Hey so I'm pretty new to ObjC and coding in general. Essentially I want to make a circle move across a UIBezier path (close to a sin function) one 'unit' every hour and make its shadow small and yellow, then brigger and white, then small and dim again as it moves up and then down the curve. The crest of the sin function should be midday (noon), and the 'tails' of the curve should midnight on both sides. Is this even possible? And where can I find the resources to help me? Couldn't seem to find anything online to help me since I don't know what I need to achieve this. Thanks!
You use the CAKeyFrameAnimation class to move the view along a path. You create a path, and animate the position property of the view's layer. An example of this is in Apple's Core Animation documentation in the "Using a Keyframe Animation to Change Layer Properties" section. The other things you want to do with the shadow, can be done with CABasicAnimation. You can animate a shadow's color, offset, radius, path, and opacity.
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I'm writing an app that could make good use of the Apple Watch's fitness tracker design, here:
So far, I've created the basic outline which is just a CAShapeLayer with a CGPath of an ellipse. I use strokeStart and strokeEnd to animate the progress. My problem comes when applying a gradient to the outline. How do I apply a gradient like above to the stroke of a CGPath?
The cleanest way to do this without having to drop down to Core Graphics or GL is to create a layer containing the angle gradient that you want the ring filled with, mask it with a CAShapeLayer containing your circular path (with the appropriate line width and cap settings), then, as you’re currently doing, use the shape layer’s strokeEnd property to set the “fill” percentage. Note that there isn’t a built-in way to create an angle gradient—you can use one of the suggestions in this answer for that.
edit: Also, you’ll need a pair of semicircular “cap” images, one at each end of the ring—as the fill percentage gets close to 100%, the region at the top will reveal the discontinuity between the start and end color. In your example image above, you’d need a red semicircle oriented like this ( at the start, and a pink one oriented like this ) with a translation/rotation transform tracking the end.
additional edit: Also also, since the end-cap semicircle will be moving along the gradient, you’ll need it to change color, interpolating from the start color to the end color as the fill amount goes from 0% to 100%. Best way to do that is with a shape layer with a semicircular path, since you can set the fillColor of that without having to redraw image contents.
We did this for an iOS app.. but quickly stopped as it gets bogged down quickly.
I think Apple is using images.. as they do in the Lister example
I want to be able to select some area from this image, and change the color of the selected area.
To do this, I thought of using CALayer and UIBezierPath.
I've cleared the colored area from the image, then I took each area point and drew a UIBezierPath beneath the image.
I have 3 CALayers for each area, each CALayer has a UIBezierPath with predefined points.
When the user clicks on a layer, it will show the selected layer without filling the UIBezierPath, just to have a border around the UIBezierPath, the result look like this:
I added a UIView over the image with Opacity = 0.6f and
redrew all the CALayers on it.
All the layers are hidden in the new UIView
Every thing is working great, the next step is to merge the selected areas:
I took the points from the first area and added it to the points of
the second area
I created a new UIBezierPath with the new points
My problem is that the result is wrong:
How to merge a UIBezierPath with a correct points order?
Is there a better way to accomplish something like this without
using UIBezierPath?
from looking at the image above, the path is wrong because the sequence of points is not followed which pretty much screws up your path. I don't think a Bezier Path is the right tool to do this in the first place as you have rectangular or point to point connections. So you more have a Poligon than a Bezier Path object. However UIKit seems to bundle all this into a UIBezierPath object (non optimal naming if you ask me).
The tricky thing here is to find out where the two shapes really touch each other and to add the points in the sequence as before but then tear up the vertical lines in the middle and connect the path to the other structure.
Another alternative could be to use a bitmap and simply union the bitmaps and create a new shape. It largely depends on how your base data is represented and managed. You could also simply keep two shapes and just join them in a meta object to draw them concurrently.
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.
I have a CCSprite that was created from a png with transparent background.
I want to be able to apply colors to this sprite in a way that I`m free to define which color it is, without the actual color of the sprite affecting the amount of each color I have to add.
I`ve tried this:
mySprite.color = ccc3(200,200,255);
In an attempt to add a little blue-ish feel to my sprite, but as it works by setting the amount of tint that's gonna be displayed based on existant color of the sprite, and my sprite has virtually no blue in any of it (most of it is yellow) the resulting effect is pretty sketchy, everything gets really dark, and there is one slight blue-ish coloring, but not as I wanted.
The ideal effect for me on this case would be to ADD a light blue mask to it with very low alpha.
Is there an easy way to do that without composing sprites?
I've tried using CCTexture2D, but had no luck, as there is no built in method for working with colors, and most tutorials only teach you how to build textures out of image files.
This is deceptively hard to do in code with the original sprite. Another option would be:
create a new sprite, which is just a white outline version of your original sprite
the color property of this white sprite will now respond exactly to the RGB values you pass in
so pass in your light blue value to the white sprite and set the opacity correctly
then overlay it on your original sprite
Any good?
The only way you can achieve this is by overlaying (masking) the sprite with the proper OpenGL blend functions. When you say "add a light blue mask" then that's what you need to do. You may find this visual blendfunc tool helpful, if only to understand how blending with mask sprites works and what you can achieve with it. There's no built-in support for this by Cocos2D however, so you'll have to revert to pure OpenGL inside a cocos2d node's -(void) draw {} method.
Tinting (changing the color property) will only modify the RGB channels of the entire image by changing the vertex colors of all 4 vertices.
I'm working on an iPhone app that has some non-rectangular UI elements. Currently, I'm subclassing UIView, and in drawRect I'm using a CGPathRef to draw black border and a color-filled interior.
I'd like to make these items look more like "buttons", though, so I'd like to have some of the same sort of "glass effects" that are used on e.g. the icons for an iPhone app (when you don't set UIPrerenderedIcon to true), or in other buttons.
I hunted around, and found this, which seems to be close to what I need:
Gradients on UIView and UILabels On iPhone
But I'm having difficulty figuring out how to clip the gradient to my shape.
It seems like the mask property on the view would be the right place to go, which seems like it would call for me to create a new CALayer object, with the clipping somehow applied to it.
I'm hoping there's some nice convenience function for doing this, though if I need to write something more complicated, that's OK, too. I'm just having difficulty figuring out how to apply the path as a mask. I'm unsure if I need to create a new drawing context and draw the path into it? And then use CGContextClip?
I think I've got a lot of the right pieces figured out, I'm just having difficulty understanding how to assemble them.
Could someone please point me in the right direction? (I'm happy to read more in the docs, just point me in the right direction, please.)
You can create a CAShapeLayer and set its path to your CGPathRef. Then set the mask property of a CAGradientLayer to your shapeLayer.