Hi,
I'm writing an iOS app which needs to generate and animate individual text characters dynamically. The actual text being displayed will be dynamic and I want to use layers and masks to animate individual characters. Does anyone have any experience of what is the best and/or easiest way to do this? I've been looking at CoreGraphics and CATextLayer.
Is CATextLayer actually just making CG calls under the hood?
Well, the only way to do this is with CAAnimation. You'll have to animate each character individually.
I don't think that CALayer is making calls to CG-stuff, because it's a pretty full calss on it's own and doesn't need other frameworks. The only CG-stuff that is using is CGFont.
One simple way to do this is by calling drawRect (via setNeedsDisplay) off of a timer (or CADisplayLink). Just update the xy location (rotation, size, etc.) of each character each animation frame and redraw the view containing the characters.