// the take
A standalone Xcode demo implementing a smooth, anti-aliased line-drawing algorithm for iOS, built on Cocos2d and OpenGL ES, with stroke width that varies based on drawing speed (Paper-by-FiftyThree style). Useful if you want to study or adapt the actual math behind variable-width smoothed strokes, not as a drop-in drawing library.
The core technique is genuinely clever: it smooths touch input into a spline and varies line width by speed, rendered with OpenGL ES quads for cheap anti-aliasing instead of relying on expensive Bezier-stroke redraws. It shipped in a real production app (Foldify) rather than being a toy. There's an accompanying blog post walking through the derivation step by step, which is rare and valuable for an algorithm repo.
It's built on OpenGL ES, which Apple deprecated years ago and has since removed from current SDKs, so the rendering code won't run on modern iOS without a rewrite to Metal or Core Graphics. It depends on Cocos2d as a git submodule (itself with nested submodules), so you're pulling in a whole game engine just to extract a line-drawing routine. It's a full Xcode project rather than a packaged library (no CocoaPods/SPM), so integrating it into an existing app means manually extracting LineDrawer.h/.m and untangling it from Cocos2d-specific types. Objective-C only, no Swift interop layer, and effectively unmaintained since the underlying tech stack it targets no longer exists on current iOS.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →