iPhone "slide to unlock" animation

Question

Any ideas as to how Apple implemented the "slide to unlock" (also, "slide to power off" is another identical example) animation?

I thought about some sort of animating mask - but masking is not available on the iPhone OS for performance reasons.

Is there some private API effect (like SuckEffect) that they might have used? A spotlight type of effect? Some Core Animation thing?

Edit: It's definitely not a series of stills. I've seen examples of being edit a plist value or something and customize the string on jailbroken iphones.

Answer 1

It can be easilly done by using Core Animation, animating a mask layer on the layer displaying the text.

Try this in any plain UIViewController (you can start with a new Xcode project based on the View-based application project template), or grab my Xcode project here:

Note that the CALayer.mask property is only available in iPhone OS 3.0 and later.

- (void)viewDidLoad 
{
  self.view.layer.backgroundColor = [[UIColor blackColor] CGColor];

  UIImage *textImage = [UIImage imageNamed:@"SlideToUnlock.png"];
  CGFloat textWidth = textImage.size.width;
  CGFloat textHeight = textImage.size.height;

  CALayer *textLayer = [CALayer layer];
  textLayer.contents = (id)[textImage CGImage];
  textLayer.frame = CGRectMake(10.0f, 215.0f, textWidth, textHeight);

  CALayer *maskLayer = [CALayer layer];

  // Mask image ends with 0.15 opacity on both sides. Set the background color of the layer
  // to the same value so the layer can extend the mask image.
  maskLayer.backgroundColor = [[UIColor colorWithRed:0.0f green:0.0f blue:0.0f alpha:0.15f] CGColor];
  maskLayer.contents = (id)[[UIImage imageNamed:@"Mask.png"] CGImage];

  // Center the mask image on twice the width of the text layer, so it starts to the left
  // of the text layer and moves to its right when we translate it by width.
  maskLayer.contentsGravity = kCAGravityCenter;
  maskLayer.frame = CGRectMake(-textWidth, 0.0f, textWidth * 2, textHeight);

  // Animate the mask layer's horizontal position
  CABasicAnimation *maskAnim = [CABasicAnimation animationWithKeyPath:@"position.x"];
  maskAnim.byValue = [NSNumber numberWithFloat:textWidth];
  maskAnim.repeatCount = HUGE_VALF;
  maskAnim.duration = 1.0f;
  [maskLayer addAnimation:maskAnim forKey:@"slideAnim"];

  textLayer.mask = maskLayer;
  [self.view.layer addSublayer:textLayer];

  [super viewDidLoad];
}

The images used by this code are: