UIView animation duration - ios

Question

I have an UIView and I want to change it's background color. That works well using the UIView beginAnimation:context: method. However, the animation 'lasts' for like 1 second or so. I want it to last 5 seconds. This is the code I'm using:
- (void)updateSky:(NSString *)time {
[UIView beginAnimations: #"backgroundUpdate" context:nil];
[UIView setAnimationDuration: 5.0];
gradient.colors = [NSArray arrayWithObjects: (id)[[UIColor colorWithRed:0x63/255.0f green:0xA9/255.0f blue:0xFF/255.0f alpha:1.0] CGColor],
(id)[[UIColor colorWithRed:0x8C/255.0f green:0xBF/255.0f blue:0xFF/255.0f alpha:1.0] CGColor], nil];
if(time == #"night") {
gradient.colors = [NSArray arrayWithObjects: (id)[[UIColor colorWithRed:0x1E/255.0f green:0x1E/255.0f blue:0x1E/255.0f alpha:1.0] CGColor],
(id)[[UIColor colorWithRed:0x2C/255.0f green:0x4C/255.0f blue:0x72/255.0f alpha:1.0] CGColor], nil];
}
[UIView commitAnimations];
}
gradient is defined as follows:
CAGradientLayer *gradient;
Am I doing something wrong?

Answer 1

The way to animate setting a UIView's background color using view animation is to set its backgroundColor property. You don't seem to be doing that. What is this thing gradient and what is its colors property? The problem here seems to be that you're using UIView animation, but colors is not a UIView animatable property so this makes no sense. You need to provide more code to show what you're really doing. For example, if this is an implicit layer animation you'd use +[CATransaction setAnimationDuration:] to set the duration.
(Also this whole beginAnimations / commitAnimations structure, while not exactly deprecated, is virtually on the chopping block. That's irrelevant to your question, but it would be good to get out of it if you can, just on principle. You should be using animateWithDuration:delay:options:animations:completion:, or implicit layer animation, or explicit Core Animation.)