So I was asked to do a easy feature recently, provide two button to rotate a image view 90 degree clockwise or counterclockwise with animation. How hard could it be?

NSView provide a handy variable called frameCenterRotation, which define the rotation angle of the view around the underlying layer’s anchorPoint.

This is also an animatable property, so all we need is to set frameCenterRotation using animator():

imageView.animator().frameCenterRotation += 90


Easy piece of cake.

Wait, what?

Let’s slow it down for a little bit:

It looks like the layer’s anchorPoint is also animated from 0 to 0.5, which should be 0.5 by default as suggested in this document:

… The default value of this property is (0.5, 0.5), which represents the center of the layer’s bounds rectangle.

Even if you change the anchorPoint manually to 0.5:

let layer = imageView.layer
print(layer.anchorPoint) // (0, 0)

layer.anchorPoint = CGPoint(x: 0.5, y: 0.5)
print(layer.anchorPoint) // (0.5, 0.5)

imageView.animator().frameCenterRotation += 90

print(layer.anchorPoint) // (0, 0)


It was changed back to 0.

This lead us to a conclusion:

The cake is a lie.

The best guess is that in the setter of frameCenterRotation, it first set its layer’s a anchor point to center, then it do the rotation, and finally set the anchor point back to zero.

But when setting it through an animator proxy, it animates everything. What it really should be is to set the anchor point with animation disabled, then animates the rotation, and then finally, in the animation completion, set anchor point back to what it was with, of course, animation disabled.

The Workaround

Calling frameCenterRotation is a death end, now we need to find a way to rotate it on our own.

Other than firing a bug report that most likely won’t be fixed, luckily, we can modify layer properties directly:

let rotation = CATransform3DMakeRotation(n * CGFloat.pi / 2, 0, 0, 1) // n is a CGFloat with an initial value of 0.
imageView.animator().layer?.transform = rotation
n += 1


The above code rotate the layer 90 degrees counterclockwise every time it gets runs.

It rotate! But not about its center, and there’s no animation. We still need to change the anchorPoint to center:

layer.anchorPoint = CGPoint(x: 0.5, y: 0.5)


Now it do rotate about layer’s center, but it jumps to bottom left, the origin point of its frame. To fix this, we need to also change its position:

layer.position = CGPoint(x: layer.frame.midX, y: layer.frame.midY)


What about the animation? We already use animator() to animate the property changes?

That is because, by default, AppKit disables implicit animations for its layer-backed views. Since we are animating layer properties directly, we need to programmatically reenable implicit animations in current context:

NSAnimationContext.current.allowsImplicitAnimation = true


Now that’s what I called a rotation!

Complete Code

var n: CGFloat = 1

func rotate(_ sender: NSButton) {
if let layer = imageView.layer, let animatorLayer = imageView.animator().layer {
layer.position = CGPoint(x: layer.frame.midX, y: layer.frame.midY)
layer.anchorPoint = CGPoint(x: 0.5, y: 0.5)

NSAnimationContext.beginGrouping()
NSAnimationContext.current.allowsImplicitAnimation = true
animatorLayer.transform = CATransform3DMakeRotation(n * CGFloat.pi / 2, 0, 0, 1)
NSAnimationContext.endGrouping()

n += 1
}
}