Learning AV Foundation

Book excerpt: The massive success of apps like Instagram, iMovie, and Vine proves that users want tools to help them capture, edit, and share their lives. If you want to build those apps for iOS or OS X, you need to understand Apple's most powerful media framework: AV Foundation. Until now, however, this meant wrestling with Apple's massive, out-of-date API documentation. Now, there's a more productive and efficient alternative. Learning AV Foundation helps you gain real-world mastery by teaching each aspect of the framework in the context of building real world applications. By the time you finish, you'll have built a voice memo app, custom video player, video editor, and an image and video camera app -- and you'll have mastered all the techniques you need to write your own advanced media apps with AV Foundation. Most chapters contain additional optional exercises, to help you further deepen your understanding. Learning AV Foundation comes with a complete collection of starter apps that abstract away visual aspects, so you can focus solely on AV Foundation without getting bogged down in supporting infrastructure. Coverage includes: Understanding the AV Foundation media environment ; Basic techniques for working with media: playback, recording, and more ; Basic and advanced media capture ; Media creation and editing: composing media, mixing audio, creating video transitions, and layering animated content ; Advanced topics, including real-time audio and video effects ; Integrating AV Foundation with Core Audio.