Drawing incrementally in a UIView (iPhone)

Question

As far as I have understood so far, every time I draw something in the drawRect: of a UIView, the whole context is erased and then redrawn.

So I have to do something

Answer 1

How many ellipses are you going to draw? In general, Core Graphics should be able to draw a lot of ellipses quickly.

You could, however, cache your old drawings to an image (I don't know if this solution is more performant, however):

UIGraphicsBeginImageContext(self.frame.size);
CGContextRef ctx = UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext(); // ctx is now the image's context

[cachedImage drawAtPoint:CGPointZero];
// only plot new ellipses here...

[cachedImage release];
cachedImage = [UIGraphicsGetImageFromCurrentImageContext() retain];
UIGraphicsEndImageContext();

CGContextRef context = UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext();

CGContextDrawImage(context, self.bounds, maskRef);          //draw the mask
CGContextClipToMask(context, self.bounds, maskRef);         //respect alpha mask
CGContextSetBlendMode(context, kCGBlendModeColorBurn);      //set blending mode

[cachedImage drawAtPoint:CGPointZero];