to accomplish an overlay effect like Photoshop?

The designer used lots of overlay and multiply blend modes in his Photoshop design. Is there a simple way to set a UIView's background (or draw something to the CALayer) that will do the same thing as Photoshop's overlay (as well as multiply) filter? The goal is to blend the UIView's background with whatever appears behind it. This ideally would auto update if I animate the UIView's position as well.

drawRect: How do I do an "inverted clip"

I am creating an iOS user interface to allow a user to pick a rectangle within an existing image, dragging the corners of that rectangle to the desired size. I now have four custom UIButtons (30% alpha) and a custom view (also with 30% alpha) that draws the dashed lines between the four corner buttons.
To "improve" the interface, I would like my drawRect code to make the cropped portion of the image appear "normal" while everything outside the cropped region is washed out (filled with white color, which will give me the correct effect since the UIView is set to 30% alpha).
The obvious algorithm would be:
Fill the entire image with [UIColor whiteColor] fill
Draw the four dashed lines with a [UIColor clearColor] fill
When I do this, the clear fill isn't showing up. I believe this is because the "fill" of the clear color in step #2 isn't being seen because the pixels were already set to white in step #1. Perhaps there's a blend mode that will allow me to see the transparency of the second rectangle? I'm not sure about the various blend modes.
My second attempt, which works, does the following:
Draw the four dashed lines with [UIColor clearColor] fill
Draw four additional rectangles with [UIColor whiteColor] fill, each representing the portions to the left, right, above, and below the cropped region.
As I mention, this method works, but seems to me there should be a simpler way instead of me having to calculate these four additional rectangles each and every time.
There is a similar question on SO Create layer mask with custom-shaped hole that uses CALayer and masks, but this seems to be overkill for what I need.
Does anybody have any suggestions on how to improve this?
You can set the blend mode to kCGBlendModeCopy and use clearColor to reset a pixel's alpha to zero. You can presumably also use kCGBlendModeClear but I haven't tested that.
You can also set the clipping path to just contain the pixels you want cleared and call CGContextClearRect(gc, CGRectInfinite).
If you want to use a clipping mask with a hole in it, you can do so without using a CALayer, and you can build it a little more simply than in the answer you linked, by using the even-odd rule and CGRectInfinite:
CGContextSaveGState(GC); {
CGContextBeginPath(gc);
CGContextAddRect(gc, myRect); // or whatever simple path you want here
CGContextAddRect(gc, CGRectInfinite);
CGContextEOClip(gc);
// drawing code here is clipped to the exterior of myRect
} CGContextRestoreGState(gc);

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