Question

I need help with CABasicAnimation. I am trying to move a NSView left by 300 pixels. I found this SO thread: How to animate the frame of an layer with CABasicAnimation?

Turns out animating the frame is not possible and one of the answer points to a link to QA on Apple’s website but it takes me a to a generic page:
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#qa/qa1620/_index.html

So, how can I do something as simple as translation of my NSView/CALyer?
Thanks!

Answer 1

NSView has a protocol called NSAnimatablePropertyContainer which allows you to create basic animations for views:

The NSAnimatablePropertyContainer protocol defines a way to add
animation to an existing class with a minimum of API impact …
Sending of key-value-coding compliant “set” messages to the proxy will
trigger animation for automatically animated properties of its target
object.

The NSAnimatablePropertyContainer protocol can be found here

I recently used this technique to change the origin of a frame:

-(void)setOrigin:(NSPoint)aPoint {
    [[self animator] setFrameOrigin:aPoint];
}

Instead of calling the [view setFrameOrigin:], I created another method called setOrigin: which then applies the setFrameOrigin: call to the view’s animator.

If you need to change the duration of the animation, you can do so like this (similar to CATransactions):

-(void)setOrigin:(NSPoint)aPoint {
    [NSAnimationContext beginGrouping];
    [[NSAnimationContext currentContext] setCompletionHandler:^{
        ...Completion Callback Code goes here...
    }];
    [[NSAnimationContext currentContext] setDuration:1.0];
    [[self animator] setFrameOrigin:aPoint];
    [NSAnimationContext endGrouping];
}

The NSAnimationContext is described here