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Core Animator is helping iOS and Mac developers create stunning animations using simple visual tools. They can focus on creating animations and Core Animator will take care of the Objective-C or Swift code. Here is our interview with Jason Smith from Core Animator’s team:

Q: What is Core Animator?

A: Core Animator is a simple visual tool for creating animations on iOS and Mac. It allows designers, animators, and developers to create fun and engaging animations, and export them to native Swift or Objective-C code. It’s a keyframe based animation tool that allows control over position, scale, rotation, and other properties along a timeline. During export, these keyframes are translated directly to Core Animation code. Once in an app, each animation can be kicked off with just a single line of code.

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Q: What is under the hood? Tell us something more about the technology behind Core Animator?

A: If we take a peek under the hood, we’ll see that Core Animator is written entirely in Objective-C. The use of 3rd party frameworks is extremely limited.

The application is basically segmented into two separate, yet dependent parts. The model stores information for each property of each element across a timeline. The canvas is responsible for visualizing this information and allowing the user to change it. As the user manipulates elements on the canvas, keyframes are automatically generated and property information stored in the model. During export, this information is used to generate the resulting code file.

Q: What was technically the most challenging part of developing it?

A: As in all software development, there were problems to solve throughout the entire development process. The model went through several iterations. The UI changed over time. Feauteres were added and removed. Bugs, once fixed, resurfaced.

However, the most challenging aspect has probably been keeping the canvas in sync with the timeline. This is a critical component to get right. As a user scrubs through their animation, it needs to look, both exacty as they created it too look, as well as exactly as it will show up on the device. In addition, it must be performant. There simply cannot be a delay for the canvas to update while interacting with the time slider.

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Q: Do you have any new features in the pipeline? What are your plans?

A: We are very excited by the wonderful reception that Core Animator has received. We have gotten a lot of feedback and have been adding much of it to our development schedule. I can’t talk about all of the upcoming new features, but some of them include: 3x image support, movie file export, and Xamarin support. The latter two were not on our schedule prior to shipping the product and came from user feedback.

The future of the product is bright. We are excited to continue to develop it actively and our users can expect many updates to come.

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Q: What’s the coolest use of Core Animator you’ve seen until now?

A: The product has only been out for a couple of weeks, but it’s great to see how people are using it. We’ve heard of individuals using it as a prototypeing tool, which is really cool. Others are creating animated UI controls with it, which we love. There is also a fantastic user-made Swift game tutorial using Core Animator on YouTube. Honestly, the reception has been phenomenal, and we are loving everything that we’re seeing done with Core Animator.