I need about 100 icons inside my application. Would it be logical to have one large image file with all the icons and then somehow split it up into individual NSImage objects? Is there a way to run some code at build time to regenerate the individual icons?
Assuming you are indeed using the icons separately, I think it would be more logical to keep them separated, for a couple of reasons:
It might seem more organized to reduce the total number of files, but having one big file with all your icons isn't a terribly organized method of storing them, either. Xcode can deal fine with a large number of icon files.
If you're using version control, it complicates the management of the history a bit. As it stands now, if you need to change an icon, you just change that icon, and you can keep a history of changes to that icon. If the icons are in one big file, then any time you change any icon, that file will show up in the history, so it'll be hard to isolate what changes to what icons you made.
It's probably easier to edit a single icon than a bunch of icons smashed together into one file.
Why write a build script or runtime code to slice up the icons if you don't have to?
100 icons? Woot? Okay,
No it would not be logical. It is possible to split them at runtime, not at build time. I would simply use the easy way and add all icons as different files.
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I often spend hours bringing pictures into PowerPoint templates one by one and trying to customize the way a presentation whose behavior is very different.
If there were a way to randomly select an image from all of the images on a different slide or excel file or folder and have them appear based on the probable weight assigned to them, it would be a huge time saver.
I've seen various methods of having a random object appear, and some of them don't even require a macro, but importing the images is always very time consuming. If anyone knows of a better/faster way to link a folder with a group of images or something along these lines to an object that is randomized, please help.
Importantly, showing a random image from a batch group without customizing the way each image is brought in is the hard part. Adding weight helps, but it could be done by duplicating important images repeatedly.
I wrote a Node.js app that creates images that I want to stitch. I want to create one image with over 10,000 charts. My original solution was to create images each with over 200 charts each and stitch those together. That results in 50 images being stitched.
I now wish to create one chart per image, resulting in over 10,000 images, and stitch those together. When I drag and drop the files into Fiji to create a montage, it opens each individual one. It takes way to long to open the entire collection.
Is there a way I can create a montage of thousands of images and stitch everything into a single file in Fiji that doesn't require every image being opened?
You say that you want to stitch your image, which implies your goal is to find where these images overlay from a specific channel, but when you say montage, it makes it seem like what you really want to do is concatenate the images into a stack or align them into a montage. To me it appears that you have a program which will output some form of stack which has 200 planes, and then concatenate them together or align them as a montage.
In principle, you will have to open every image, but opening them with batch mode on and running the operations by macro will reduce time by not rendering the viewable image. It would not be possible to run ImageJ/FIJI operations on an image without opening it, as this is beyond something like renaming or deleting a file.
If you really meant that you want to stitch them, use the stitching plugin function for Grid/Collection stitching, and set the overlap to zero. This requires having your images be in a single folder, and in your case splitting them into individual images instead of sets of 200, with each file labeled with an increasing number (i.e. file_name_1.tif, file_name_2.tif, where each file_name is the same and only the number changes). If you have stacks of 200 and are happy to keep them that way in the created montage, the file naming convention needs to be the same. You should select the Fuse and Display option to get the resulting image. The output will be a merged, larger image.
When you are trying to somehow stitch the images and overlay the stacks, scripting the commands to run it in batch mode would also work.
For stitching I highly recommend the MIST plugin. For batch opening files, try dragging and dropping the folder containing the images rather than the images themselves. Alternatively, go through File -> Import -> Image Sequence.
I've made a little Towers of Hanoi game, but nothing what was set on my PC looks the same on a different computer, not even the fonts. Everything is so messed up, I couldn't do it better even if I wanted this to happen. To say it short the backgrounds used for controls and forms are out of place, the initial values used for size and position of both forms and controls are bloody changed, and my project just looks like a huge mess. It's true I've worked in absolute values, because usually a programming language respects the programmer's point of view, and doesn't scales and moves everything the way it wants. If I wanted my project to rescale according to screen resolution I would had used relative coordinates, and made all my forms and controls dimensions be a certain amount of the screen's width and height.
Is there a way to preserve the project just as it was initially designed, so it would look the same on any computer?
I'm using Visual Studio 2010, and Windows 7 as OS.
You don't tell us specifically which properties you've modified from the defaults, or show us a screenshot of the before and after views from which we might be able to infer which modifications you've made. But you did mention something about changing the font, so we'll go with that.
In fact, it does try to preserve your specified properties to the extent possible. But sometimes it is just not possible. For example, if you specify a font for your controls that isn't available on the other computer, then it has no choice but to fall back to a font that is available. If you have any experience with web page design, it is a very similar problem. You have to use a small subset of web-safe fonts to ensure that they will be available on all of your users' computers. That's also why web designers are so keen now on embedding fonts into pages.
Anyway, it goes without saying that if the font has to change, the layout is going to be messed up. Different fonts are different sizes, so different amounts of text are going to fit, causing some to get cut off. That is why, in general, you should avoid changing properties like Font. If you use the defaults, things are a lot more compatible. But neither web pages nor desktop applications are WYSIWYG. You need images or PDF files for that.
Then there are system settings like DPI that can really mess things up, too. Keeping the default font isn't going to help you there. You have to design your application in a smart way. You mention something about relative layouts—these are the ticket. Unfortunately, WinForms doesn't make it easy to do this. It all but forces you into specifying absolute sizes and positions based on the pixel grid, which is mostly a waste of time, as you've seen. I describe in detail how to accomplish this in WinForms in this answer. The AutoSize property will be very useful to you. Of course, you'll also need the dynamically-growing TableLayoutPanel and/or FlowLayoutPanel controls, otherwise you'll end up with automatically sized controls that overlap one another.
Pre-emptive snarky comment: you should totally drop WinForms and use WPF instead. It is new, and cool, and sexy, and all but forces you the other way into pixel-independent layouts. Of course, it also makes it really easy to create butt-ugly, downright unusable applications that look like some of the stuff Microsoft has been churning out over the past couple of years.
#Cody Gray thanks for your insights.
com/qMBJS.png
The first image is how the main menu looks. It's kinda self-explanatory how it should had looked, without the big white margins while the text should had been inside the labels backgrounds
The second one is some in-game footage. And this is just one of the levels. It's so messed up I'm almost sorry I've lost a night doing some heavy work on the image editing side of the matter. I'm not at my own PC right now, so I've tried to rearrange all the stuff directly in Visual Studio's design window, to show how the level should had closely looked. Just imagine it without the white and black margins surrounding some controls.
Also I've tried to set the controls and forms parameters through code, when the form loads, trying to force it to look as it should but the result wasn't any better.
What I am ultimately trying to do is to create a grid of images for print that are minor variations of the same thing (different text is all). Looking through online resources I was able to create a script that changes the text and exports all of the images necessary (several hundred). What I am trying to do now is to import all of these images into a new photoshop document and lay them all out in a grid and I can't seem to find any examples of this.
Can anyone point me in the right direction to place a file at a specific coordinate (I'm using CS5 and have the design suite so if there is a way in illustrator to do this quickly...)?
Also, I'm open to other ideas on how to do this (even other programs) easily. It's for labels so the positioning on the sheet has to be pretty precise...
The art layer object has a translate() method that takes delta x and y params. You'll need to open each image, copy it to the target document, get its current location (using artLayer.bounds) and do the math to find the deltas to position it where you want it. Your deltas can be in pixels so you'll get plenty of precision.
Check out your 'JavaScript Scripting Reference' pdf in your Adobe install directory for more details.
Ok I'm marking Anna's response as the answer because though I didn't fully test it, it seems like it should work and answers the original question with jsx. However I'm also leaving my final solution in case anyone else runs across this with the same issue and may prefer this method as well.
What I ended up doing instead is using InDesign. I figured out that it has a grid option that lets you import a number of files and place them all in an equal grid in a single command. This is almost exactly what I was looking for, except that it leaves a small border/margin in between the columns and grids and mine were designed to meet exactly.
I couldn't figure out how to make it not have the border (I have very little experience with InDesign, it may be possible). However I was able to select all my images and scale them uniformly to be the correct size, then I just selected each column and dragged it over to snap to the adjacent column and the same with rows...
I am writing an app that stitches iOS text message screen captures together vertically.
I have the images cropped to only contain the message bubbles and none of the navigation bar of the text input bar (expect the the first and last screencaps of course) but I don't know how to detect where to line up the images.
I need to detect where there is overlap in the conversations and then stitch the images at the point. (I know how to draw the images to a new image context too.)
I am looking for an open source framework that could help me achieve this and any advice as to how to accomplish this task.
Thanks!
You can also give a go to the following code:
https://github.com/foundry/OpenCVStitch
While it might be overkill for your project, you could have a look at PanoTools: an Open Source software library for manipulating and stitching panoramic images. It's portable (Win/Lin/Mac), and if you're looking forward to making the stitching on your computer, GUIs to it like Hugin may even already fit your use case (I only used them for stitching photographs, so check the projection settings).