One Quickie

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Using CGLayers (Graphics->General)

CGLayer is a Tiger (and beyond) feature that will cache Quartz operations. Kind of like a PICT for CG. Make a new layer based on the context you're going to be drawing it in, then get a context from the layer, and draw into that. So something like this:

- (void) makeLayerInContext: (CGContextRef) enclosingContext
{
    layer = CGLayerCreateWithContext (enclosingContext, CGSizeMake(100, 100),
                                      NULL); // options - unused in Tiger
    CGContextRef context;
    context = CGLayerGetContext (layer);

    // .. and do your drawing

} // makeLayer

And then to draw the layer at a particular point (like replicating it a bunch of different points as done here):

    for (i = 0; i < pointCount; i++) {
        CGContextDrawLayerAtPoint (context, locations[i], layer);
    }