Question

I have a spinning circle UI element that is updated by an NSTimer. I also have a UIScrollView that would ‘block’ the spinning circle while being scrolled. That was expected, because the timer and the scroll view where both in the same thread.

So I put the timer in a separate thread which basically works great! I can see it working because NSLogs keep coming even while scrolling.

But my problem is that my spinning circle is still stopping on scrolling! I suspect redrawing is halted until the next iteration of the main thread’s run loop (?). So even if its angle is changed all the time, it might not be redrawn…

Any ideas what I can do? Thanks!

Answer 1

While scrolling, the main thread’s run loop is in UITrackingRunLoopMode. So what you need to do is schedule your timer in that mode (possibly in addition to the default mode). I believe NSRunLoopCommonModes includes both the default and event tracking modes, so you can just do this:

NSTimer *timer = [NSTimer timerWithTimeInterval:0.42 target:foo selector:@selector(doSomething) userInfo:nil repeats:YES];
[[NSRunLoop currentRunLoop] addTimer:timer forMode:NSRunLoopCommonModes];

By the way, you should do this all on the main thread. No need to spawn a background thread (unless each timer invocation is going to do some lengthy processing).