Knee deep in Cocoa

[Malachite]

I've invested quite a bit of time and money in an effort to develop an OSX application which will read a realtime stream of physiological data and display this information for the user. I'm wondering before I delve too deep into studying Quartz if it is the way to go for constantly updating the graphic display based on the incoming stream. Are there fundamental limitations that I need to be aware of? Is this a stupid question?

 

[lurk]

Don't go there if you are talking about trying to do a truly low level Quartz interface. You will lose. What you really should do is try to implement the thing using the "normal" stuff like NSBezierPath and the like. Then if you find that there redisplay is too slow r is taking too many resources look into optimizing your redrawing code. Get Scott Anguish's book on Cocoa it has several good chapters on optimizing drawing.

There is a lot you can do to sped up a slow display if need be but the lesson I carried away from going through Scott's text was that the old rules for optimizing display do not really apply and can actually hurt you.

 

[slur]

I concur. OpenGL can also be very powerful for drawing lines and areas, but it has a fairly steep learning curve.