Can I build 3D interactive websites with a-frame? I mean, are there input controls like in HTML5? Type text in a textbox, upload files control, buttons, show a floating window with some 2d rendered HTML, like a table, etc? And then of course, have these spatially set up.
I am building an app that can help studying for the 2D web. I can imagine that being fully immersed in the study environment, and interact spatially, can help you learn even faster with more focus.
Nope, stuff must be built with WebGL. There are some early widget sets out there like aframe-material.
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I've made a little Towers of Hanoi game, but nothing what was set on my PC looks the same on a different computer, not even the fonts. Everything is so messed up, I couldn't do it better even if I wanted this to happen. To say it short the backgrounds used for controls and forms are out of place, the initial values used for size and position of both forms and controls are bloody changed, and my project just looks like a huge mess. It's true I've worked in absolute values, because usually a programming language respects the programmer's point of view, and doesn't scales and moves everything the way it wants. If I wanted my project to rescale according to screen resolution I would had used relative coordinates, and made all my forms and controls dimensions be a certain amount of the screen's width and height.
Is there a way to preserve the project just as it was initially designed, so it would look the same on any computer?
I'm using Visual Studio 2010, and Windows 7 as OS.
You don't tell us specifically which properties you've modified from the defaults, or show us a screenshot of the before and after views from which we might be able to infer which modifications you've made. But you did mention something about changing the font, so we'll go with that.
In fact, it does try to preserve your specified properties to the extent possible. But sometimes it is just not possible. For example, if you specify a font for your controls that isn't available on the other computer, then it has no choice but to fall back to a font that is available. If you have any experience with web page design, it is a very similar problem. You have to use a small subset of web-safe fonts to ensure that they will be available on all of your users' computers. That's also why web designers are so keen now on embedding fonts into pages.
Anyway, it goes without saying that if the font has to change, the layout is going to be messed up. Different fonts are different sizes, so different amounts of text are going to fit, causing some to get cut off. That is why, in general, you should avoid changing properties like Font. If you use the defaults, things are a lot more compatible. But neither web pages nor desktop applications are WYSIWYG. You need images or PDF files for that.
Then there are system settings like DPI that can really mess things up, too. Keeping the default font isn't going to help you there. You have to design your application in a smart way. You mention something about relative layouts—these are the ticket. Unfortunately, WinForms doesn't make it easy to do this. It all but forces you into specifying absolute sizes and positions based on the pixel grid, which is mostly a waste of time, as you've seen. I describe in detail how to accomplish this in WinForms in this answer. The AutoSize property will be very useful to you. Of course, you'll also need the dynamically-growing TableLayoutPanel and/or FlowLayoutPanel controls, otherwise you'll end up with automatically sized controls that overlap one another.
Pre-emptive snarky comment: you should totally drop WinForms and use WPF instead. It is new, and cool, and sexy, and all but forces you the other way into pixel-independent layouts. Of course, it also makes it really easy to create butt-ugly, downright unusable applications that look like some of the stuff Microsoft has been churning out over the past couple of years.
#Cody Gray thanks for your insights.
com/qMBJS.png
The first image is how the main menu looks. It's kinda self-explanatory how it should had looked, without the big white margins while the text should had been inside the labels backgrounds
The second one is some in-game footage. And this is just one of the levels. It's so messed up I'm almost sorry I've lost a night doing some heavy work on the image editing side of the matter. I'm not at my own PC right now, so I've tried to rearrange all the stuff directly in Visual Studio's design window, to show how the level should had closely looked. Just imagine it without the white and black margins surrounding some controls.
Also I've tried to set the controls and forms parameters through code, when the form loads, trying to force it to look as it should but the result wasn't any better.
What I am ultimately trying to do is to create a grid of images for print that are minor variations of the same thing (different text is all). Looking through online resources I was able to create a script that changes the text and exports all of the images necessary (several hundred). What I am trying to do now is to import all of these images into a new photoshop document and lay them all out in a grid and I can't seem to find any examples of this.
Can anyone point me in the right direction to place a file at a specific coordinate (I'm using CS5 and have the design suite so if there is a way in illustrator to do this quickly...)?
Also, I'm open to other ideas on how to do this (even other programs) easily. It's for labels so the positioning on the sheet has to be pretty precise...
The art layer object has a translate() method that takes delta x and y params. You'll need to open each image, copy it to the target document, get its current location (using artLayer.bounds) and do the math to find the deltas to position it where you want it. Your deltas can be in pixels so you'll get plenty of precision.
Check out your 'JavaScript Scripting Reference' pdf in your Adobe install directory for more details.
Ok I'm marking Anna's response as the answer because though I didn't fully test it, it seems like it should work and answers the original question with jsx. However I'm also leaving my final solution in case anyone else runs across this with the same issue and may prefer this method as well.
What I ended up doing instead is using InDesign. I figured out that it has a grid option that lets you import a number of files and place them all in an equal grid in a single command. This is almost exactly what I was looking for, except that it leaves a small border/margin in between the columns and grids and mine were designed to meet exactly.
I couldn't figure out how to make it not have the border (I have very little experience with InDesign, it may be possible). However I was able to select all my images and scale them uniformly to be the correct size, then I just selected each column and dragged it over to snap to the adjacent column and the same with rows...
There are many GUI automation tools that allow clicking on a specified image (well-known Sikuli, for example). Is there any way to click on the specified text, not image? This way the tool will:
make screenshot
recognize text on it
find text position (somehow)
send click event to this position
It would be much easier to write tests using this approach (many interfaces have text button, inputs etc.) rather than make screenshots for every single element.
I've seen some OCR feature in Sikuli but it didn't work for me (I tried invoking click('some-text-here').
Sikuli built-in OCR features are pretty buggy and unstable. All (or at least most of) the related issues are listed in this BUG. However there are few possible workarounds which are, however, not also always applicable..
If the text is known, you can take a screenshot of the text and then look for it as a screenshot. For example if you know exact font of this text, you can automatically generate such text on the screen and use it as a pattern to locate it elsewhere.
The built-in tesseract based OCR, performs significantly better when the font is bigger, "fatter" and in Grayscale (usually). Hence you might do some background image processing before attempting the actual recognition. I used ImageMagick to resize and filter the images for better recognition. It can be in the background as a command line tool. For example:
convert -filter spline -resize 100x -unsharp 10x20 -type Grayscale
I am aware that this does not answer your question directly but these are steps you might consider taking towards the final solution.
I'm a developer at Deskover company and we are currently developing an application, UiPath Studio that meets your needs.
We provide text recognition on various technologies with 100% accuracy, ability to find specific text in an area on screen, a control or an entire window, and also ability to click text or controls.
You can execute different actions, sequentially by creating workflows.
We at Deskover are big fans of Sikuli project. We actually use the same image recognition engine in UiPath Studio.
UiPath Studio is a visual tool that helps you create workflows easily, but you can also use the underlying API and implement an application that extracts text and clicks on it.
You can find more details about the UiPath library here.
I am writing an app that stitches iOS text message screen captures together vertically.
I have the images cropped to only contain the message bubbles and none of the navigation bar of the text input bar (expect the the first and last screencaps of course) but I don't know how to detect where to line up the images.
I need to detect where there is overlap in the conversations and then stitch the images at the point. (I know how to draw the images to a new image context too.)
I am looking for an open source framework that could help me achieve this and any advice as to how to accomplish this task.
Thanks!
You can also give a go to the following code:
https://github.com/foundry/OpenCVStitch
While it might be overkill for your project, you could have a look at PanoTools: an Open Source software library for manipulating and stitching panoramic images. It's portable (Win/Lin/Mac), and if you're looking forward to making the stitching on your computer, GUIs to it like Hugin may even already fit your use case (I only used them for stitching photographs, so check the projection settings).
I am trying to identify the right tool, language, software package, or other for the automated development of presentations, where the presentation is user interactive.
The presentation will consist of images with titles and some descriptive text. Most of the time there will be 35–70 images. I would like to show each image on a separate page, slide, tab, etc. (I guess proper terminology depends on the solution.)
The images will change, but the titles will remain the same, and there will be a little bit of change to the description of each image.
After putting the presentation together, I would like the user to be able to circle and "write" on the electronic image in kind of the wax pencil sense (I previously worked in a photo lab and we worked with wax pencils on negatives all the time and would like to have kind of a similar flexibility). Moreover, I would like users to be able to add comments as well, kind of in the way Adobe PDF Professional allows, e.g. inserting bubble comments, etc.
Most importantly, I would like to be able to do this in an automated way. Right now we are using PowerPoint, but the amount of time it is taking to put an image on a slide in PowerPoint, resize it, and then set up the text is killing us. Plus, as the images change it takes tons of time to go back and update them. Thus, we would like something that is a bit faster to update images and get the feedback from our few users. Does not necessarily have to be a web hosted solution, but could be run through a browser.
Sorry this is so long and thanks for any ideas and feedback, especially if there is an existing software package solution, language that can be used, or other approach to get this done.
These days, two of the most popular are Adobe Captivate and Articulate Presenter. For service, instead of product, you can check out services like http://voicethread.com.
I don't know of any product that completely answers your requirements.
But, for similar results I use two different tools for developing the presentations and another one for drawing while presenting.
If I just want to make a presentation made of pictures and texts, and I want to automate its creation, I use irfanview http://www.irfanview.com/ with its wonderful feature for automated slideshows. I put all the images together, annotate them (I use either their filenames, or if not enought, with EXIF and comment fields) and create a slideshow, that can be compiler into an .exe file.
If I want a more elaborated presentation. With full annotation capabilities, I use Wink http://www.debugmode.com/wink/
For drawing over the screen during the presentation, I use a very old bitmap drawing program, called PC-Draw, that allows, with a hotkey, to capture the screen as a bitmap and begin drawing over it, and with another hotkey, to return to the original screen without altering the running programs at all. I have not found it anywhere in the web. However, I found similar programs just a quick google away.
All three tools are free and easy (and even fun) to use.