I have a UIView that allows the user to draw a line (myLine) on the screen. This UIView is directly above another UIView that has several shapes drawn with CGPaths. When the user taps on one of these shapes I need to erase any portion of myLine that is above one of these other shapes as if I was erasing the pixels with an eraser.
What would be the best way to approach this?
I need the light blue part of the line to be erased leaving the dark blue portion
1) (current approach partially works) I'm able to use the path shape from the bottom view as a mask in the top view but it is only masking the UIView. If I later need to change the mask location the vector strokes are still there. (I know this is because all off my lines are being redrawn in the drawrect of the view)
2) After I draw each line should I somehow cache the drawing as an image and THEN
slice out the parts inside the triangle?
3)Is there a better approach to this?
This link provided the answer:
Building a Simple Drawing App
I cache the drawing to a bitmap context and then clip out
the unneeded parts of the bitmap.
Related
I know how to use a background image with alpha channel to create a UIButton with an irregular tap area. But with this solution, only the ignore-tap area is transparent; the tap area consists of the opaque.
What I want is a totally transparent UIButton, with an irregular tap area. (It triggers an animation behind the button.)
It seems that some sort of extra UILayer with some hit-testing could work, but I don't quite see how. Suggestions welcome.
Here's my solution. The problem: A UIImageView (call it the base view) to which I want to attach an irregularly-shaped tap area. The area corresponds to something in the image, let's call it a river. It could be a non-connected region.
In the Finder, duplicate the view's image, and make all the non-river pixels transparent, using your favorite graphics app. Call this the mask image.
When the base view is tapped, check to see if the corresponding pixel in the mask image is or is not transparent. (Solution left to reader; examples abound.)
So the mask image is never actually rendered, it is just used as a reference.
Note that if the base view gets resized or moved around (as it does in my app, via animating its constraints) then you have to "move" the mask image too, or in some other way manage the coordinate translation between view and mask. The easiest way to do this is to make the mask image a hidden subview of the base view, with its left, top, leading and trailing anchors constrained to be equal to those of the base view. Then they move around together, and the coord translation between the two is the identity.
I wrapped all this up in a subclass of UIImageView so that it manages its own mask, and calls a delegate if the "river" (or whatever) is tapped.
this is going to be hard to explain.
I am modifying the InfoBarStackView sample code from Apple.
The problem that I am encountering, is that it looks as if one of the subviews is being divided in two, by NSStackview and rendered separately.
In my sample, I am adding 4 subviews to my stack view, each exactly the same size (and same code). This is then placed into an NSScrollView. (The layout is vertical.)
When the application is run, I see the very first two subviews. When I scroll downward, the weirdness begins. The subsequent view is rendered, where the bottom portion is rendered, then the top is rendered. If the vertical size is 272 pixels, the bottom is rendered as 256 pixels and the top is the remainder (16). Scrolling down to the last view causes the same problem.
Attached are some screen grabs to illustrate:
I have a sample project for Xcode 8. I have posted the Xcode 8 project here, if someone would like to take a look. I can't seem to figure this one out.
Are you referring to the extra bounding boxes that intersect the "Label" and "Show" buttons?
If you use Xcode's View Debugger to look at the decomposition of the view hierarchy and the drawn contents of each view, you'll see that the extra bounding boxes are drawn by the GT_BorderedViews — that is, the bottom GT_BorderedViews are each drawing two bounding boxes.
GT_BorderedView's implementation of -drawRect: calculates and draws the bounding boxes based on the dirtyRect that is passed in. However, as the documentation states, the dirty rect is «a rectangle defining the portion of the view that requires redrawing», not necessarily the entire bounds of the view. Changing the implementation to calculate and draw the border based on [self bounds] instead of the dirty rect results in the expected appearance.
Taylor nailed it. I didn't realize that drawRect didn't render the whole view. Using [self bounds] rather than dirtyRect ensures the draw happens properly.
I am creating an app for practice that is a simple drawing app. The user drags his/her finger along the screen and it colors in a 100px x 100px square.
I currently achieve this by creating a new colored UIView where the user taps, and that is working. But, after a little time coloring in, there is substantial lag, which I believe is down to there being too many UIViews as a subview of the main view.
How can I, and others who similarly create UIViews on dragging a finger reduce the lag to none at all, no matter how many UIViews there are. I also think that perhaps this is an impossible task, so how else can someone like me color a cube of the size stated above in the main view on a finger dragged along the screen?
I know that this may seem like a specific question, but I believe that it could help others understand how to reduce lag if there are a very large amount of UIViews where a less performance reducing option is available.
One approach is to draw each square into an image and display that image, rather than keeping around an UIView for each square.
If your drawing is simple enough, though, you can use OpenGL to do this, which is much faster. You should look at Apple's GL Paint Sample Code which shows how to do this in OpenGL.
If your drawing is too complex for OpenGL, you could create, for example, a CGBitmapContext, and draw each square into that context when the user drags their finger. Whenever you draw a new square into that bitmap, you can turn the bitmap into an image (via CGBitmapConxtextCreateImage) and display that image an a UIImageView.
There are two things that come to my mind:
1- Use Instruments tool to check if you are leaking any memory
2- If you are just coloring the views than instead of creating images for each of them, either set the background color property of UIView or override the drawRect method to do custom drawing
I think what you are looking for is the drawRect: method of UIView. You could create your custom UIView (you propably have that already) and override the drawRect method and do your drawing there! You will have to save your drawings in an array or another container and call the setNeedsDisplay method whenever the array content is changed.
Attached 1 is a screenshot from an app called GeniusScan where you can photograph any document and an adjustable rectangular grid shows on the imageview. You can easily adjust the borders of the grid with your fingers to select the portion of the image that you want to scan. It will be then transformed into the correct prospective.
1- How can I draw and interact with the grid on the imageview?
2- How can I return the corner points of the grid to my view controller.
Update: I found a wonderful class called BJImageCropper which allows to use fingers to ajust the borders, but only for a box like rectangle. Can anyone suggest how it can be updated to support shapes like in the GeniusScan app?
Dude:
I created a demo that solves both questions:
1- How can I draw and interact with the grid on the imageview?
By Adding 4 views that will act as interactive control points by adding UIPanGestureRecognizer and then drawing the grid using CAShapeLayer on top of your view.
2- How can I return the corner points of the grid to my view controller.
You must keep references to the four control points of your grid.
Here's the link to my code.
This isn't actually drawing on top of UIImageView. It's actually an overlay (view) on top of the UIImageView. You need to keep track of 4 points (have 4 views as subview of the layer), track their positions, once moved, use drawRect: to draw lines based on the 4 points.
The way I've implemented it in my app is, I overlay the UIImageView with a transparent 'SelectionView' (a custom view that I wrote). The selectionView contains 4 custom subview of class 'Vertex'. The vertex talk back to the selectionView via protocol method every time user touches/moves it (it's actually not important which vertex moved, just that it moved):
- (void)vertexMoved:(Vertex *)vertex;
Then the selectionView knows that it needs to re-draw, so it calls setNeedsDisplay which calls internally calls drawRect (you should never call drawRect) where I do the actual drawing of the bounding rect. Basically, iterate through each vertex and draw a line using Quartz APIs and fill it with semi transparent/hollow color.
This is how I am doing it atleast, I am sure there are other ways.
I have a simple test app on which my rootViewController's UIView contains a bunch of UIView subviews. Each one of those UIView subview is backed by a CAShapeLayer.
I want the composition created by those subviews ( the four shapes that are within the dotted area .. ) to always stay vertically and horizontally centered with respect to my
UIWindow. (the minimium size of the left/right, top/bottom margins will be subject to be changed at runtime at each orientation change )
So for example when i rotate to portrait i will have to
resize and reposition those single shapes so that the whole figure will be mantained centered and each CAShapeLayer sublayer stays sharp ( i want their path to be resized not just a raster resize )
what would be the best technique to resize/move the shapes to always have a centered composition while maintaining path crisp appearance for the shapes?
Ultimately for me it will be good to have an answer to this: how can i shrink the subviews as a whole? i mean their sizes and relative positions?
Thanks
You can use CGPathCreateMutableCopyByTransformingPath() or -[UIBezierPath applyTransform:] to recalculate all points in the path.