In one of the WWDC 2014 talks on the new Yosemite UI, it says to avoid the use of NSVisualEffectView in masked layers. Unfortunately my view's layer does have a shape mask, and as a result the visual effect view in it has an ugly jagged edge effect:
However I know it must be somehow possible to create a masked visual effect view, partly due to 2 reasons:
The image mask property on NSVisualEffectView produces a smooth, anti-alised mask (but requires an unmasked background behind it, and not just an unmasked parent view)
NSPopover and NSMenu seem to be able to achieve a smooth mask that changes with dimensions:
Although it is doubtable as to wether or not they use NSVisualEffectView, and not a custom blurred view.
Is there any way I can achieve this smooth mask that doesn't rely on a mask image but rather a path or shape layer?
I was trying to achieve this with a NSWindow view a while back and I came across this awesome library: https://www.cocoacontrols.com/controls/waythedarkside
It allows you to add a light or dark blur to your view/background. I think this is what you are looking for :)
Related
I've created a canvas within which I display an image that is clipped when it goes over the edges. I can do this fine with a square shaped frame, however the frame I want to use is the one below. Is there any way I can clip the image inside the frame without having to add a non transparent square border around the image, i.e. just using the black line that I've already drawn? (on iPad)
You'll need to use Core Graphics and Quartz to handle this sort of clipping/graphics manipulation.
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/GraphicsImaging/Conceptual/drawingwithquartz2d/Introduction/Introduction.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP30001066
If you're using UIBezierPath, you may be able to achieve the clipping you're after using the following process
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/GraphicsImaging/Conceptual/drawingwithquartz2d/dq_paths/dq_paths.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP30001066-CH211-TPXREF101
Convert your UIBezierPath to a CGPath
Get your image into a CGContext
Add your CGPath to the context via CGContextAddPath
Clip your context using CGContextClip
Alternatively, if you don't want to be messing with paths (and depending on whether this technique is suitable for your situation, your description of the issue makes it hard to tell), it might be worth using image masking to achieve the effect you're after. See the first link and look under "Bitmap Images and Image Masks".
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'm trying to write a fairly simple animation using Core Animation to simulate a book cover being opened. The book cover is an image, and I'm applying the animations to its layer object.
As well as animating a rotation around the y axis (The the anchorPoint property set of the left of the screen), I need to scale the right hand edge of the image up so it appears to "get closer" to the user and create the illusion of depth. Flipboard, for example, does this scaling really well.
I can't find any way of scaling an image like this, so only one edge is scaled and the image ends up nonrectangular.
All help appreciated with this one!
CoreAnimation, by default, "flattens" its 3D hierarchy into a 2D world at z=0. This causes perspective and the like to not work properly. You need to host your layer in a CATransformLayer, which will render its sublayers as a true 3D layer hierarchy.
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've got my layer hosted workspace working so that using CATiledLayers for hundreds of images works nicely when the workspace is zoomed out substantially. All the images use lower resolution representations, and my application is much more responsive when panning and zooming large numbers of images.
However, within my application I also provide the user the ability to resize layers with a resize handle. Before I converted image layers to use CATiledLayers I was doing layer resizes by manipulating the bounds of the image layer according to the resize delta (mouse drag), and it worked well. But now with CATiledLayers in place, this is causing CATiledLayers to get confused when I mix resizing of layers through bounds manipulation and zooming/unzooming the workspace through scale transforms.
Specifically, if I resize a CATiledLayer to half the width/height size (1/4 the area), the image inside it will suddenly scale to a further 1/2 the resized frame leaving 3/4 of the frame empty. This seems to be exactly when the inner CATiledLayer logic gets invoked to provide a lower resolution image representation. It works fine if I don't touch the resize handler and just zoom/unzoom the workspace.
Is there a way to make zooming/resizing play nice together with CATiledLayers, or am I going to have to convert my layer resize logic to use scale transforms instead of bounds manipulations?
I ended up solving this by converting my layer resize logic to use scale transforms by overriding the setBounds: method for my custom image layer class to scale it's containing CATiledLayer, and repositioning accordingly. Also it is important to make sure the CATiledLayer's autoresizingMask is set to kCALayerNotSizable since we are handling resizes manually in setBounds:.
Note: be sure to call the superclass's implementation of setBounds:.