I am looking for a raster graphics framework for Mac OS X. Specifically, I want some kind of view that I can manipulate (at least conceptually) like a matrix of pixels. My program will generate the pixel data programmatically.
QuickDraw fits that description nicely, but is deprecated. As far as I can tell, there is nothing equivalent in Core Graphics. Am I missing something?
A plain C framework would be preferable to an Objective-C one, but I'm not too fussy.
What about dividing the width and height of the view by itself, then draw width x height squares? You could just use an NSPoint and increase it by one until it hits width x height.
QD was deprecated because there is no way to do implement it efficiently with the the current generation of fully composited UIs and GPU HW. For that reason there is nothing quite like QD on the system, and there won't be. Allowing direct access to the backing store forces at best forces a lot more bus transactions to and from the GPU, and at worst may prevent a texture from being loaded on to the card itself, and some cases may cause software fallbacks.
It is clear there are sometimes reasons people need pixel level access to a backing store, so there are some mechanisms to do it, but there are no real convenience methods and if you can find some way to avoid it you should. If you can't avoid it you can use CoreGraphics to create a bitmap context using CGBitmapContextCreate where you have access to the backing store and can manipulate the backing store directly. It is not simple to work with, and it is slow.
The Simple Directmedia Layer has pixel access. It may be over kill as it is a porting library, but the entire API is in plain C. I do not know what it uses as an underlying MacOS API uses. Best to check the website to see if it is suitable for your purposes.
Alternatively, you could use OpenGL textures.
The best way to do this is Core Image. It's designed for working with pixels, and it's very fast because it lets you do the work on the graphics card.