Hey, I'm curious - when you did your (amazing) research/experimentation on NSTableView, did you play around with layer-backed views ?
Hey, yeah I did extensively play around with it, not only in this exploration but even before.
That's what these two gifs are about.
CALayer disabled:
http://www.giphy.com/gifs/3o6fJ8pErz4lcAQxl6
CALayer enabled:
http://www.giphy.com/gifs/xUOxf7wGVGPVDmeYOA
As you can see, the performance difference is HUGE.
I could have done two more gifs while scrolling and it would also show the same performance difference.
Plus like i also wrote somewhere, views are redrawn and buffered differently when they are layer backed.
The thing is, in some cases this could mean worse performance also, so it's important to know, when to use wantsLayer (which is the same as checking CALayer in IB) and on which views to use it and on which views not to.
In my tableView exploration I tested about each single view and combination in terms of performance when having them layer backed or not. Like when you layer back the cell view of a table for example, performance seemed to drop a little instead of increase. This is due to the overhead a layer backed view introduces. So you wanna limit the amount of layer backed views as much as you can and only use them on views that make use of layer backed rendering, like for example the 'Outline View' in my NSTableView exploration.
If there's any more thing you want to know about layer backing, just ask. I may be able to help, since I already read through a lot of stuff regarding this topic.
Edit:
Also since regarding layer backing your version of Aural can be improved.
So you could make use of the CA Instrument tool, which i already posted to improve performance a lot.
Or I could do it as well, if you want.
Here's the link again:
http://jwilling.com/blog/debugging-core-animation-on-osx/
And here's the performance critical part of that article as a quote:
In most applications, it's not possible to remove all blending. After all, sometimes it's useful to have blending. However, by removing as much blending as possible, rendering time can be reduced.
Tips:
- If the background is a solid color, simply set a background color on the layer that matches that of the layer behind it. This allows your layer to be opaque, but still have the same effect.
- The amount of blending occurring is signified by the shade of overlaied red. A light red color indicates little blending. If removing blending isn't possible, try to make the red color as light as possible.
right now your Aural is 100% dark red. I could post screenshots of different applications running through CA Instruments, but i would recommend to try it on your own, since it's very quick to do.
Also this isn't useful for only Aural, but for every other app you're about to write for macOS as well.
You could run apps you already have installed on your Mac through this tool and this way figure out it's blending and layes and why the drawing performance is as good/bad as it is. For example run Finder or iTunes through it and you instantly see why they perform as good as they do in terms of the UI (with iTunes may having some confusing blending on some views, but still it has quite good performance).
Also ran my different NSTableView layer cases through that tool, and you instantly see, depending on where you set layer backing how the red color instantly changes.
Like i said, if you want I can optimize your current UI of Aural regarding the layer backing and blending if you don't want to do it yourself, or don't have the time to do so. Also, I would be curious to see about how much of a difference on performance it would actually make.
