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I never used to be particularly interested in designing mobile applications. I just thought it was a hopeless platform, plagued by tiny screens and keys that were designed for inputting numbers (how often do you actually type numbers into your phone?) I also had never thought of my phone as something that I want to use for various applications. This scepticism had become so ingrained that I initially didn't even see much point in Apple opening up the iPhone for third-party developers. I thought it might destroy the purity of this well-designed platform if developers were suddenly given reign over users' mobile screens.

However, two months ago or so, a certain curiosity, a thirst for a new challenge and a feeling that I was missing a boat (to where I did not know) combined to make me go out and buy an iPod touch (I don't want to buy an iPhone because my current phone deal is too good to give up). I almost immediately appreciated both what a well-designed platform it is and what a compelling playground the third-party application market represents, for users and developers alike.

NSCompositingOperation visual quick reference

I have never been able to remember what the different compositing operations in Cocoa's NSImage class do. So whenever I need to use one, I find myself having to read the documentation, which is not particularly easy to understand, because it describes the operations in words rather than graphically.

M. Uli Kusterer has had the same thought. However, I wanted something that would work at a quick glance, at a small size, and that would print easily.

So I decided to fire up OmniGraffle and create this visual quick reference:

You can download it as a PDF here.

Let me know if you find this useful or if you can think of any improvements.