Question

I have a basic spinning animation of the iPhone. Is there any way that I can “pause” the animation so that the position of the view will be maintained? I guess one way of doing this would be to cause the animation to “complete” instead of calling “remove” on it, how would I do that?

CABasicAnimation* rotationAnimation;
rotationAnimation = [CABasicAnimation animationWithKeyPath:@"transform.rotation.z"];
rotationAnimation.toValue = [NSNumber numberWithFloat: M_PI * 2];
rotationAnimation.duration = 100;
rotationAnimation.cumulative = YES;
rotationAnimation.repeatCount = HUGE_VALF;
rotationAnimation.removedOnCompletion = NO;
rotationAnimation.fillMode = kCAFillModeForwards;
[myView.layer addAnimation:rotationAnimation forKey:@"rotationAnimation"];

Answer 1

Recently appeared Apple’s technical note QA1673 describes how to pause/resume layer’s animation.

Pause and resume animations listing is below:

-(void)pauseLayer:(CALayer*)layer
{
    CFTimeInterval pausedTime = [layer convertTime:CACurrentMediaTime() fromLayer:nil];
    layer.speed = 0.0;
    layer.timeOffset = pausedTime;
}

-(void)resumeLayer:(CALayer*)layer
{
    CFTimeInterval pausedTime = [layer timeOffset];
    layer.speed = 1.0;
    layer.timeOffset = 0.0;
    layer.beginTime = 0.0;
    CFTimeInterval timeSincePause = [layer convertTime:CACurrentMediaTime() fromLayer:nil] - pausedTime;
    layer.beginTime = timeSincePause;
}

Edit:
iOS 10 introduced new API – UIViewPropertyAnimator that allows to handle animations more interactively, for example it makes easy to pause and resume animation or ‘seek’ it to some particular progress value.