I would like to loop through a sequence of images. I have tried using a Pivot control, but I don't like the blank space in between image transitions. I would prefer to use something that will animate between images smoothly. I also looked at the LoopingSelector control, but I can't seem to set the orientation to horizontal.
I'm assuming you're interested in a kind of image viewer like iOS offers, swiping right or left to navigate through the photos. If that's the case, I hate to say it but i think you're looking at building your own control.
I think to implement it properly these are the essential things you need to think about and address:
For performance' sake, load all the images you have into memorystream objects and store the binary data (you can get creative with this and only store the first 10-15 images, depending on how large the images are, doing this would enable your control to support thousands of images and still perform like a champ).
Once an image is about to be on-screen set the source of the image to the saved memorystream object that has the bytes loaded into it (this will minimize the work that the UI thread does, keeping the control performant and responsive)
Use Manipulation events to track the delta x of the motion someone uses when swiping left to right in order to actually perform the moving of the items
Move the images by changing their Canvas.Left property (you can go negative I think, otherwise just make your canvas the width of all the images you have combined)
Look up some of the available libraries to support momentum so you can have a natural smooth transition between images
Related
I'm making a silverlight website which includes paint-like features including freedraw. To achieve this I used the technique described on the following website: http://codeding.com/articles/freehand-drawing-in-silverlight .
The problem is, when I run the demo project it will start to lag extremely after just a few seconds of drawing. I realise that that is probably caused by the amount of shapes this techniue requires, however, and this is my main question:
How on earth does the demo on the website not lag nomatter howmuch I draw, while my local project which should have the EXACT same code lags right away?
I tried finding something about improving canvas performance overall, but the only thing I found was turning the drawing into a static image, which is not really ideal since I use undo/redo functionality.
The number of shapes added to the Canvas shouldn't be the reason for the lagging, there must be something else like converting the drawing into image for undo/redo functionality. For undo/redo, you can save the strokes-information instead of images. Creating & storing images during each undo/redo operation will consume too much memory.
A stroke is nothing but a set of points from the start (mousedown event) to end (mouseup event), and a set of strokes forms a complete drawing. You can always recreate the drawing using the saved strokes-information (just like you can recreate using images). You can use simple data-structures like List<List<Point>> to store a complete drawing, this is very memory efficient instead of creating & storing the image itself.
I am trying to download a number of images, of differnet sizes, then after some cropping stitch them into one single image.
I am intending to do this in code on a WP7 device
My current approach uses n Image controls and waits for their ImageOpened events to fire. Once they have all been successfully opened I create a new Image for each and stick them into a StackPanel.
In then use WriteableBitmap to create a single image from the stacked images.
This code works 40/50% of the time. The rest of the time the layout engine decides to not bother laying them out in a horizontal stack. All the images get rendered on top of each other.
Is there a way of forcing the StackPanel to do a full layout pass? I have tried combinations of Arrange and Measure on both the Images and the StackPanel.
I found the article WP7: Generate Live Tile Images Locally (Without The Visual Tree). I am now using Henry Chong’s approach (which includes UpdateLayout) and my photo stitching is working great.
I cannot help but be amused by the fact that the answer to my question “how the hell do I force the layout to be updated” was answered with a method called “UpdateLayout” [dev exits stage left kicking himself]
In our web application, the users need to review a large number of images. This is my current layout. 20 images will be displayed at a time, with a pagination bar above the thumbnails. Clicking a thumbnail will show the enlarged image to the left. The enlarged image will follow the scrollbar so it's always visible. Quite simple actually.
I was wondering what the best interface would be in this scenario:
One option is to implement an infinite scroll script which will lazy load thumbnails as the user scrolls. The thumbnails not visible will be removed from the DOM. But my concern with this approach is the number of changes in the DOM slowing down the page.
Another option could be something like Google's Fastflip.
What do you think is the best approach for this application? Radical ideas welcomed.
I think the question you have to ask is: what action is user supposed to do? What's the purpose of the site?
If "review images" entails rating every image, I'd rather go with a Fastflip approach where the focus is on the single image. A thumbnail gallery will distract from the desired action and might result in a smaller amount of pics rated/reviewed.
If the focus should rather be on the comparison of a given image against others, I'd say try the gallery approach, although I wouldn't impement an infinite scroll with thumbnails because user can quickly get lost in the abundance of choices. I think a standard pagination (whether static or ajaxified) would be better if you choose to go this route.
Just my 2c.
If you paginate thumbnails, you can pre-generate a single image containing all thumbnails for each page, then use an image map to handle mouseover text and clicking. This will reduce the number of HTTP requests and possibly lead to fewer bytes sent. The separation distance between images should be minimized for this to be most efficient. This would have some disadvantages.
To reduce image download size at the expense of preprocessing, you can try to save each image in the format (PNG or JPG) most efficient for its contents using an algorithm like the one in ImageGuide. Similarly, if the images are poorly compressed (like JPEGs from a cell phone camera), they can be recompressed at the cost of some quality.
Once the site has some testers, you can analyze patterns in which images tend to be clicked (if a pattern exists) and preload the full-size images, or even pre-load all of them once the thumbs are loaded.
You might play with JPEG2000 images (you did say "radical ideas welcomed"), which thumb very easily, because the thumbnail and main image needn't be sent as if they are separate files. This is an advantage of the compression format -- it isn't the same as the hack of telling the browser to resize the full size image to represent its own thumbnail.
You can take a look at Google's WebP image format.
At the server side, a separate image server optimized for static content delivery, perhaps using NginX or the Tux webserver.
I would show the thumbnails, since the user might want to skip some of the pictures. I would also stay away of pagination in the terms of
<<first <previuos n of x next> last>>
and go for something more easy to implement and efficient. A
load x more pictures.
No infinite scroll whatsoever and why not, even no scroll at all. Just load x more, previous x.
Although this answer might be a bit unradical and boring, I'd go with exactly your suggestion of asynchronously loading the thumbnails (and of course main picture), if they come into view. A similar technique is used by Google+ in the pane to add persons to circles. This way, you keep the server resources and bandwidth on the pictures that are needed by the client. As Google+ shows, the operations on the DOM tree are fast enough and don't slow down a computer of the past years.
You might also prebuilt a few lines of the thumbnail table ahead with a dummy image (e.g. a "loading circle" animated gif) and replace the image. That way, the table in view is already built and does not need to be rerendered, as the flow elements following the table would have to be, if no images are in there during scrolling.
Instead of paginating the thumbnails (as suggested by your layout scheme), you could also think about letting users filter the images by tag, theme, category, size or any other way to find their results faster.
In my app, I've a panorama-page which contains around 10 panorama items. Each panorama item has some path drawings, a list picker and few input fields.The problem i'm facing is that whenver i navigate to this page the navigation is very slow due to lot of content to initialize. If i comment the InitializeComponent(); the loading becomes fast.I thought of adding the XAML content in code, but the problem is that i've to access the input fields by their name in code, so it didn't worked.Any idea how i can speed up the navigation to the page.Thanks..
From the UI Guide:
Use either a single color background
or an image that spans the entire
panorama. If you decide to use an
image, any UI image type that is
supported by Silverlight is
acceptable, but JPEGs are recommended,
as they generally have smaller file
sizes than other formats.
You can use multiple images as a
background, but you should note that
only one image should be displayed at
any given time.
Background images should be between
480 x 800 pixels and 1024 x 800 pixels
(width x height) to ensure good
performance, minimal load time, and no scaling.
Consider hiding panorama sections
until they have content to display.
Also, 10 PanoramaItems seems like a lot since the recommended maximum is 4. You should either cut down on the number, or hide the content until it's required. Have a read of the best practice guide for Panoramas on MSDN.
I think you could improve page performance by creating usercontrols for the specific panorama items, add an empty panorama control to your page (with only the headers) and as picypg suggests load these usercontrols when they are needed.
Another way could be that you load the first page and show this one already to the user. In the background you could start loading the other panorama items.
My suggested approach would be for the first one. Using the lazyloading principle.
I woudl assume that your delays are due to the number of items on the page. This will lead to a very large object graph which will take a long time to create. I'd also expect it's using lots of memory and you have a very high fill rate which is slowing down the GPU.
Having input items/fields on PanoItems can cause UX issues if you're not careful.
That many panoItems could also cause potential navigation issues for the user.
I have a flex app I am scaling using systemManager.stage.scaleMode=StageScaleMode.NO_BORDER; for the most part it works well except for my bitmap data (mostly png's from the designers).
I can set the mx:image tags to smoothBitmapContent=true and that works great for everything except my mouseover objects. When I do a mouseover, the source is being changed from one embedded image to another embedded image. I have tried several (many) online "smoothimage" classes, and tried to write my own, I have tried to reset smoothBitmapContent every chance I get but still no dice. It seems to mee that because I am scaling at the app level, that the flopped out bitmap is not getting smoothed when it renders.
How to keep things smooth? Perhaps there is a flag to tell Flex to smooth stuff when it scales it?
So the easy answer (that works for me) was to instead of changing the image.source from one embedded png to another, was to use two images and flip flop image.visible between the two... Granted that adds two extra objects to the screen, But for some reason they all stay smoothed and scaled that way, where as before switching sources was going from smooth to jaggidy and un-readable.
Josh