What's the most straightforward way of painting RGBA data into a view on Mac OS X?

Question

Hey guys,

Long story short, every 60^th of a second I have a relatively small buffer (256x240) of RGBA data (8 bits per component, 4 bytes per pixel) that is refreshed with new data, and I want to display it (I guess inside an NSView, but anything is welcome). What's the most straightforward way to do it? Building a CGImageRef from a CGBitmapContext to write it to the CGContextRef obtained from the NSGraphicsContext seems a bit convoluted.

Answer 1

Building a CGImageRef from a CGBitmapContext to write it to the CGContextRef obtained from the NSGraphicsContext seems a bit convoluted.

It is. Specifically, the “bit” is CGBitmapContext; you don't need that if you already have raster data to create an image from. Just create the image, and then draw it into the CGContext you got from the current NSGraphicsContext.