I'm a faily newby with iOS development and I'm trying to figure out how CATiledLayer works. NOT how to use it! 😉
There are two key features of CATiledLayer I want to know how it works.
1. Visible bounds automatic reporting. How does CATiledLayer know its visible bounds have changed? Can I create a custom CALayer and register to know the same information?
2. Tile drawing. How are these tiles drawn? Are they drawn as sub layers?
The reason I want to find out how these two key points work is that I'm building a custom UIView that can have a very large width and a CALayer will crash due to having such a large backed layer. CATiledLayer has a light memory usage and its' almost perfect!
The reason I don't want to use CATiledLayer is how it works internally. All drawing happens on a background thread. I know you can even have the drawing logic be called on the main thread but this would happen on the next drawing cycle. Because drawing doesn't happen on the same draw cycle, during a view resize our drawing logic has a delay updating the drawings thus causing the UIView content to shake during updates by the user.
Just to add a little more to this. I'm building an audio editor where it shows the audio waveform and the user can resize this clip. The clip is shown inside a collectionview. The mentioned issue above with CATiledLayer seems to be the same issue Garage band has. I can barely notice it when resizing an audio clip to the left. They are likely using CATiledLayer.
