Working with multiple displays? - cocoa

I have zero experience with multiple displays & cocoa. Feel free to share any handy links, tutorials. What I need is this : I'm trying to fill all displays with a full screen, transparent window. What I'm afraid for, though, is that all the displays together don't necessarily form a rectangle, but have to touch somewhere.
What are your thoughts about this?

You would set up a window for each display that is not mirrored. The API you are looking for is "Quartz Display Services".
CGGetActiveDisplayList gives you a list of non-sleeping, non-mirrored, drawable displays.

Related

Only show the back of the live tile in WP7?

Is there possible to only show the back of the tile when pinned to start? I think the back gives me more freedom, with the "Content" setting, so I would like to only use the back, and not the front.
No. But what you can do, is to create a custom live tile background-image, which allows you to have more content on it.
I've written a guide on how to do exactly that

Adjustable size screen shot in app

I would like to know if it is possible to make a screenshot within the app and allow to save it in photo album of the phone? Since i have too many things on the view, such as graphic buttons, few UIImages. And i want them all export or save as one picture.
However, i also want the screenshot to be adjustable. As there are many things i dont want such as the navigation bar etc.
May I know if it is possible?
Thank you all.

Mirroring a portion of the screen to an external display (in OSX)

I would like to write a program that can mirror a portion of the main display into a new window. Ideally this new window could then be displayed on an external monitor. I have seen this uiltity for a flightsim that does this on a pc (a multifunction display extractor).
CLick here for a screenshot of the program (MFD Extractor)
This would be a live window ie. constantaly updated video display not just a static graphic.
I have looked at screen magnifiers or vnc clients for ideas but I think I need to write something from scratch. I have tried to do some reading on osx programing but where do I start in terms of gaining access to the display? I somehow need to extract the graphics from a particular program. Is it best to go near the final output stage (the individual pixels sent to the display) or somewhere nearer the window management stage.
Any ideas or pointers would be much appreciated. I just need somewhere to start from.
Regards,
There are a few ways to do this:
Quartz Display Services will let you get access to the video memory for a screen.
Quartz Window Services (a.k.a. CGWindow) will let you create an image of everything that lies below a window. If you create a borderless, transparent, empty, high-level window whose frame occupies an entire screen, everything below it will be everything on that screen. (Of course, you could create a smaller window in order to copy a section of the screen.)
There's also a way to do it using OpenGL that I never fully understood. That technique is demonstrated by a couple of code samples, OpenGLScreenSnapshot and OpenGLCaptureToMovie. It's more or less obsoleted by CGWindow, though.
Each of those will get you an image that you can then show or write to a file or something.
To show an image, use NSImageView or IKImageView. If you want to magnify it, IKImageView has a zoomFactor property, but if you want nearest-neighbor scaling (like Pixie, DigitalColor Meter, or xScope), I think you'll need to write a custom view for that (but even that isn't all that hard).

Any suggestions for best practices to follow when creating UI prototypes using sketchFlow for multiple screen sizes?

am looking to prototype the UI for an windows application. The app will be deployed on several display devices with different (physical) screen sizes and aspect ratios. Would like to be able to generate scenarios optimized on one display and quickly check if the layout is OK on different screen sizes, orientations. That is, I'd like to prototype one set of scenarios and "automatically" generate the same scenarios on different screens. Have superficial knowledge of MS Sketchflow. Have seen some best practices at http://www.wpftutorial.net/LayoutProperties.html#best . Am wondering if folk can advise on best practices to follow in sketchflow.
Bye
To quickly be able to check how things will look, I have 2 possible suggestions:
Use the states panel to create a state group/states that change the size of the layout container (such as layoutroot) you are working with. Then in the sketchflow player, you can select the state from the navigation menu and see how it looks.
Use a ChangePropertyAction behavior from the asset panel attached to a button. You can set the height or width to the size you want. If you use 2, you can set both the height and width. This would give you the ability to control the layout size and see how it is rendered.
Hope that helps, let me know if you need more info.
Keep a consistent theme between the pages, kind of goes without saying.

What is a robust method for capturing screen of child window in Windows 7?

Pardon my frustration. I've asked about this in many places and I seriously don't think that there wouldn't be a way in Windows 7 SDK to accomplish this.
All I want, is to capture part of a 'child window' ( setParent() ) created by a parent. I used to do this with bitblt() but the catch is that the child window can be any type of application, and in my case has OpenGL running in a section of it. If I bitblt() that, then the OGL part comes blank, doesn't get written to the BMP.
DWM, particularly dwmRegisterThumbnail() doesn't allow thumbnail generation of child windows. So please give me a direction.
Thanks.
It's been a while since I did any of this, so my explanation might be a bit vague, but from what I remember, the Windows doesn't "see" the OpenGL rendered inside the window.
What Windows does is create the window at the specified size and then "hands it over" to OpenGL for rendering. This means that you can't get at the pixels as rendered from the Windows side of the code.
When we wanted to capture the 3D we had to re-render the screen to an off screen bitmap which was then saved (or printed).
Obviously a whole screen capture (Print Screen) works because it's reading the final pixels.
I suggest that you:
Forget the Thumbnail part of the task (in terms of capture).
Calculate where your window is.
Capture full screen.
Excise the area you are interested in (using data from step 2).
Rescale to the appropriate thumbnail size.
Sorry, its more work, but it should work, which is better than what you have right now.
This may help:
http://code.google.com/p/telekinesis/source/browse/trunk/Mac/Source/glgrab.c?r=140
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/dialog/screencap.aspx
Also Java's Robot class (http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/awt/Robot.html#createScreenCapture%28java.awt.Rectangle%29)
I don't have access to the source code of any child window that may be open including the one with OpenGL

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