AppleInsider Staff
John Harper, the creator of of Apple's Core Animation tool for developers and the inventor credited with designing gesture and scrolling animations in iOS, has apparently taken a new position at social networking giant Facebook.
Harper's departure was revealed on Twitter on Thursday, as highlighted by Daring Fireball. Harper designed and implemented the "CoreAnimation" compositing and animation framework that first appeared in the debut iPhone OS in 2007, and came to OS X 10.5 Leopard later that year.
His name appears as the inventor on a number of key software patents owned by Apple related to both OS X and iOS. For example, Harper is one of the key inventors on the Apple patent Framework for Graphics Animation and Composting Operations," along with many other graphics- and display-related patents.
According to Harper's LinkedIn page, he spent just over 12 years at Apple. During his time there, he also co-designed and implemented the "CoreImage" real-time image processing engine that debuted in OS X 10.4 Tiger, which launched in 2005.
Harper is also credited with working on the OS X windowing system, the Mac X11 port, and various components of the graphics systems found in both OS X and iOS.
His new position will apparently reunite him with Kimon Tsinteris, a former designer and engineer at Apple who now works on Facebook for iOS. Tsinteris took to Twitter on Thursday to say that he's "delighted" to be crossing paths with Harper once again.
Harper responded by thanking Tsinteris and revealed that he will officially start next week. Neither man mentioned Facebook in their comments, but Harper's profile says that he "was Apple's Core Animation hacker," referring to the position in the past tense.
Core Animation is the graphics rendering and animation structure found in both Apple's Mac OS X operating system, and the iOS mobile platform for iPhone and iPad. Developers use Core Animation to animate the views and other visual elements of their third-party apps.
Core Animation makes it simpler for developers to create the proper look and feel in their applications, by handling the bulk of the work required to draw each frame of an animation. Developers must simply configure a few animation parameters, like the start and end point, and allow Core Animation to handle the rest of the process.
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46 Comments
Apple should be deeply concerned about the constant exodus of deeply technical people in recent years. Tim Cook is dropping the ball again.
Sounds like he was pretty key at Apple, at least for some time. Hopefully he won't be a great loss to Apple.
He must be someone important. That was my first thought when I saw his LinkedIn pic showing himself all disheveled and unkept. I guess if one is really that good, they don't care how he keeps himself since he'll probably be working more-or-less on his own, at home, to not care.
Take some pride in your appearance buddy
Jesus, that profile pic. My grandmother's voice comes to mind. "Wipe that puss off your face."
Apple should be deeply concerned about the constant exodus of deeply technical people in recent years. Tim Cook is dropping the ball again.
He's hardly dropping the ball. You can't force somebody to work at a place they don't want to. That went the way of the dodo in this country way back in 1865. More than likely Tim Cook has his replacement ready to go. Being as important as this guy was don't you think there's a "Line Of Succession" in place for things such as this?