According to the Mac Dev Center docs, you should be able to set the contents property of a CALayer and have that render automatically. However, I still can\'t get a simple image
You don't need to set the contentsRect (and if you do, it should be in the unit coordinate space, probably just CGRectMake(0, 0, 1.0, 1.0).
contentsRect
CGRectMake(0, 0, 1.0, 1.0).
You might want to set the layer's position property.
layer
position