I have an idea to implement a deep zoom type interface hosted in a browser for sports training data (speed, distance, heart rate etc.) However, rather than images I actually want to zoom into a hierarchy of information. For example, the initial display would contain a grid of years - hover over 2008, for example, and spin the mouse wheel (or click) will zoom into that year but during the zoom I want 2008 to fade out and be replaced with a calendar of months. Again zoom into a month and the months are replaced with the months calendar, zoom into a day and you finally see a chart with the training data plotted on it. All the time only dates with actual data would be highlighted in some fashion.
My question is whether this would even be possible and whether anyone has seen examples of this already. I'm imagining that most of the time the next level of information could be cached in the browser (in fact, because this is calendar-based, I can calculate most of that and cache the dates to be highlighted.) I could also zoom into an empty chart whilst an Ajax thread is fetching the data to display.
I've never tried anything like this before and I'm especially interested in whether DHTML would be capable of this sort of zoom (I suspect not and I would have to resort to Silverlight) and whether the Ajax execution would be uninterrupted whilst the browser rendering thread is kept busy zooming.
For Deep Zoom on images in JavaScript/Ajax there's the excellent Seadragon Ajax library by Microsoft Live Labs.
If you're looking into smooth and interactive zooming on content besides images such as text, video & vectors, have a look at the open source OpenZoom SDK I've developed over the last couple of months.
You probably could not achieve very smooth zooming with an javascript/ajax type interface, but a zoom interface would be possible. The pragmatic ajax book has a great chapter on implementing a Google maps clone. Theres no need for the technique to be restricted to zooming in and out of tiled images. The image elements can just as easily be any HTML you want. A fade effect could be applied to the zoom operation so when you move up and down a layer you get something similar to what you described. I recommend grabbing the book (Its a pragmatic programmers book, so theres a cheap and immediately downloadable PDF version available. Read the chapter, think about the techniques and then see if you think its practical for your vision. good luck.
Seadragon Ajax continues to evolve and is now OpenSeadragon:
http://openseadragon.github.io/
I've also been keeping a list of various zooming technologies, many of which use JavaScript:
https://github.com/iangilman/zooming
I don't believe ajax or dhtml are good solutions for what you are trying to achieve. I think flash/flex or silverlight may be the best option.
Check out the "scale" effect in jQuery. Here's a link. I haven't used it myself, but it might be able to do what you want. You'd have to swap out some content for different content at the right point, or your html would get too big.
Related
What language or technology would I need to be able to create documents online? I want to be able to add text and images and move them into position, resize etc, similar to this.
And then when complete, create a PDF from them.
Sorry if this is a bit vague, I just need to know where to start researching.
You need to decide on your basic technology: Flash, Silverlight, Canvas, client-side SVG, server-side SVG or server-side bitmap. There are also commercial solutions that work with Adobe InDesign documents (and probably a host of other proprietary formats) but I'd expect those not to be cheap.
Flash/Silverlight require plugins, and are considered by some to be a dying technology - though I am sure that is disputed. Canvas is 'very HTML5' and is essentially a bitmap built/rendered on the client, but if you are ultimated rendering to PDF it may not provide the resolution you need. The same limitation affects building an image server-side too - you should probably be dealing with vector elements plus bitmaps, rather than rendering everything to pixels as you go.
That leaves SVG in my list, either on the client (see RaphaelJS) or on the server (see Inkscape). I'm doing some work with server-side SVG rendering at the moment, and it is promising; although subject to more scalability issues than client-side, it doesn't suffer from browser-compatibility issues or the limitations of browser rendering.
The biggest issue in browser SVG rendering is flowed paragraph text and text in/on a path - I am not sure how well these are implemented in modern browsers, or how much agreement there is between them. This is especially the case given that some of these require SVG1.2, and browsers (afaik) are only just settling on SVG1.1, after many years. But, if you just want to do standard blocks of text, bitmaps and vector elements, browser-based SVG should suit you fine.
The example you've given uses a server-side technology (SVG, or perhaps a commercial format) and renders to low-res PNG on the client.
In your case, once you've considered how to 'do the editing', you'll need to consider how to render to PDF, which will be done on the server. You could go low-level and use something like FPDF, use a report renderer like Jasper, or use a graphics system like GhostScript, Inkscape, Scribus, ps2pdf, svg2pdf etc.
Aside: I normally don't answer questions without obvious prior research. But, since you've indicated that you will indeed undertake this, I'm happy to help get you started.
I tried to sign up, but I was unable; perhaps a problem from my side. Hopefully I'll get an answer as anonymous.
I apologize for the grammar/syntax, but English isn't my native language.
Recently I lost my job, so I have enough spare time to try something fun. I decided to create a simple text RPG game for me and some friends. It will very close to the board games like Talisman, Dungeon Run, and HeroQuest, using dice and a simple attribute/skill system. So no 3d graphics. The only 2d element, if I decide to include it, will be a map
that will allow the hero to move between locations. Currently I'm using Windows XP SP3, for the game I use wxDev-C++, and although cross platform would be cool, I don't really care.
I have some experience in C++ (currently using wxDev-C++), but I'm far from being called an expert or even a great programmer. I was about to start writing parts of the code, but I decided to check if creating a GUI for the game is possible. In some forums, many suggested I use Qt, CEGUI or wxWidgets, but most examples I saw are grey boxes that are
indifferent at best, when I want something that fits better in a fantasy setting. I don't claim I would do better, but I want a GUI that is more fantasy related.
What I want from the GUI:
1. A "cool" Gui with decent graphics. I could even create an image to serve as a mask in Photoshop, but the GUI builder will have to support imported images.
2. A relatively large textbox in the middle (with a scrollbar) that will display die rolls, damage and options.
3. The ability to display dynamically values (like the change in the health after each action without requiring to refresh manually)
4. Display an icon or a small image of the character in the area where I display stats/abilities.
5. Open new windows created with tha same GUI builder to allocate points, buy/sell things and open a map.
About the map in the game: I decided to create a map in photoshop. When the hero decides to move to another location, a new window will open showing the map. I thought of 2 possible ways to move between locations: 1) Create hotspots on the image and select one by clicking on the name of the location.(I dare not think about the complexity of this so we
move to idea #2) and 2) Have the image as a backgroung to a grid with vertical and horizontal coordinates. When the hero selects a new area to visit, he clicks on the area, but what he really does is click on the grid, which returns the two values (x,y) of the location and informs the game about the area the hero wants to visit.
Yeah, yeah, I know it's too much, so what I'm most interested in are the 1-3. I know that even if they are possible, it will propably take forever, but as I said I have spare time, and I like learning new things. I apologize for the size of the post, but I decided to post as many info as possible so you know what I want.
If any of you has used Qt, CEGUI or wxWidgets could you tell which covers most of my criteria? I saw some great stuff build with CEGUI, but I don't know if it is too hard to learn?
Thank in advance.
I know my answer comes pretty late, I only recently started using stackoverflow fairly recently, but maybe this response will help anybody.
CEGUI fully supports skinning widgets using XML. Our CEED editor (WYSIWYG) fully supports layout editing, but the skinning editor (LNF editor) is not finished as of now (11.11.2014), the development version supports exchanging images however and changing sizes and proportions, but more advanced adjustments have to be done in XML.
CEGUI has an imageset editor, fully supported by the CEED editor. Creating imagesets (sets of named subimages, with position and dimension inside a big texture atlas) is supported there. Additionally there is a way to create imagesets from just a bunch of jpg/png/... files using a tool. You would have to ask for specifics in the forum though because it is not integrated into CEED yet.
So basically with CEGUI you are free to make whatever fantasy GUI you want. Skinning simple elements like buttons and progress bars isn't much work in XML anyways. Without the finished editor, some more advanced widgets are more work to skin, but many skins have already been created done this way and some of them are even publically available in the forum and in the CEGUI stock files.
StaticText widgets supports what you want, you can even use images in there or change fonts and colours in the text if you want. Scrollbars are supported too.
I am not sure what you mean by this. You have to specify this.
A simple "Generic/Image" widget is available in CEGUI for this purpose. You can use precreated images or even RTT textures.
You can create and destroy windows in CEGUI without issues.
Regarding the map: I m not sure what you mean, but getting the position of a click in respect to an image (representing the map) is possible in CEGUI.
CEGUI is not particularly hard to learn. There is always the forums and the chat if you got questions. For an Open Source project it is quite well documented so if you read all of the API docu, and look at the supplied samples in the sample browser, you should already get quite far. And for everything additional there is the forum (search), the IRC chat and a community wiki (mind the targeted versions of an article there though)
For a project like yours, CEGUI seems perfectly suited (this is what it was created for in the first place). Qt is not really optimal for games for numerous reasons. wxWidgets I have never used.
I am making digital instruments for a car. These instruments will be constantly updated by information through ajax. These instruments will be served from a server onboard the vehicle through WLAN (fast) to my iPhone 3G. Is imperative to the success of the project that the updating of the tachometer is smooth and very responsive. Otherwise, it will look retarded.
The first problem I encountered was when I made this demo where tachometer moves quickly back and forth between zero and a thousand RPM: http://www.kingoslo.com/instruments/ When viewed on my iPhone 3G, the arrow simply doesn't move back and forth smoothly enough.
This javascript works by changing the source of the arrow img-element (which is semi transparant {4 color png} floating on top the static picture of the scale {16 color png}, by the way).
I've been made aware of new image editing features in HTML5, and wondered if any of those, or any other methods will be more responsive. Also, I am getting an iPhone 4 for xmas, so that may be a bit faster, but I've got the feeling that it still will fall short for the current build, especially when I add the constant ajax updating that is required to keep the instruments change values as the driver drives along.
Thank you for your time. Any help is greatly appreciated.
Kind regards,
Marius
I think using canvas will result in much faster animation - it was created to handle drawing, whilst manipulating DOM elements is comparably expensive.
Mobile Safari is compatible with canvas.
Alternatively, you could try incorporating all the angles as one large CSS sprite, and then just manipulating its background-position CSS property (element.style.backgroundPosition in the JavaScript DOM API).
I'm developing my first Android game and I'm having a bit of difficulty making the UI as smooth as I would like. I've spent a couple of hours googling around with no luck, I'm probably just searching for the wrong thing.
I have two different XML layout resources where each layout contains just one SurfaceView subclass. When I call activity.setContentView(R.layout.second_layout) to transition from the first layout to the second layout there is a noticeable period of time where a black screen (with a small white bar along the top) is displayed in between the two views.
I've tried various things such as; constructing the second view manually at runtime (i.e not using a layout XML file), calling activity.overridePendingTransition(android.R.anim.fade_in, android.R.anim.fade_out) after activity.setContentView(R.layout.second_layout) and attempting to render to the canvas before the view has loaded (turns out the canvas is unavailable).
I don't see other games (or apps) having this issue so I presume there is a reasonably simple solution.
If you need some more information about my particular situation in order to help out then please let me know what information is missing. Any help would be largely appreciated.
Update: My answer below was written in 2010. Since then Fragments have become the norm, particularly since Fragment nesting was made possible and the support library allows this functionality to be used in a backwards compatible fashion. As such, instead of transitioning to a new Activity to perform a new "user task", you can use the one Activity and push and pop fragments within that Activity's view hierarchy. Animations can also be performed as a part of a fragment transaction (e.g. Fragment transaction animation: slide in and slide out).
This became pretty apparent not long after posting this question, however I thought I should come back here and make it clear to everyone else.
Activities are positively the way to go when developing for Android. Don't be put off by the fact that a transition may seem too minor for a separate Activity, the very foundation of Android is built around the idea of an Activity.
Many animation effects are simply gratuitous eye candy -- however, there are situations where animations effectively communicate to the user what's going on.
What are some of your favorite uses for animations, and what specific animation type would you use?
E.g.: Animate items downwards when a new item is inserted into a list
I really like Google Chrome's use when a file is being downloaded. It's hard to describe, but, it's a circle that fills like a pie chart as the download progresses, and the circle is overlaid with the icon for the file you're downloading. Very slick.
One example I can think of is the animation used by operating systems when you minimize a window.
Both Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X animate the window going down to the taskbar (or the Dock in OS X) to show the user where the window went. Otherwise novice users that hit minimize by accident might have trouble getting the window back.
I don't use linux, but I'm pretty sure it does the same. I'm not being discriminative =)
From enjoy3d.com
enjoy3d.com http://worldsware.com/images/mouse.gif
Press your mouse button
and move to look around.
There is a very nice paper by Ben Bederson and Angela Boltman in which they evaluate the impact of animation on user’s ability to build a mental map of the information in the space:
Does Animation Help Users Build Mental Maps
of Spatial Information?
I believe that all visual changes should not be swift. Be it status notification, window maximized/minimized, or data deleted/added. I cannot find a reference, but usually it is recommended that all animations should not be around 1-2 seconds, matching human's response time.
My favorite uses of animation is not in a commercial software (though Apple is good at this) but a research paper called Phosphor which I consider one of the great UI ideas that have not yet implemented into major operating systems.
AJAX loading gifs - you've got to have an indicator that you definitely registered an event and you're doing something about it
Progress bars are nice for things that take more than a moment or two, but only when they are accurate. An inaccurate progress bar is worse than none, in my opinion.