SCNView frame rate

There’s no API to get any kind of performance information from an SCNView, even as basic as a rolling frame rate.  But it’s not hard to add – you can be notified when each frame is drawn by overriding the -draw method.  For example: Update:However, if you’re layer-backed the “draw” method isn’t used. Instead you… Read more

SCNGeometrys can be shared by multiple SCNNodes

It’s not explicitly documented either way, but it is perfectly valid, evidently, to attach the same SCNGeometry to multiple SCNNodes.  Works as you’d expect – changes to the geometry are reflected across all the nodes identically. It doesn’t appear to have any performance impact though, oddly.  At least not in fairly trivial scenes.  It might… Read more

Animations only work when the node is already in the scene

If you try to add an animation to an SCNNode that’s not yet part of a scene graph, nothing will happen.  It won’t give any indication of failing, and the performance of rendering implies it’s still running them, but there will be no visible effect.  So, addChildNode: and then addAnimation:forKey:.

Radar or GTFO

Just ran across this old post by Daniel Pasco, which showed again up in NetNewsWire presumably because of some RSS reboot on their end.  Anyway, it reminded me of dealing with 3rd party developers – mostly indirectly, through Developer Relations – and the trials it involved. I particularly like the captioned picture of Mike.  Nice.… Read more

Different icons for release vs debug builds

Ben_hawk asked how to do this on Stackoverflow, and I was both curious how to do it myself.  Turns out it’s not too tricky – see my answer in the same post. A big reason for doing this even early in development, prior to distributing builds to anyone else, is that it makes it much… Read more

keyDown: fires even when your app is in the background

It appears that the standard behaviour for an NSView (NSResponder in general?) is for it to “hold onto” pressed keys.  That is, if a key is held down the view will keep getting keyDown: events until the key is lifted, no matter what else happens.  So it can lose focus or the app loses frontmost… Read more