Getting Started with Sprite Kit

In iOS 7, Apple introduced Sprite Kit, a framework for the high-performance rendering of 2D graphics. That sounds a bit like Core Graphics and Core Animation, so what’s new here? Well, unlike Core Graphics (which is focused on drawing graphics using a painter’s model) or Core Animation (which is focused on animating attributes of GUI elements), Sprite Kit is focused on a different area entirely: video games! Sprite Kit is built on top of OpenGL, a technology present in many computing platforms that allows modern graphics hardware to write graphics bitmaps into a video buffer at incredible speeds. With Sprite Kit, you get the great performance characteristics of OpenGL, but without needing to dig into the depths of OpenGL coding.