ASDK is available via CocoaPods or Carthage. See our Installation guide for instructions.

AsyncDisplayKit's basic unit is the node. An ASDisplayNode is an abstraction over UIView, which in turn is an abstraction over CALayer. Unlike views, which can only be used on the main thread, nodes are thread-safe: you can instantiate and configure entire hierarchies of them in parallel on background threads.

To keep its user interface smooth and responsive, your app should render at 60 frames per second — the gold standard on iOS. This means the main thread has one-sixtieth of a second to push each frame. That's 16 milliseconds to execute all layout and drawing code! And because of system overhead, your code usually has less than ten milliseconds to run before it causes a frame drop.

AsyncDisplayKit lets you move image decoding, text sizing and rendering, layout, and other expensive UI operations off the main thread, to keep the main thread available to respond to user interaction.

As the framework has grown, many features have been added that can save developers tons of time by eliminating common boilerplate style structures common in modern iOS apps. If you've ever dealt with cell reuse bugs, tried to performantly preload data for a page or scroll style interface or even just tried to keep your app from dropping too many frames you can benefit from integrating ASDK.

• Read the our Getting Started guide
• Get the sample projects
• Browse the API reference

We use Slack for real-time debugging, community updates, and general talk about ASDK. Signup yourself or email AsyncDisplayKit(at)gmail.com to get an invite.

We welcome any contributions. See the CONTRIBUTING file for how to get involved.

AsyncDisplayKit is BSD-licensed. We also provide an additional patent grant. The files in the /examples directory are licensed under a separate license as specified in each file; documentation is licensed CC-BY-4.0.