Hi all,
I have an application in which I'm doing some custom drawing, a bunch of lines on a gradient background, like so (ignore the text, they're just UILabels):
http://prehensile.co.uk/outgoing/Screenshot2010-06-09at12.22.32.png
At the moment, that's all done by starting a new CGContext, drawing stuff into it with CGContextDrawLinearGradient and CGContextStrokePath, then finally saving the resulting image with UIGraphicsGetImageFromCurrentImageContext. The positioning info is calculated while I'm laying out those labels, so it'd be a PITA (and duplication of effort) to calculate it all over again when the containing UIView is drawn with drawRect, so I'm drawing it ahead of time into a UIImage. All works fine, so far so good.
However, I have a sneaking suspicion that it may be more efficient to use CALayers to do this drawing. My (cursory) understanding of the difference between the two approaches is that a CALayer is more like a bunch of instructions to draw stuff, and so takes up less memory until it's actually drawn onscreen, whereas drawing everything into a UIImage ahead of time means that you've got a sodding great bitmap kicking around in memory all the time, whether it's drawn or not.
Is that a correct understanding? What is generally considered to be the best way of drawing custom images on the iPhone?