Core Data and image entities - image

I'm new to Core Data. I'm creating an app that will allow a user to add a document importing/exporting from/to either Dropbox, Mail (haven't figured that out), or the camera or photo library.
I see in CoreDataRecipes that Apple creating an entity for image and have a relationship to recipes. And their PhotoPicker app the camera part is a little ridiculous in my opinion. Cool but not practical. Plus they're not using Core Data.
I just have a table view, an add button at the top, the user will be prompted to choose any of the options mentioned, add a title, and that title added to the table view. Hope all that is clear, I'm trying to be brief. In a way I want to do this part of the app like a scanner app.
So my question is, do I really need to create an entity for the image? Or can I just go about figuring how to do all this?
Thanks in advance for any help or info you can provide.

In my case, I kept the images out of sql store altogether and just saved the images in the application's /Cache folder. I then stored a filename in my entity in core data which allowed me to access the image.

Below 1MB do with it whatever you like. Beyond 1MB you should put the binary data on a separate table. What you get doing this is lazy loading, that is, the data remains at fault until the user needs it. It also depends on your memory usage and number of images, this part is only common sense.

Related

Persistant object in ADF

I am trying to formulate how to create an ADF, drop an object in it, then have that object always be there when I run the app again, after localization occurs, of course. Do I have to save off the locations of virtual objects into a separate file when the user is done "dropping" objects into the scene and then reload them on subsequent runs? Or is there a way to save them into the ADF?
We cannot save objects with ADF, instead while loading ADF, object can be added (after recognition of ADF) to the recognised coordinate.
I did something like this and got it working, but found placed objects oscillating and not get placed exactly on the same place in the subsequent ADF loading. Because whenever Tango connection is established, that location is considered as origin(0,0,0) and objects get placed related to this origin. So it is hard to see those objects exactly on same places.
There's no good way to save it into ADF, unless you hack some of the ADF's meta data. But hacking meta data is not suggested.
I did what you say.
You have to write coordinates of Objects into a separated file then when you reload scene and recognized your room (thanks to the adf), just put back objects at same coords.
Of course every coord (x y z) must refer to the ADF Tango pose -> base = TangoEnums.TangoCoordinateFrameType.TANGO_COORDINATE_FRAME_AREA_DESCRIPTION
On Unity it's very simple, you just have to check to "true" the "Use Area description poses" on your ARCamera tango script and same on your PointCloud script if you use it also.

MvxImageViewLoader behaviour overriding (Caching, Images appearing etc.)

I use MvxImageViewLoader for MvvmCross Xamarin applications.
This component is really great and simplifies the images loading pretty much, but it (at least, out-of-the-box) is pretty basic and most of modern applications require some reacher functionality, for instance, loading/progress images or images nice appearing/transitions (possibly with custom animation).
I see there is DefaultImagePath property, but that's static image, which I can probably use by default, but that's not animated view or something.
So, is there any way to customize/extend the loader behaviour (for default image appearing, images transition (from default to loaded)) etc?
And also I've noticed that the loader caches the image and even if I trigger bound property changing (leaving the image url the same) it does not refresh the image. I guess, "caching" really means caching and so on, but what if I need to change the user icon or something... how can I forse the cache refreshing with the image loader?
Thank you!
So, is there any way to customize/extend the loader behaviour (for default image appearing, images transition (from default to loaded)) etc?
No - advanced features like fade-in/fade-out/animated-placeholder display aren't supported within the standard MvvmCross image view, and no-one that I know of has provided any samples or tutorials about how this can be done.
For adding such functionality, you can use normal software techniques - inheritance, aggregation and cut, copy, paste. e.g. you could simply create your own AgatImageView which had the behaviour your app requires based on MvxImageView.cs.
Some examples of creating your own data-bound controls is given in N=18 and N-19 of http://mvvmcross.wordpress.com/
As you already mentioned in upper comments you may use default iOS' UIActivityIndicatorView for showing progress and you should hide the progress in afterImageChangeAction, you can check if UIImageView.Image field is not null, to make sure that the image is loaded.
Regarding the caching, it's not that easy here. By default MvxImageViewLoader relies on MvvmCross framework's implementation of IMvxFileDownloadCache interface. This interface has only one public method RequestLocalFilePath(), so even if you get an instance from IoC container (Mvx.Resolve()) you won't be able to clean-up the existing cache (to do that you need to reset private _entriesByHttpUrl field of MvxFileDownloadCache class).
If you really need this, you have to copy-paste existing MvxFileDownloadCache class and make your tweaks. But I am not sure about your use-cases where you need this. If you download images from the web, the URL of the image is a sort of a key in the cache, so if you need to reload just change the URL.
Maybe you could use some old-school approach like adding GET parameters to the URL: http://mydomain.com/images/myimage.jpg?timestamp=123456. Usually this helps everywhere :-). Although I didn't test it with MvxImageViewLoader, it's just my best guess.

Best way to deal with image thumbnails on news web site (custom CMS based on codeigniter)?

I’ve been thinking a while about the best solution and as much as I read I get more and more confused. There are a lot of different libraries and helpers (most of them are outdated or for CI 1.x) and I really need your help.
I have a custom CMS based on CodeIgniter 2.1.3, news site that has about 40-50 images on the home page, but 80% of them are really small thumbnails in 3 different sizes and the other 20% of the images on the home page are in 2 sizes + for the inner pages when I list the news from a category there is 1 size of thumbnails. So in total I will need the original image for the news story, + 5-6 thumbnails sizes for the home page.
What’s the smartest way to deal with this? There will be let’s say 10-50 new news per day.
Is it still better to create 5-6 thumbnails per image during the upload?
What about the method “on the fly”? I’m more into this method, as I read, only the first visitor will call the library/helper to generate the thumbnails, and for the others the thumbnails will be already created so it won’t waste CPU. What about this method? Is it good practice?
What caching techniques I should use for these what I need?
Also I forgot to ask, how the other CMS system deal with generating the thumbnails? I mean about Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.
Do they store predefined sizes or generate them on the fly?
I guess their logic should be the best, or maybe not, but I want to implement something smart in my CodeIgniter CMS.
I didn’t mention, but I think it’s not important to this, I use Grocery CRUD for the admin panel.
Any help is appreciated.
Your best bet is to create images on the fly + use CDN like Amazon Cloudfront to cache the resized versions of your source image.
I’ve been using CodeIgniter for a number of years to build websites where lots of different sizes of images are used throughout the website. At the beginning I used to create every size needed out of the original image during the upload process (could easily end up with more than 5 thumbnails). This proved to be delivering the best performance – whenever you need an image of the certain size you just include it with no additional PHP processing. However I noticed that I end up with a huge number of images on the server, where the older ones may not even be used that often (e.g.: articles older than a year). Plus developing this way takes longer.
Then I started creating images on the fly, firstly using 3rd party libraries and later developed my own interface for CodeIgniter. This saves a lot of time, because during the upload process you save an original version of the image not worrying about resized versions. When displaying an image in the front end, all you normally need to do is to pass certain dimensions of the image required. Doing this way, not only you can get 5-6 versions of the image, but as many as you need. Also that’s a solution for the future when you redesign your website where the different sized images might be needed! What would you do when none of your 5 thumbnail options are no longer valid and you need different sizes?
You’re right, resizing an image on the fly can really be CPU consuming operation (especially when the large images are involved), therefore caching is a must. You can cache images right on your server or get CDN on top of that.
To keep the server tidy I normally run a cron job to delete on-the-fly images older than let's say a week. That saves space + doesn't cause harm - whenever image is needed to display, it'll just get recreated.
Check out timthumb, it's a script that resizes images on the fly and stores them in a cache. It's a simple as including an image tag with parameters in the URL.
ALso check this link which looks promising http://www.jenssegers.be/blog/31/Codeigniter-resizing-and-cropping-images-on-the-fly-continued
I love the way Drupal manage this. In Drupal 6 there was a module called imagecache (now is in core in Drupal 7, but functionality is very similar), which basically stores presets for images (image sizes, transformations, effects...) and when the visitor ask for an image the module generate different images based on presets and serve this images. This way you upload an image but have different images for different purposes.
The module has a really useful feature, if you want to change one preset, you can "flush" all the images related with that preset, so the visitors can see the changes.
Of course there are many other modules in Drupal related to imagecache or image styles, that add other effects like watermarks...
More information:
http://drupal.org/node/949222
http://drupal.org/node/163561

Any tips to achieve replication of paper form in vb form and then print and save

I'm looking for a tips that I can use to make the following as easy and/or re-usable as possible.
I need to recreate a paper based form in vb6, allow the user to fill in values and then be able to both print out and save the completed form.
I'm thinking of scaning the form and saving it as a jpeg.
Using this jpg as the picture in a picture box.
Overlaying it with checkboxes/textboxes etc.
Saving the values of the various controls to the database
etc.
It seems like a lot of work for just 1 form and not very re-usable.
is there a better way?
Well, if what you want is "easy" - there isn't any tool which will do everything you want automatically. There are tools to turn paper forms into PDFs - but you would still have to do the database work yourself.
As for "re-usable" - I suppose creating a simple web application will fulfill this criteria, because your users wouldn't have to install your application.

working with images in windows phone app - performance

I have an app that allows users to take pictures and store them in the IsolatedStorage. These images are then retrieved to display them in a list. The app suffers from performance issues when there are more than 30+ images in the list. It is taking a long time to retrieve these images from the storage and bind them to the list. A lot of times, the app is just closed by OS because it takes too long.
Also, I think as better resolution devices are coming in the market, the images are getting created with bigger sizes and affecting performance even more.
I need some guidance on how to resolve this. Couple of things I have though about:
1) how can I asynchronously retrieve every image to be retrieved from IS so the page can load but the images are being retrieved in async fashion. Any sample code is appreciated.
2) the other approach will be where I create a thumbnail photo of the actual photo (smaller size and resolution) while storing the original photo and use this thumbnail photo in binding to the list later. If this should be done, then how should I go about processing the image on the fly to create a smaller size thumbnail version of the original photo.
Any other ideas are appreciated as well.
Thanks for your time.
If you are able to, I would recommend using the Async CTP and making the code that loads images from isolated storage async. The methods that generate the thumbnails can be async as well.
If you cannot do this (add these dependencies to your project), use a BackgroundWorker. Perhaps this article can help you get started.
This will allow your UI to be responsive while processing continues on threads in the background.
Do not pretend the Isolated Storage as a SQL Server. There will be great performance difference. If you want to process too much data, send them to server.
However, there is a method for getting a thumbnail. You can use it:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.drawing.image.getthumbnailimage.aspx
Also, please check this answer:
Create thumbnail image

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