View transitions slowed down on adding OpenGL view - ios

Facing a really, really weird problem with an OpenGL View we are using in our app to perform some custom animations. As soon as the Open GL View is added into the project, all native View animations slow down. And by slow down I don't mean a drop in frame rate. The animations are stutter-free, except much much MUCH slower than normal (like someone enabled "Toggle Slow Animations" in the Simulator).
This is affecting only view transitions animations, for example:
a. transitionFromView
b. presentViewController (iOS6, or presentModalViewController on earlier)
While regular UIView Animations, CABasicAnimation etc proceed at the regular pace.
I haven't seen anything like this, and the results honestly have to be seen to be believed. :) But any idea what the problem could be (I'm not sure which piece of the code would help you debug, and I'm unfortunately not in a position to share screenshots or video)

It seems like the animation gets stuck while loading the OpenGL View, debug the
Lifecycle methods like loadView, viewWillLoad. The loadview, etc. happens within the
transition animation, maybe you can solve the slow animation by sending most of the loading
code in to a custom method which you call in viewdidload or viewdidappear.
It does not interrupt any other animation because thats a totally new action in the queue.
Hope this helps!

Found the solution accidentally several days later.
The problem turned out to be much sillier and unrelated. It so happens that if you have a UIView beginAnimation block that is not closed properly, future animations get all wonky. This faultily coded animation happened to be triggered at more or less the same time as the OpenGL view was being initialized, which led to my erroneous belief that the OpenGL View was at the root of this.
Thanks for the help!

Related

Avoiding that brief 'Empty Screen' using SceneKit

I'm making a scene kit app and it all works very nicely indeed. My only annoyance is that for a brief second after loading, my SCNView object is completely blank. I presume that this is because the scene hasn't loaded or rendered yet, but I'd like to avoid it if possible.
I tried putting a masking view mimicking the app's loading screen in front of the SCNView and fading it out once rendering began using renderer:didRenderScene:atTime but alas, the animation for fading out the masking view doesn't happen (it just flashes off immediately instead of fading out). So I put the masking view in the app's main window as an experiment and gave it a short delay. However, even with the delay before removing that mask, the SCNView was still entirely blank for a split second before the scene appeared.
Can anyone tell me how to avoid this annoying graphical artefact?
As usual there is a simple fix that I just failed to find until now. After your scene has been completely set up, simply do:
sceneView.prepareObject(scene, shouldAbortBlock:nil)
...and bingo! No delay. It's caused because scenes, like all objects in a SCNView, are lazily loaded. Calling prepareObject lets you cache them in advance.

Image in UIImageView glitches, how to stop this? [duplicate]

I'm using Xcode 5.1.1
When i click the BACK button from ViewController 1 to ViewController 2, and when VC 1 appears the ImageView glitches for 1 second before going back to normal. I tried programming the segue with performSegueWithIdentifier but that didn't solve the issue. I tried using Modal's cross dissolve transition, cover vertical and partial cross but they don't help the glitch either. Only Flip Horizontal doesn't have the glitch but it wouldn't look good with my app. I'm currently using unwind segue to go from VC 2 to VC 1 but the VC 1 is glitching for 1 second. I tried regular modal but that creates worse problems. What do i do?
Well you should admit that "The UIImageView" is quite a generic assumption to figure out what your issue actually is. Just for pure diagnosis purpose I'd do the following checks:
Check the size of your UIImage you're assigning to the UIImageView. If the UIImage is too big the higher resolution might cause some rendering problem in the animations.
To have a proper check of what's going on you might want to run instruments adding "Time Profiler" to your tab. Performing either the pop or dismiss of your VC2 you should be able to figure out where the glitch comes from.
I know it's quite a generic answer but with the little info you provided don't think anyone might be able to help you more than that.
Hope this helps.

Animations during first keyboard appearance is sometimes not smooth

I have often noticed that UIView animations are often not smooth during the first becomeFirstResponder event when the keyboard appears for the first time. I am referring to animations that occur with the keyboard animation, such as manually scrolling the UIView to make a textField visible. The animation is always smooth after the first time it is executed.
Is there a technical reason why this would be the case? I was thinking that there might be some lazy loading or optimization that happens with UIView animations on the first run, then gets stored in cache for reuse. Are there lessons learned around this? If this is not clear to this audience, I can try to recreate the issue in a test project.
While this does not answer the question WHY this happens, it explains how to fix it.
Why are iOS animations slow the first time they are run?
Basically, you need to do animations on "DID" events rather than "WILL" or "SHOULD". The system performs it's animations during the "will/should" events, so apparently there is some colluding happening. This does not explain why the behavior is inconsistent between the first run and all other runs.
I thought, as may some of you, that I should put the animation in the "textFieldWillBeginEditing" because I wanted the animation to run concurrently with the keyboard animation. Luckily, putting the animation code in "DID" actually still ensures that the animation happens concurrently. Fantastic.
If anyone still has an explanation of the inconsistency between the first and latter runs, I'll still hold his question open and award you with an upvote and question answer. Thanks!

What's causing the delay in my segues?

One of my views freezes up for several seconds when I tap the back button.
In addition, when I tap on one of the items in this view, it shows a popup (custom, not a UIPopoverController). This popup appears quite fast, but when I "flip" the popup to see it's back side, the same long delay occurs.
I suspect the reason has something to do with the complexity of the view. As you can see in the screenshot below, it's a collection view, it has a background and some of the subviews are rotated (UIViewEdgeAntialiasing is on).
I used the Time Profiler in Instruments to figure out what's going on, but I'm stuck.
I don't see anything useful unless I deselect "Hide System Libraries":
If I look at the method names, I think they are related to auto layout. That suggests that it's trying to render something during the segue. But methods such as cellForItemAtIndexPath are not called.
There is also an iPhone version of this app where I don't experience this problem at all. It uses a tableview in stead of a collectionview. It also has a background and rotated pictures.
I took these measurements using the simulator; on my iPad Mini the situation is worse; it can take up to 20 seconds before the animation starts.
Update - Things I've tried thanks to your answers:
turn off UIViewEdgeAntialiasing : no effect on performance
I think this might be due to the UIViewEdgeAntialiasing flag. It seems that your main view (the one with lots of slightly rotated pictures) have lots of antialiased edges and hence is very taxing on the iPad's GPU. The fact that the drawing performance slows down when your popover is spinning (ie when the background is showing again) gives this some credence.
Try turning it off and see if the performance improves. How does it look like?
Rotation was the bad guy here. Each UICollectionViewCell has a UIView as a container view and within that is a UIImageView. I rotate it like this:
container.transform = CGAffineTransformMakeRotation(M_PI * someRandomFloat);
Remove that line and everything is snappy.
I use the same technique on the iPhone, but apparently this kind of rotation has less of a performance impact in UITableViewCell than in UICollectionViewCell.
I tried subclassing UICollectionViewFlowLayout to rotate cell itself in stead of one subview. Unfortunately that causes a similar performance issue.

UIimageView animation is using too much memory

I have two uiimageview animations. One on each of two view controllers in a navigation controller.
They have about 10-15 frames each. This is the smallest I can possibly make them.
They seem to be using a hell of a lot of memory though. Especially on startAnimating. Is there any way around this?
On my iPad this is causing a memory warning an a leak. I've tried looking into it, and as per an earlier question on here I've been using a lot of memory tools and such and narrowed the issue down to the startAnimating function.
I have read that this is because on startAnimating the imageView puts all the images into memory at this point.
However removing from superview and releasing dosen't seem to have a marked effect on the amount of memory reclaimed.
Is there any way around this? Bar creating a custom OpenGL style animation?
Thanks
Even i use to face same Problem.. I came up with solution by using custom navigation controller. Now i don't see any memory warnings or memory leaks.
Try to implement your own custom navigationController.

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