Chapter 7

Well-Rendered Miscellany

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research,

would it?

-----Albert Einstein

When starting this chapter, I tried to find a suitable quote about miscellany.
Unfortunately, all I could find were collections of miscellaneous quotes. But the one by
Albert Einstein is a real gem and can almost apply because you, dear reader, are
c o n d u c t i n g r e s e a r c h -----research in how to make richer, more involving and fun software.
The products and tools that Apple releases are fun t o u s e -----to the point of almost being
playful, charming, and wondrous. If vacuuming the house was as much fun as using an
iPad, we’d all win awards from Good Housekeeping magazine.

In books like this, sometimes it’s hard to make clean classifications of a particular topic.
So, we just have to dump a lot things into a single chapter when they might not warrant
a chapter of their own. So here I’m going to cover some classic presentation and
rendering tricks, whether they can be applied to the solar-system project or not, that
integrate UIKit elements with OpenGL windows and user interaction with components in
your scenes.

Frame Buffer Objects

Usually referred to as FBOs, you can think of frame buffer objects as simply rendering
surfaces. Up until now, you’ve been using one and you probably didn’t know it; the
EAGL context that your scene renders to is an FBO. What you probably didn’t know is
that you can have multiple screens at the same time. As before, we’ll start off with the
old standard, and then see where it can go from there.