I want to create a simple application which performs some calculations and then draws some images on view. I use NSBezierPath. Then I must resize the view and allow people scroll the finished picture. But i don't know how.If I also try to draw an image on an invisible part of canvas then it becomes invisible or isn't drawn (I couldn't know the future canvas size).
Check out the Apple sample code called BezierPathLab. I think that will get you started. There's lot of other sample code for Quartz 2D drawing too.
Being able to scroll and resize the view should be as simple as putting the view that you will be using to draw inside an NSScrollView.
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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'm trying to make a page based application in iOS where the actual page is a non-rectangular image (contains clear color). However, the shadow that appears when I turn the page doesn't seem to ignore the transparency of the image (see below).
Screenshot http://img543.imageshack.us/img543/9730/pagecurl.png
Does anyone know if it's possible to modify this behavior?
Thanks in advance.
Have you tried setting your UIPageViewController's view's frame so that it sits just within the border defined by your custom page image?
(So in your case, the largest rectangle that fits inside your white page image)
The way UIPageViewController handles a page curl animation with views that extend beyond its own view's frame can be thought of as follows:
Think of the overhang as rigid. it does not bend like the rest of the page, but it does maintain the angle at the edge of the UIPageViewController's frame. If the overhang (i.e. parts of your image or view that extend beyond the UIPageViewController's frame), is small, the fact that the overhang animates as rigid (instead of the bendy, flexible page) is visually negligible.
However, without any further modifications, the pages will only flip when a touch is started INSIDE the UIPageViewController's view's frame. But it would be better if it could react to touches anywhere on your white page image. If you want the pages to react to touches inside another view's frame (e.g. the view holding your white page image), try the following:
otherView.gestureRecognizers = myPageViewController.gestureRecognizers;
The problem is that the iOS framework puts a shadow over the entire bounds of the view controller you specify for the page, so any transparent areas will look shadowed. You could try masking your view controller (viewController.view.layer.mask and viewController.view.layer.masksToBounds) and see if that helps.
Hopefully Apple improves this framework for a future iOS release. It sure would be nice to disable that shadow or have a way to do it yourself but there you go.
I'm currently working on an app which needs to draw s.th. like a network graph. Unfortunately this graph can become very big with thousands of movable objects.
I tried to put a giant UIView inside a UIScrollView but soon noticed this won't work because of memory limitations.
So I tried another approach: currently I have a UIView which has exactly the size of the visible part of the UIScrollView. The scrollview is set to not handle the scrolling (only the pinching). Instead I handle the scrolling in the UIView. Everytime a user scrolls, all graphic objects (those graphic objects are currently just subclasses of NSObject, which contain custom drawing code) are moved, so it seems like the view is scrolling. In the drawRect I only draw the graphics that are currently visible.
Also I constantly add and remove sublayers if they are moved out/in the visible frame
This works very smooth even with thousands of objects.
Unfortunately this approach has some drawbacks:
I can't zoom out to see all the objects in the graph, instead the user can only see a part of it
I don't get the inertial scrolling the UIScrollView offers
Other approaches I tried, like the CATiledLayer, don't work either because all the objects in the graph are draggable by the user and it looks really ugly if I use a CATiledLayer...
Swapping out the UIView with other UIViews while the user scrolls may help with the inertial scrolling, but it makes everything more complicated and zooming out completely still won't work :-(
Do you know of any best practices to draw graphs that can be very big?
//edit: I ended up with a uiscrollview which has a subview which has a cascrolllayer which has many sublayers. While zooming in and out the frame of the uiscrollviews subview is constantly changed to the uiscrollviews bounds by view.frame = scrollview.bounds. While dragging the scrollview the cascrolllayer is always forced to scroll to the current offset of the scrollview.
I needed to subclass the uiscrollview and hack around in order to make the zooming work nicely, but it's working well now. This approach works very well and allows very big graphs with lots of draggable elements.
//edit: see my other answer below, the approach above didn't work out as well as I initially thought, especially the zooming part
CATiledLayer is definitely what you should use here—there’s not really another solution that’ll let you use Quartz/UIKit drawing on a huge zoomable canvas. For anything that needs to be interactive (dragged or animated or whatever), you can disable its display in the main tiled layer and overlay another view or layer on top of it that just contains the object being interacted with.
I am developing an application where I need to place rectangular slabs of different shapes to create the shape of a Bench Top. I am placing the rectangular slabs of different shapes(I am using a the Canvas container as the slab) in a repeater and dragging them on the main canvas. One functionality that needs to be implemented is the ability to resize these slabs once the are dragged from the repeater into the drawing canvas by dragging along their edges like we resize the windows that we normally see. Is there any way this can be done.
I just found an component developed for the purpose
http://www.rogue-development.com/objectHandles.html
I am going to check it out.
Please inform if anyone has any other solutions.