Well for example if you're animating the layer property of a UIView, then check out CALayer.h - here you can find the property opacity, and the inline doc mentions that it is animatable. Or frameOrigin in NSView.
A bunch of properties are animatable, for iphone:
and mac:
And then there are some extensions:
to give you:
[CABasicAnimation animationWithKeyPath:@"transform.scale.x"];