The Core iOS Developer’s Cookbook, Fifth Edition

Recipe: Testing Against a Bitmap

Unfortunately, most views don’t fall into the simple geometries that make the hit test from Recipe 1-5 so straightforward. The flowers shown in Figure 1-1, for example, offer irregular boundaries and varied transparencies. For complicated art, it helps to test touches against a bitmap. Bitmaps provide byte-by-byte information about the contents of an image-based view, allowing you to test whether a touch hits a solid portion of the image or should pass through to any views below.

Recipe 1-6 extracts an image bitmap from a UIImageView. It assumes that the image used provides a pixel-by-pixel representation of the view in question. When you distort that view (normally by resizing a frame or applying a transform), ...