Recipe: Testing Against a Bitmap

Unfortunately, most views don’t fall into the simple geometries that make the hit test from Recipe 8-5 so straightforward. The flowers shown in Figure 8-1, 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 8-6 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), update the math accordingly. CGPoints can be transformed via CGPointApplyAffineTransform() to handle scaling and rotation changes. Keeping the art at a 1:1 proportion to the actual view pixels simplifies lookup and avoids any messy math. You can recover the pixel in question, test its alpha level, and determine whether the touch has hit a solid portion of the view.