does anybuddy know, any good third party charts/graphs provider for iPad which we can use in business applications?
Apart from core-plot.
Core Plot is a plotting framework for Mac OS X and iOS. It provides 2D visualization of data, and is tightly integrated with Apple technologies like Core Animation, Core Data, and Cocoa Bindings.
Core-plot and also have look to PowerPlot
From a review I did recently there are very few good iOS charting components. Most are pitifully slow, which spoils the tablet / phone user experience. I was made aware recently of a newcomer to iOS charting by ShinobiControls. They have some pretty good looking charts:
But what really sets them aside is the speed, I downloaded the trial and was amazed to see charts with 100,000+ points rendering at 60fps and multi-touch support.
I have used CorePlot and this seriously beats it by a long way!
Related
I have stuck on very interesting question in regards of the AR. Is there a way to represent an augmented reality 3d objective with a camera application by apple without downloading any of the 3rd party apps. just by pointing it towards the camera
AR applications uses ARKit which enables world tracking which works through a technique called visual-inertial odometry.
By using the iPhone or iPad’s camera and motion sensors, ARKit will find bunch of points in the environment and track them when you move the phone. Once you pin it in the real world 3D model is rendered.
Where as these operations are not supported by the default camera application since they are not leveraging ARKit internally by Default.
I am planning to develop an iOS app and would love to have some very simple 3d objects the user could interact with either by gestures or gyro. I don't need complex animations or game logic. I have developed simple apps but never used 3d. What frameworks could be best for such task and does it take a lot to learn and implement?
Cocos engine. Google cocos2D but look for the 3D information. Cheers
Using OpenGL with GLKit seems to benefit you the most here.
I started to use NinevehGL (http://nineveh.gl). It is a very simple framework to load and handle 3D objects for iOS.
I guess OpenGL can fit your need.
As briefly as I can; are there any frameworks available that I can drop into an iPad app I'm working on, along with a 3D model, and allow me to add a view that will present the model in an interactive format?
Model needs to be rotatable, and ideally I would like to be able to add interactive points on to the model that pop up modal views when tapped.
I have never worked with 3D before in any respect so I'm coming at that part as a complete novice. The 3D model is being supplied to me and will be available in "various formats". The rest of the app is pure Objective-C in which I'm proficient enough.
I have Googled and Googled and have come up with nothing so far.
Failing there being any drop-in frameworks, how much of a challenge is it likely to be to get myself up to speed with what I would need to know? Are there any good starting points to expand my knowledge here?
3D is a complex matter, if you don't see your future dealing with it on a regular basis I wouldn't recommend writing your own solutions for it.
The closest you can find to a drag and drop framework would be the SDK of the iPhone / iPad GPU's manufacturer. It's pretty easy to use.
PowerVR SDK Download
After a free registration on their website, you can download the SDK that contains lots of samples with source code. Their framework displays 3D models in their own POD format, which is of course heavily optimized for the iOS devices. Ask your 3D model provider to give you the models in POD format (you can find POD converters / exporters for Maya etc. on PowerVR's website as well).
I recently moved from a PC to a MacBook Pro. I'm starting to go through tutorials on Objective-C and developing in Cocoa. I do a lot of image processing algorithm development work (pixel by pixel manipulation) in my day job so I'd like to get create a test image processing app or two for OS X. I'm struggling to figure out where to start - let's say I want to create a simple application (that I could reuse) like the following:
load an image from an open file option within a file menu
display this within the GUI.
Click a button to apply pixel by pixel processing
Update the displayed image
Save the processed image from the save option within the file menu
Any pointers or links would be most appreciated.
Thanks
Other info:
I'm pretty familiar with OpenCV within Linux - haven't looked at using it within Objective-C/Cocoa/Xcode environment yet though - not even sure if this would be a good idea?
I guess it would be nice to use GPU acceleration as well, but I'm not familiar with OpenGL/OpenCL - so I might have to put that one on the long finger for the moment.
As you are looking at the Apple platform, you should look into the CoreImage framework - it will provide you most of pre-baked cookies ready to be consumed in your application.
For more advanced purposes, you can start off with openCV.
Best of luck!!
As samfisher suggests, OpenCV is not that hard to get working on the Mac, and Core Image is a great Cocoa framework for doing GPU-accelerated image processing. I'm working on porting my GPUImage framework from iOS to the Mac, and it's entirely geared around making accelerated image processing easy to work with, but unfortunately that isn't working right now.
If you're just getting started on the Mac, one tool that I can point out which you might overlook is Quartz Composer. You have to download the separate Graphics Tools package from Apple's developer site to install Quartz Composer, because it's no longer shipped with Xcode.
Quartz Composer is a graphical development tool that lets you drag and drop modules, connect inputs and outputs, and do rapid development of some fairly interesting things. One task it's great for is doing rapid prototyping of image processing, either using Core Image or OpenGL shaders. I've even heard of people using OpenCV with this using custom patches. You can easily connect an image or camera source into a filter chain, then edit the filters and see live updates as you work on them, without requiring a compile-run cycle.
If you want some sample QC projects to play with, I have a couple of them linked from this article I wrote a couple of years ago. They both do the same color-based object tracking, with one using Core Image and the other OpenGL shaders. You can dig into that and play around to see how that works, without having to get too far into writing any code.
I'm interested in writing some homebrew code for the Microsoft Kinect console. I have a few applications which I think would translate well to the platform. I've been toying with the idea of giving it a shot using the OpenKinect drivers and libraries. Obviously this would be a lot of work, but I am wondering just how much. Does anyone have experience with OpenKinect? Do you get only the raw video/audio data from the device, or has anyone written higher level abstractions to make common tasks easier?
The OpenKinect library is basically a driver — at least for now — so don't expect much high functions from it. You will more or less get the raw data from both the depth and the video cameras.
This is basically an array received in a callback function each time a frame arrives.
You can give it a try by following the instructions provided on the OpenKinect website, it's really quick to install and try it, and you can play a bit with the glview application provided to get a feeling of what's possible.
I've set up a few demos using opencv, and got pretty cool results even though I didn't have much background in computer vision so I can only encourage you to try it yourself!
Alternately, if you're looking for more advanced functions, the OpenNI framework was just released this week and provides some impressive high level algorithms such as skeleton tracking and some gesture recognition. Part of the framework is proprietary algorithms from PrimeSense (like the powerful skeleton tracking module...). I haven't tried it yet and don't know how well it integrates with the kinect and the different OS, but since a bunch of guys from different groups (OpenKinect, Willow Garage...) are working hard on it that shouldn't be an issue within a week.
Elaborating further on what Jules Olleon wrote, i've worked with OpenNI (http://www.openni.org) and the algorithms above it (NITE), and I highly recommend using these frameworks. Both frameworks are well-documented, and come with numerous samples from which you can start out.
Basically, OpenNI abstracts the lower-level details of working with the sensor and its driver for you, and gives you a convenient way to get what you want from a "generator" (e.g. xn::DepthGenerator for getting the raw depth data). OpenNI is open-source and free to use in any application. OpenNI also handles the platform-abstraction for you. As of today, OpenNI is supported and works fine for Windows 32/64 and linux, and is in the process of being ported to OSX. Bindings are available for use in multiple programming languages (C, C++, .NET, Python, and a few others I believe).
NITE has additional interfaces built above OpenNI, which give you higher-level results (e.g. track a hand-point, skeletons, scene analysis etc). You'll want to check the subtleties of NITE's license regarding when/where you can use it, but it's still probably the easiest and fastest way to get analysis (e.g. skeleton) for now. NITE is closed-source, so PrimeSense need to supply a binary version for you to use. Currently windows and linux versions are available.
I haven't worked with with OpenKinect but I've been working with OpenNI and SensorKinect for a few months now for my research. If you are planning to work with raw data from Kinect, they work great in giving you depth and video (they don't support motor control). I've used it with C++ and OpenGL in both Windows 64bit and Ubuntu 32bit with almost no modifications to the code. It's very easy to learn if you know basic c++. Installing it might be a little headache.
For more advanced features such as skeleton detection, gesture recognition, etc., I highly recommend using the middlewares such as NITE with OpenNI or the ones provided in here: Middlewares developed around OpenNI rather than re-inventing the wheel. Nite is also very easy to use once you have OpenNI working; e.g. joint recognition is something around 10-20 extra lines of code.
Something that I would recommend to my younger self would be to learn and work with a basic game engine (e.g. Unity) rather than directly with OpenGL. It would give you a lot better and more enjoyable graphics, less hassle and would also enable you to easily integrate your program with other tools such as PhysX. I haven't tried any, but I know there are some plugins for using Kinect drivers in Unity.