Appropriate name for container of position, size, angle - naming-conventions

I have something like an artboard which users can place picture objects.
Each picture object can be moved around, resized and changed its rotation angle.
I have a class stores picture's position, size and angle.
I wonder what could be appropriate name for that class.
I cannot think of any word summarizes "Position", "Size" and "Angle".
I'm am also not a native English speaker so if anyone could help finding appropriate name for me.

"Aspect" might be good, or "Appearance", or "Presentation"...

Related

How to add a shadow to an UIImageView which fits the shape of the image content but with some rotation and shift effect

I have been looking for the solution on the web for a long time. Most tutorials are fairly simple about adding shadow to a UIView. I also noticed that if we add a shadow to an UIImageView. The shadow shape could perfectly fit the shape of the content image if the image itself has alpha channel in it. Say for example, if the image is an animal with transparent background, the shadow shape is also the same as that animal (not a rectangle shadow as same as UIImageView frame).
But these are not enough. What I need to do is to add some changes to the shadow so it may have some rotation angle and compressed (squeezed or shift) effect so that looks like the sunlight comes from a certain spot.
To demonstrate what I need, I upload 2 images below, which I captured from the Google Map App created by Apple. You can imagine the Annotation Pin is an image which has the Pin shape, so the shadow is also "pin shaped", but it is not simply "offset" with a CGSize, you can see the top of the shadow is shifted right about 35 degrees and slightly squeezed the height.
When we tap and hold and pin, the shadow is also animated away from the pin, so I believe that such shadow can be made programmably.
The best shadow tutorial I can found so far is http://nachbaur.com/blog/fun-shadow-effects-using-custom-calayer-shadowpaths But unfortunately, that cannot make this effect.
If anyone know the answer or know any better words to search for, please let me know. Thank you.
(Please note that the shape of the image is dynamic in the App, so using any tool like Photoshop to pre-render the shadow is not an option.)
In order to create dynamic effects like this, you have to use Core Graphics. It's incredibly powerful once you know how to use it. Basically you need to set a skew transform on the context, set up a shadow and draw the image. You will probably have to use transparency layers as well.
It doesn't sound like you can use CALayer shadows, since that is meant to solve a specific use-case. The approach Apple takes with the pin marks on the map is to have two separate images that are created ahead of time (e.g. in Photoshop) and they position them within the map relative to a reference point.
If you really do need to do this at run-time, it should still be possible by using either Core Graphics or ImageKit. To get a blurred shadow appearance, you can use the kCICategoryBlur CIFilter. You can then convert the image to grayscale. And to get that compressed look you just need to resize and skew the image.
Once you have two separate images, you can either take the CGImageRef for the shadow image and can set that as the content of another sublayer, or you can add it as a separate view.
If you know what all the shapes are, you could just render a shadow image in Photoshop or something.

Translate Colors to Image?

Im not sure how else I should approach it, but if I was to (in my mac application) have a grid of NSViews, which the user can change the colour of each, is it possible to then translate this, so now I have been given a colour for each pixel by the user, make this into an exportable image?
I honestly can't think of how else to do this. I don't want to go ahead an realise I have taken a rather foolish path.
The idea is I will have a grid of squares which the user can paint, a colour in each square, a square representing a pixel in the final image. So they paint with like a paint bucket filling each one, then export it into an actual image file.
Any help much appreciated, thanks.
A grid of NSViews sounds really heavy for what you're doing. Why not write one single custom view that checks the mouse position and modifies the data appropriately? Then you'd write a custom drawing method to fill the custom view, and you could use the same exact draw method to write to an NSImage which you could export.
You'll need to do a bit o' math. For each "pixel", call -set on the appropriate NSColor, then use NSBezierPath's -fillRect method. It may help you to get out a pencil & paper to figure out the math for the rect origins & sizes.
Check http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/CocoaDrawingGuide/Introduction/Introduction.html for help if you've never done custom drawing before. It's really not that bad, just takes a little reading. :)

Which pixels did that drawmesh operation just draw to?

Ok, it's a relatively simple problem, I want to know where, in screen space, a particular mesh was just drawn. I plan on then storing that information in a data store of some kind so that when I interact with something in screen space, I can lookup in the register and find the object, i.e, click on the spaceship drawn on the screen and then select target etc.
I can't find any way of finding out which pixels the mesh was drawn to though...
Alternatively, if I'm missing something obvious regarding what it is that I Want to do, please let me know!
There is no easy way to do that. But you can use another texture as render target and render those meshes with unique colors.
So for example you give #FF0000 to your mesh A and draw it also to your second render target with that color. Now when you select a pixel from 2nd render target and look at that color, if it is #FF0000 you can understand that, the pixel is a part of mesh A. Thus you can easily pick the mesh drawn on a certain pixel when you click one of those pixels.
Why dont you Unproject your screen space coords into 3D space? The only complication I had was the fact that I'd be left with a plane, I could check if a Mesh intersected with that plane but I often had multiple candidates for 'picking'.
Check out Google for DirectX Unproject and there are various articles discussing it. It's sometimes complicated for some to implement but done well it's actually pretty nifty; don't get put off by the people online who say it doesn't work, it does work!

Simple Drawing App Design -- Hillegass Book, Ch. 18

I am working through Aaron Hillegass' Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X and am doing the challenge for Chapter 18. Basically, the challenge is to write an app that can draw ovals using your mouse, and then additionally, add saving/loading and undo support. I'm trying to think of a good class design for this app that follows MVC. Here's what I had in mind:
Have a NSView-subclass that represents an oval (say JBOval) that I can use to easily draw an oval.
Have a main view (JBDrawingView) that holds JBOvals and draws them.
The thing is that I wasn't sure how to add archiving. Should I archive each JBOval? I think this would work, but archiving an NSView doesn't seem very efficient. Any ideas on a better class design?
Thanks.
Have a NSView-subclass that represents an oval (say JBOval) that I can use to easily draw an oval.
That doesn't sound very MVC. “JBOval” sounds like a model class to me.
Have a main view (JBDrawingView) that holds JBOvals and draws them.
I do like this part.
My suggestion is to have each model object (JBOval, etc.) able to create a Bézier path representing itself. The JBDrawingView (and you should come up with a better name for that, as all views draw by definition) should ask each model object for its Bézier path, fill settings, and stroke settings, and draw the object accordingly.
This keeps the knowledge of how to draw (the path, line width, colors, etc.) in the various shape classes where they belong, while also keeping the actual drawing code in the view layer where it belongs.
The answer to where to put archiving code should be intuitively obvious from this point.
Having a whole NSView for each oval seems rather heavyweight to me. I would descend them from NSObject instead and just have them draw to the current view.
They could also know how to archive themselves, although at that point you'd probably want to think about pulling them out of the view and thinking of them more as part of your model.
Your JBOval views would each be responsible for drawing themselves (basically drawing an oval path and filling it, within their bounds), but JBDrawingView would be responsible for mousing and dragging (and thereby sizing and positioning the JBOvals, which would be its subviews). The drawingView would do no drawing itself.
So far as archiving, you could either have a model class to represent each oval (such as its bounding rectangle, or any other dimensions you choose to represent each oval with). You could archive and unarchive these models to recreate your views.
Finally, I use the JB prefix too, so … :P at you.

How do I fill a region to its bounds with a color on a graphics object?

I'm playing around and try to make a Coloring book for my children and I have a lots of black and white line drawings that I use as backgrounds so they they can paint on them.
Now, I want to add a FILL-function so they can point and click somewhere where its white in the drawing and then let the function fill the whole region within its bounds with a color.
It would be nice to have a function that by sending in X, Y and a color defined for the boundary and get a region out of it. Then its just about to do e.Graphics.FillRegion (brush,region) to fill it with the color.
But I can't find any function that allowes me doing that, and I think its too much job to trace the boundarys myself.
Have I missed some function in the system.drawing class that does this or do you have any other ideas?
Any other ideas for the coloring book-program are also interesting. (Im making the program safe so you can leave the kid in front of the computer without being afraid of the kid accessing any other things on the computer and have different funny sounds when selecting colors and so on)
If the "boundary" is defined by differently-colored pixels and not a mathematical formula or a Path data structure, you will have to test and fill individual pixels. There is an article on how to flood fill in .Net at Code Project.
Look into flood fill methods. Wikipedia has plenty of information on the subject here.