Canvas overlay on IPAD for Google Maps is jumpy - ipad

I'm using Google Maps V3 with an OverlayView to put an HTML5 Canvas onto a map. I attached a DIV to the overlay and within the DIV lies the Canvas element.
After the map is panned around/zoomed in, etc, I:
shift the DIV (left, top CSS attributes) to re-centre the DIV/Canvas
I redraw the graphics on the Canvas
This works super fast in desktop browsers. However, on an IPAD2 it's really slow and there's a lag between shifting the DIV and redrawing the Canvas, so it jumps around every time you move/redraw the map.
It's almost as if the IPAD redraws the Canvas element tile by tile (like the regular map tiles). Why would it do that though? HTML5 Canvas is normally really fast on an IPAD and has nothing to do with being drawn in tiles.
Any suggestions?

It appears this has to do with making your Canvas object too big. I was making it twice the height and twice the width of the Google Map, so 4x the screen size total, and it seems to really slow things down...

Related

Scaling SVG past unknown threshold causes elements to disappear

I'm using openseadragon with the excellent svg overlay plugin.
On Chrome, the app behaves as expected: users can tap to zoom in until a table rendered in SVG is fully visible, the note on the table is legible.
Here's the link to the demo. Zoom out to see the SVG version of the table appear, overlaying the fuzzy raster version of the background.
On Safari on iOS or OSX when zooming past a seemingly arbitrary threshold the table and everything on it start to disappear. The point of disappearance seems to depend on other factors I don't understand, hence this question for insight. For example, a orange circle drawn with two.js will disappear when the scale transform is precisely 51201 (at 51200 the circle is there). For the more complex table SVG, elements on the table will disappear at different scale levels, between ~23000 to 50000. Sometimes they'll disappear and then reappear upon a slight zoom in. Sometimes they'll disappear on zoom and then reappear as I pan around, the objects nearing the edge of the viewport.
IE 11 has a very similar issue.
Has anyone dealt with this before or solved it?
That's a really slick project!
In my experience, that kind of problem with SVG disappearing has to do with extreme amounts of zoom. The good news is you should be able to work around it by changing your viewport coordinates. By default the width of the image is a viewport value of 1, but you can set your image to be width 10,000 or some such, which will look exactly the same on the screen, but it means that the SVG thinks it's zoomed out a lot at first, so when you zoom in you can go a lot further.
If you're using two.js, another possible fix would be to switch over to canvas rendering and use https://github.com/altert/OpenSeadragonCanvasOverlay.
Btw, I'd love to share your project when it's done... please file a ticket at https://github.com/openseadragon/site-build/issues when you're ready and we can add it to http://openseadragon.github.io/examples/in-the-wild/.

How to fix various MKTileOverlay rendering problems?

I'm currently in the process of converting a custom map from using a CATiledLayer scroll view to using custom map tiles in an MKMapView with an MKTileOverlay. Whilst the CATiledLayer-approach generally works well and looks nicer, you get a lot of things for free by using an MKMapView such as rotations which are otherwise very difficult to achieve.
So, I've redrawn my tiles for use with the recommended format of zoom level, column and row numbers, and have them displaying in the map view correctly. Note that my map tiles only cover a small region somewhere; I don't have them for the entire globe.
The first problem I noticed is that there seems to be an issue when you zoom in past the largest zoom level my tiles support. I have tiles all the way to zoom level 20 so I set my MKTileOverlay's maximumZ property to 20. If you zoom in to level 21, the map view no longer requests tiles at all. Any tiles loaded on the way to level 21 still show (albeit pixelated), but if you scroll away it won't load any more tiles, so eventually the map just becomes blank. Ideally, it would fall back to my level 20 tiles and display those instead, or prevent the user from zooming in too far. When I use the CATiledLayer, you could zoom in as much as you want and it would always show the most zoomed in tiles (even if you were zoomed in further than the tiles were 'comfortable' at). Example
I have other minor niggles too:
If you set canReplaceMapContent to true, you can zoom in a lot further (which is fine), but the camera clips the ground if you get too close and I get all sorts of rendering artefacts. Any way to prevent that from happening? Example
Sometimes there are small pixel-sized rendering artefacts between tiles which indicate the tiles aren't quite positioned or sized correctly my the MKMapView. These artefacts don't seem to affect the native maps app; any way to get rid of these? Example
As you pan around when zoomed in, there are a lot of white flashes as tiles are loaded and it's quite obvious. When I used the CATiledLayer, they were loaded in quite smoothly (by animating the opacity) and the lower-zoom levels were already present in the background so it was overall difficult to tell it was even using tiles. Is there any way to load in my tiles more seamlessly? Example
I'm guessing the answer to most of these questions is that it's not possible to fix using MKMapView, which is a shame because I really want to allow the user to change the heading of the map and it seems pretty difficult to do using a standard CATiledLayer!

IOS Image Rotational Scrolling

I have chart images that are conical projections. Whenever the chart position moves, I need to rotate the chart. Imagine viewing a globe from above. The change in rotation is generally less than 1 degrees for a full screen of scrolling.
I am currently doing this in an image view within a scroll view, redrawing the images when the position changes. Any small change in position requires a complete redraw.
Is there a way to have IOS rotate the images within the layer without having to redraw them.
I am imaging something like in the maps app where you can scroll-rotate your course.
Another way of looking at it would be to have something like a scroll view that can scroll up/down or rotate its contents around an axis that may be way off the top of the screen.

iOS Maps - Grid Overlay

I'm looking for a way to overlay the iOS maps with a grid. The complete earth needs to be divided into squares. The location of the user doesn't effect the placement of the squares (In other words; the squares are always placed the same. On every iPhone, no matter where the user is).
I Looked into MKOverlay, but I've never used this so it's very new to me. Also, when zooming in/out should effect the overlay. It's very important that the squares are always covering the same area on the map (For example; A square should be 100mx100m in real world, when you zoom out, the square should cover the same 100x100).
Is there anybody that can point me in the right direction?
Is it possible to draw the grid from een .xml? Example given; On .XML is holding all squares with their coordinates on the map. When the user loads the map, the 100 squares around the user are loaded.

Painting app with huge canvas

I'm working on yet another drawing app with canvas that is many times bigger than screen.
I need some advice/direction on how to that.
Basically what i want is to scroll around this big canvas, drawing only in visible region.
I was thinking of two approaches:
Have 64x64 (or whatever) "tiles" to draw on, and then on scroll just load new tiles.
Record all user strokes (points) and on scroll calculate which are in specified region, and draw them, using only screen-size canvas.
If this matters, i'm using cocos2d for prototype.
Forget the 2000x200 limitation, I have an open source project that draws 18000 x 18000 NASA images.
I suggest you break this task into two parts. First, scrolling. As was suggested by CodaFi, when you scroll you will provide CATiledLayers. Each of those will be a CGImageRef that you create - a sub image of your really huge canvas. You can then easily support zooming in and out.
The second part is interacting with the user to draw or otherwise effect the canvas. When the user stops scrolling, you then create an opaque UIView subclass, which you add as a subview to your main view, overlaying the view hosting the CATiledLayers. At the moment you need to show this view, you populate it with the proper information so it can draw that portion of your larger canvas properly (say a circle at this point of such and such a color, etc).
You would do your drawing using the drawRect: method of this overlay view. So as the user takes action that changes the view, you do a "setDisplayInRect:" as needed to force iOS to call your drawRect:.
When the user decides to scroll, you need to update your large canvas model with whatever changes the user has made, then remove the opaque overlay, and let the CATiledLayers draw the proper portions of the large image. This transition is probably the most tricky part of the process to avoid visual glitches.
Supposing you have a large array of object definitions used for your canvas. When you need to create a CGImageRef for a tile, you scan through it looking for overlap between the object's frame and the tile's frame, and only then draw those items that are required for that tile.
Many mobile devices don't support textures over 2048x2048. So I would recommend:
make your big surface out of large 2048x2048 tiles
draw only the visible part of the currently visible tile to the screen
you will need to draw up to 4 tiles per frame, in case the user has scrolled to a corner of four tiles, but make sure you don't draw anything extra if there is only one visible tile.
This is probably the most efficient way. 64x64 tiles are really too small, and will be inefficient since there will be a large repeated overhead for the "draw tile" calls.
There is a tiling example in Apples ScrollViewSuite Doesn't have anything to do with the drawing part but it might give you some ideas about how to manage the tile part of things.
You can use CATiledLayer.
See WWDC2010 session 104
But for cocos2d, it might not work.

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