Although we may not want to support this property long-term, there are some usages of it that are difficult to avoid. Specifically because the complexity it adds is both low, and contained to a small area of the code that would be easy to remove it, it would be great to support this. The usage relates to apps that require the Interop protocol, and are architected to expect a few methods / protocols being implemented on the UICollectionView class itself. It does not directly override ASCollectionView behaviors. So hypothetically, it would also work if it were possible to set ASCollectionView's superclass. Instead, the app is making its own subclass descend from ASCollectionView and use the interop APIs, even in environments where there are no ASCellNodes ever returned.
Installation
ASDK is available via CocoaPods or Carthage. See our Installation guide for instructions.
Performance Gains
AsyncDisplayKit's basic unit is the node. An ASDisplayNode is an abstraction over UIView, which in turn is an abstraction over CALayer. Unlike views, which can only be used on the main thread, nodes are thread-safe: you can instantiate and configure entire hierarchies of them in parallel on background threads.
To keep its user interface smooth and responsive, your app should render at 60 frames per second — the gold standard on iOS. This means the main thread has one-sixtieth of a second to push each frame. That's 16 milliseconds to execute all layout and drawing code! And because of system overhead, your code usually has less than ten milliseconds to run before it causes a frame drop.
AsyncDisplayKit lets you move image decoding, text sizing and rendering, layout, and other expensive UI operations off the main thread, to keep the main thread available to respond to user interaction.
Advanced Developer Features
As the framework has grown, many features have been added that can save developers tons of time by eliminating common boilerplate style structures common in modern iOS apps. If you've ever dealt with cell reuse bugs, tried to performantly preload data for a page or scroll style interface or even just tried to keep your app from dropping too many frames you can benefit from integrating ASDK.
Learn More
- Read the our Getting Started guide
- Get the sample projects
- Browse the API reference
Getting Help
We use Slack for real-time debugging, community updates, and general talk about ASDK. Signup yourself or email AsyncDisplayKit(at)gmail.com to get an invite.
Contributing
We welcome any contributions. See the CONTRIBUTING file for how to get involved.
License
AsyncDisplayKit is BSD-licensed. We also provide an additional patent grant. The files in the /examples directory are licensed under a separate license as specified in each file; documentation is licensed CC-BY-4.0.
