Core Animation Book

The Pragmatic Programmers have just published a Beta version of Bill Dudney’s forthcoming Core Animation book.

Mac OS X Leopard introduces a fantastic new technology that makes writing applications with animated and cinematic user interfaces much easier. We’ll explore this new technology by starting with the familiar concepts you already know from the pre-Leopard development kits.

Then we’ll see how they apply to the new frameworks and APIs. We’ll build on your existing knowledge of Cocoa and bring you efficiently up to speed on what Core Animation is all about.

With this book in hand, you can add Core Animation to your Cocoa applications, and make stunning user interfaces that your user’s will be showing off to their friends.

The Beta book program let us access the book as it is written and provides the option to also get the paper book when released (planned for july 2008). I’ve just brought the combo, and downloaded the PDF. It’s about 70 pages long for now, about a third of the planned 220 pages, and it looks like 70 pages of pleasure if, like me, you enjoy computer animations and the possibility of using them in your programs.

The author recount how, back in the NeXTStep days, he used to create files just so he could delete them and see the nice recycling animation in the dock. I vaguely remember doing the same… Now, could someone tell us if the black hole, which was the ancestor of the recycler, was also animated?