How can I accurately time animations on an iPhone inside the normal flow of a program?

Question

I've been using CALayer animations in my program, primarily to move around CALayers with animation on my screen. My problem is that I don't want to exit the layer-moving (card dealing, as it happens) method until all of the cards are done dealing. How can this be done cleanly?

Presume that my layer-moving method is called by different methods at different times, so it's better to let the normal flow of the program bring me back to the starting place, rather than trying to go back and forth with delegation.

Trying something simple like udelay() didn't work because it appears to block the display of the animation too.

Any ideas? Bonus if it's something I could use to pause for the completion of a built animation too (specifically, the animated dismissal of a modalViewController in what I'm working on now, but it'd be nice to have mechanisms that would regular pause, then continue on when various Animated: things occur).

Answer 1

CAAnimation has a delegate method animationDidStop:finished: and UIView has setAnimationDidStopSelector:. You can pause what you are doing at the beginning of the animation, and use these to resume. For example, if you want to pause a timer, set timerRunning = NO right at the animation code, then timerRunning = YES in the didStop method.