If you are an advanced user of drawRect, you will know that of course drawRect will not actually run until "all processing is finished."

setNeedsDisplay flags a view as invalidated and the OS, and basically waits until all processing is done. This can be infuriating in the common situation where you want to have:

  • a view controller 1
  • starts some function 2
  • which incrementally 3
    • creates a more and more complicated artwork and 4
    • at each step, you setNeedsDisplay (wrong!) 5
  • until all the work is done 6

Of course, when you do the above 1-6, all that happens is that drawRect is run once only after step 6.

Your goal is for the view to be refreshed at point 5. What to do?

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