Animations during first keyboard appearance is sometimes not smooth

Question

I have often noticed that UIView animations are often not smooth during the first becomeFirstResponder event when the keyboard appears for the first time. I am referring to animations that occur with the keyboard animation, such as manually scrolling the UIView to make a textField visible. The animation is always smooth after the first time it is executed.

Is there a technical reason why this would be the case? I was thinking that there might be some lazy loading or optimization that happens with UIView animations on the first run, then gets stored in cache for reuse. Are there lessons learned around this? If this is not clear to this audience, I can try to recreate the issue in a test project.

Answer 1

While this does not answer the question WHY this happens, it explains how to fix it.

Why are iOS animations slow the first time they are run?

Basically, you need to do animations on "DID" events rather than "WILL" or "SHOULD". The system performs it's animations during the "will/should" events, so apparently there is some colluding happening. This does not explain why the behavior is inconsistent between the first run and all other runs.

I thought, as may some of you, that I should put the animation in the "textFieldWillBeginEditing" because I wanted the animation to run concurrently with the keyboard animation. Luckily, putting the animation code in "DID" actually still ensures that the animation happens concurrently. Fantastic.

If anyone still has an explanation of the inconsistency between the first and latter runs, I'll still hold his question open and award you with an upvote and question answer. Thanks!