Play back timed events in real time (millisecond accuracy, or almost)

Question

I'm writing an OS X app that records real time events that come from a serial port and saves them to disk. So each millisecond I get 7 integers that I need to save and later "play back" by drawing them in a sort of live line chart. The saving stuff to disk is already done; playing them back is where I'm stuck.

I've done this sort of thing before with other technologies (Arduino, Corona, Processing) where I get a main game loop in which I can do whatever I want time-wise. What I need to know is how set up some sort of 'onEnterFrame' loop to be able to compare the elapsed time to the first event in my stack and fire it when needed. In this loop I would need to tell my views to update themselves and I know Apple guides state that UI updates must happen in the main thread.

I'm a little lost on how to conceptually achieve this kind of onEnterFrame loop in Cocoa as the paradigm is quite different to what I already know.

Answer 1

Of the many things I encountered, this gave me good timing accuracy in my initial tests (1/10th of a millisecond error):

func test() {
  print("test")
}

// Run test() every 1 millisecond
let timer = NSTimer.scheduledTimerWithTimeInterval(0.001, target: self, selector: #selector(test), userInfo: nil, repeats: true)