Great comment, thanks for making it. There's nothing like having a domain expert explain the tradeoffs using specifics.
A while back I wrote a reusable class that draws a single button using three overlapping CAGradientLayers each .5 pixels larger than the next layer drawn on top of it. With this arrangement I can then specify top and bottom values for the "outer gradient", "inner gradient" and "body gradient" producing beautiful buttons that are 100% adjustable in code. Since 80% of my skills lie in the development realm vs. the design realm this class has been insanely useful for me across multiple projects.
But obviously not efficient. If I wanted to refactor my class to still have the three levels of run-time rendered gradients along with rounded corners, what would be the most efficient method?
Render the gradients into a resizable UIImage via CG. That differs from approach #2 in the article, which does the same thing, but generates a non-resizable UIImage.
To make a resizable image at runtime, draw into an image as described in approach #2, but make the image have width of left cap + 1 point + right cap, then use -[UIImage resizableImageWithCapInsets:] to generate a wrapper with the correct resizing behavior.
Then: make sure that if you have 100 buttons on-screen which all use the same gradients, you end up reusing the same generated UIImage. You don't want to redraw the same thing for each of them.
A while back I wrote a reusable class that draws a single button using three overlapping CAGradientLayers each .5 pixels larger than the next layer drawn on top of it. With this arrangement I can then specify top and bottom values for the "outer gradient", "inner gradient" and "body gradient" producing beautiful buttons that are 100% adjustable in code. Since 80% of my skills lie in the development realm vs. the design realm this class has been insanely useful for me across multiple projects.
But obviously not efficient. If I wanted to refactor my class to still have the three levels of run-time rendered gradients along with rounded corners, what would be the most efficient method?