Canvas is a project to simplify iOS development for both designers and developers.
It had been difficult for designers to get hands on building the product with the lack of objective-c and Xcode experience, and a hard time for developer to use reasonable amount of time and lines of code just to achieve really simple effects.

With Canvas, creating stunning animations requires zero lines of code, trendy effects like the Parallax headers, Sticky sections, Blurred Backgrounds, will be as simple as few lines of code changes.

Demo App

The demo app in this project uses CocoaPods, please run pod install after you download this project, then open Canvas.xcworkspace.

See this screencast in action:

Unable to build demo?

If you’re getting some errors like Accelerate.framework not include, please update your CocoaPods version:

$ [sudo] gem install cocoapods

We also have a live demo avaliable at homepage.

Getting Started

If you’re already on CocoaPods, installing our library is easy:

$ edit Podfile
platform :ios, '7.0'
pod 'Canvas', '~> 0.1.2'

Make sure you also update the dependencies by running this command afterwards:

pod install

Then you should now have the Xcode workspace (.xcworkspace) ready.

$open App.xcworkspace

That’s it and you are good to go! See our blog posts for hands on tutorial.

How to Use

Using Interface Builder (no code required)

Specify the class CSAnimationView, and configurate the runtime attributes duration, delay, and type.

Please also get started with our more detailed explaination on what Canvas can do.

Using Code

It’s very similar to using Interface Builder, instead you just setup the custom view in code.

#import "Canvas.h"

CSAnimationView *animationView = [[CSAnimationView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0, 0, 100, 100)];

animationView.backgroundColor = [UIColor whiteColor];

animationView.duration = 0.5;
animationView.delay    = 0;
animationView.type     = CSAnimationTypeMorph;

[self.view addSubview:animationView];

// Add your subviews into animationView
// [animationView addSubview:<#(UIView *)#>]

// Kick start the animation immediately
[animationView startCanvasAnimation];

Issues

It has been reported that current version doesn’t work very well with AutoLayout. Canvas animates view frame/position but autolayout requires manipulating constraints. I am not sure if there’s any quick way without changing from the ground up. Our discussion here has some proposed solution but seems imperfect (but it works under iOS 8 tho). Please join our conversation or make pull request if you know a better solution!

Updates

v0.1.2 - 9 new animations, thanks for
Jake-Piatkowski adding those
awesome effects!

v0.1.1 - Minor fixes

v0.1 - Initial release

Requirements

iOS 7, Xcode 5

Who’s behind?

• James Tang (@jamztang)
• Meng To (@mengto)

LICENSE

Canvas is available under the MIT license. See the LICENSE file for more info.