Pulse animations with 3 lines on iOS

2 min readApr 12, 2016

“Pulsator” is an OSS which enable to add pulse animations easily for iOS.

It’s good for indicating:

locations on map
beacons of iBeacon
Bluetooth Low Energy (BTLE) devices
or other “Radio Wave” related devices

It can be installed in an instant, so I use it on not only my client works, but also small prototypes, or works in hackathons.

It’s written in Swift, and the license is MIT.

How to use?

It can be used with only 3 lines of code.

1. Initialize

let pulsator = Pulsator()

2. Add to your view’s layer

view.layer.addSublayer(pulsator)

3. Start animating

pulsator.start()

Customizations / Demo

You can customize the radius, color, number of pulses, etc. Please refer to the demo project or Playground which are in the repository.

Demo

Example/PulsatorDemo.xcodeproj

Playground

Pulsator.playground

Browser Demo

You can try also on browsers.

PulsatorDemo

Installation

It supports CocoaPods and Carthage.

CocoaPods

Add into your Podfile.

pod “Pulsator”

Carthage

Add into your Cartfile.

github “shu223/Pulsator”

Showcase

I used the Objective-C version of this library “PulsingHalo” in many client works, open source projects and so on.

WHILL

Moff

BONX

Waves which indicate “talking”

iOS-9-Sampler

Indicates the locations and strengths of forth touches.

Inside of Pulsator

Pulsator is implemented using Core Animation.

CAReplicatorLayer

Pulsator is a subclass of CAReplicatorLayer.

public class Pulsator: CAReplicatorLayer

CAReplicatorLayer is a layer which creates `instanceCount` copies of its sublayers, so Pulsator uses it to generate multiple pulses.

CAAnimationGroup

The animation for each pulse consists of scale animation + opacity animation, and Pulsator use those animations combining with CAAnimationGroup.


let scaleAnimation = CABasicAnimation(keyPath: “transform.scale.xy”)
// some setup
 
let opacityAnimation = CAKeyframeAnimation(keyPath: “opacity”)
// some setup
 
animationGroup = CAAnimationGroup()
animationGroup.animations = [scaleAnimation, opacityAnimation]

About me

I’m an iOS freelancer in Japan, welcome works from abroad.

You can check my past works here: My Profile Summary — Medium

Other contacts: