Please note: this article is part of the older "Objective-C era" on Cocoa with Love. I don't keep these articles up-to-date; please be wary of broken code or potentially out-of-date information. Read "A new era for Cocoa with Love" for more. Alpha masks are a powerful way to create graphical effects in your program. In this post, I'll show you how to create an alpha mask from a text string and use
![Creating alpha masks from text on the iPhone and Mac](https://cdn-ak-scissors.b.st-hatena.com/image/square/1dba7c769e81a8762bac0f0ad321af15f9211023/height=288;version=1;width=512/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cocoawithlove.com%2Fassets%2Fsite%2Ftouch_heartandcup.png)