CGAffineTransform

Any change to a view's position, scale, or rotation can now be stored in a property of the view called transform. It's a CGAffineTransform struct, and it's a bit cryptic if you've never worked with transformation matrices before.

A transformation matrix nothing more than a two-dimensional array of numbers. Okay, perhaps I shouldn't say "just", as transformation matrices are quite powerful. They can store complex changes to the position and shape of an object, including rotating, scaling, moving, and skewing (or shearing) the view as it's drawn. This adds a little bit of programmer complexity if you want to do anything more than the absolute basics, but it opens up a world of possibilities.


To translate a view from its current position, you would pass the view's transform property here. To translate the view from its original position, you would pass in CGAffineTransformIdentity. Here is an example that would move the view five points to the right and ten points down.

theView.transform = CGAffineTransformTranslate(theView.transform, 5.0, 10.0);