I really need help with this! I have looked high and low for an easy example I can learn from and can't find anything. I am turning to here as a last resort. I know there are plenty of examples of coverflow with images so there must be a way.
I am creating an online store with Flash Builder 4 and need to load product images into an TileGroup Container for display to whoever visits the app web page. The images will be stored in a directory so the app will need to read the directory to get the file image names and load them into the Tile Group Container. I do not want to hard code the image names and I do not want to use Adobe Air.
Can anyone help give me a lucid example that might be simple enough for me to learn from and understand as a newbie?
Thanks for any help with this!
It is possible to do this by using a combination of PHP and AS3.
I don't think it's possible to read the content of a directory with AS3 without using Air, but it's possible to do it with PHP.
This would mean calling a PHP function from AS3 when you initialize your application. Get the PHP function to return XML or JSON. Parse the returned data and load the files, then display them.
gotoandlearn.com has a few examples about communication between AS3 & PHP as well as carrousel/coverflow examples.
If you're not familiar with PHP, I'm sure you can find some help here with regard to the exact function you would need to return the directory content, but in any case , it shouldn't be too difficult to come up with your own.
Hope this helps!
Related
I'm still getting into google spreadsheets, recently understood how to format a .txt to be able to use =ImportData properly thanks to Tanaike's assitance, now tackling a -slightly- more challenging task.
Goal:
Automatically extracting specific data from .pdf files hosted inside of a google drive folder and arranging the information into specific cells
Challenges:
Being able to decode the blobs of information, as just the raw data obtained with =ImportData is useless
Truly learning how to use google-apps-script for something useful (that's on my own)
Instructing a single extraction of information rather than constant online status as with =ImportData
[Second Priority] Stop Depending on an add-on (Drive Direct Links) to get the URL of the files
To my understanding, I'll need to do some parsing. I know .pdf is not always straight forward, all the files will come from the same place and have the exact same format, so understanding how to do it once should be enough.
I already know how to get the real/permanent link to the files automatically and how to arrange information segregated into cells using =Index, =Extract and others.
Hope I'm being clear enough. Thanks a lot in advance.
Best regards,
Lucas.-
I am looking at Articulate to support my own application. I want my users to be able to use Articulate to create the E-learning and then uploading the files to my site and run it on my site.
However i wish to store both the questions and the answers of the quiz that is created in articulate.
Does anyone know how this is possible or know a way around either by using excel or any other software to store the Q/A?
There may be more than one answer. But Articulate is SCORM compliant. It is designed to return test scores to the server using SCORM. I have not been involved with receiving those test scores by acting as an LMS, but in the past I have made custom applications that send that data to the LMS using scorm. But if you research SCORM and other APIs they use you might find something useful.
For example, if you mean Articulate Storyline then you can test send/receiving data using this package:
http://www.articulate.com/support/storyline/how-to-use-the-scorm-test-suite
This shows that it can be done. But you would have to write your own program to communicate with Storyline. If you can duplicate how that package works you might be on your way.
As an alternative to SCORM, you can also use the xAPI see https://xapi.com/overview/ to store your e-learning data
I am playing around with Leadtools to see how it might benefit me but i am a little frustrated with their documentation regarding how the process works. I am creating a library with methods that take an input file, convert it to pdf, add a qrcode to the file and save it and then reading the qrcode again.
Does a pdf have to be converted to an image before leadtools is
able to read the qrcode?
Does leadtools allow converting from
doc to pdf and then adding the qrcode or do i have to convert it to
an image as well?
Is there anywhere I could look at code
samples of how I can go about doing what I talked about other than
the leadtools site itself?
I am sorry to hear that you are having difficulties, but I will do my best to get you pointed in the right direction.
To answer your questions:
A1.) Yes, the PDF will need to be rasterized before the LEADTOOLS barcode engine can be used. Our barcode engine will only work with raw image data. Once the file is decompressed into raw data, we will not access the file any further.
A2.) Yes, you can rasterize Microsoft Word documents using either our file I/O methods or with the LEADTOOLS Virtual Printer. Once you have the raw image data, you can pass it to the barcode engine to write the QR code into the data. Once the barcode is written, you can then compress the image into any supported format, including (raster) PDF. You can also create a searchable PDF by running the resultant image through an OCR engine & outputting to PDF.
A3.) The LEADTOOLS SDK has a main barcode demo that should illustrate the ability of the SDK to handle the features you describe here. There are also tutorials in the help file, and various projects on our support forums. We have also created a couple different CodeProject articles here:
Multi-Platform Barcode with LEADTOOLS 18
How to Read Barcodes from Images using LEADTOOLS
You haven't mentioned here what programming language you are developing with or what the specific problem are that you have encountered. Without knowing either of those, it's difficult to get more specific into any methods or other resources to check out. For a simple raster conversion of a Microsoft Word Doc to PDF and writing a barcode, I think this would probably take between 10-15 lines of code.
If you have not already, I would highly recommend sending an email to Support#leadtools.com or open a live chat with the LEADTOOLS Support team from LEADTOOLS.com. We can get into more specifics there and help you more directly with any issues you are encountering.
Walter Bates
LEADTOOLS Developer Support
I tried adding this as a comment, but it is apparently too long for that. So I have added it as another answer.
Even if you are building a DLL, I would suggest starting out building a simple demo with a view of the image so you can see what exactly is happening to the image. Once you are comfortable that the image is being modified the way you want, then implement that code in your own library.
Also, I would recommend testing out the toolkit with the provided main demos. The demos are there to illustrate the different options you have access to in the code. If you can accomplish what your application or library will need to do through the demos, then it would be worth your time to begin coding specifically what you need. You might even need to use multiple demos to verify the tools can accomplish the goals that you have. You have all the toolkit code for the demos, so you can take them apart and use the specific pieces that you need in your application.
If you are having trouble identifying which demos to try out or whether the toolkit has the specific functionality that you need, your best bet is to contact Tech Support directly to ask. We are here to help get you pointed in the right direction.
To get down to brass tacks, the source of the image data is not all that important from the perspective of the barcode engine. It needs a RasterImage handle (raw image data) to write the specified barcode. Whether the image data is created on the fly, read from file, or generated from a scanner, it does not make a whole lot of difference.
To find the main .NET barcode demo, I would start out by going to the LEADTOOLS shortcuts. To get there, go to the Start menu -> LEADTOOLS -> Help and Demos. The shortcuts are broken down by programming language, feature, and then the base toolkit. You should be able to find the WinForms .NET barcode demo here:..\Shortcuts.NET Class Libraries.NET Framework\01 Imaging\07 Barcode
Our toolkit example is a .NET WinForms project, but it will work in ASP.NET also.
Here are some links to tutorials if you want to dig right into the code:
Loading and Displaying an Image in WinForms
Reading Barcodes
HOW TO: Load and Display an Image with WebImageViewer
There was also this recent code tip posted illustrating how to read and write UTF-8 characters in a QR barcode.
We provide both .NET 2.0 and .NET 4.0 DLLs for our barcode engine. Both of these work within Visual Studio 2012.
I want record screen (by capturing 15 screenshots per second). This part I know how to do. But I don't know how to write this to some popular video format. Best option which I found is write frames to separated PNG files and use commandline Mencoder which can convert them to many output formats. But maybe someone have another idea?
Requirements:
Must be multi-platform solutions (I'm using Free Pascal / Lazarus). Windows, Linux, MacOS
Exists some librarys for that?
Could be complex commandline application which record screen for me too, but I must have possibility to edit frames before converting whole raw data to popular video format
All materials which could give me some idea are appreciated. API, librarys, anything even in other languages than FPC (I would try rewrite it or find some equivalent)
I considered also writting frames to video RAW format and then use Mencoder (he can handle it) or other solution, but can't find any API/doc for video RAW data
Regards
Argalatyr mentioned ffmpeg already.
There are two ways that you can get that to work:
By spawning an new process. All you have to do is prepare the right input (could be a series of jpeg images for example), and the right commandline parameters. After that you just call ffmpeg.exe and wait for it to finish.
ffmpeg makes use of some dll's that do the actual work. You can use those dll's directly from within your Delphi application. It's a bit more work, because it's more low-level, but in the end it'll give you a finer control over what happens, and what you show the user while you're processing.
Here are some solutions to check out:
FFVCL Commercial. Actually looks quite good, but I was too greedy to spend money on this.
Open Source Delphi headers for FFMpeg. I've tried it, but I never managed to get it to work.
I ended up pulling the DLL wrappers from an open source karaoke program (UltraStar Deluxe). I had to remove some dependencies, but in the end it worked like a charm. The relevant (pascal) code can be found here:
http://ultrastardx.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/ultrastardx/trunk/src/lib/ffmpeg-0.10/
There was some earlier discussion with a Delphi component here. It's a very simple component that sometimes generates some weird movies. Maybe a start.
I'm using Google's Custom Search API to dynamically provide web search results. I very intensely searched the API's docs and could not find anything that states it grants you access to Google's site image previews, which happen to be stored as base64 encodes.
I want to be able to provide image previews for sites for each of the urls that the Google web search API returns. Keep in mind that I do not want these images to be thumbnails, but rather large images. My question is what is the best way to go about doing this, in terms of both efficiency and cost, in both the short and long term.
One option would be to crawl the web and generate and store the images myself. However this is way beyond my technical ability, and plus storing all of these images would be too expensive.
The other option would be to dynamically fetch the images right after Google's API returns the search results. However where/how I fetch the images is another question.
Would there be a low cost way of me generating the images myself? Or would the best solution be to use some sort of site thumbnailing service that does this for me? Would this be fast enough? Would it be too expensive? Would the service provide the image in the correct size for me? If not, how could I change the size of the image?
I'd really appreciate answers that are comprehensive and for any code examples to be in ruby using rails.
So as you pointed out in your question, there are two approaches that I can see to your issue:
Use an external service to render and host the images.
Render and host the images yourself.
I'm no expert in field, but my Googling has so far only returned services that allow you to generate thumbnails and not full-size screenshots (like the few mentioned here). If there are hosted services out there that will do this for you, I wasn't able to find them easily.
So, that leaves #2. For this, my first instinct was to look for a ruby library that could generate an image from a webpage, which quickly led me to IMGKit (there may be others, but this one looked clean and simple). With this library, you can easily pass in a URL and it will use the webkit engine to generate a screenshot of the page for you. From there, I would save it to wherever your assets are stored (like Amazon S3) using a file attachment gem like Paperclip or CarrierWave (railscast). Store your attachment with a field recording the original URL you passed to IMGKit from WSAPI (Web Search API) so that you can compare against it on subsequent searches and use the cached version instead of re-rendering the preview. You can also use the created_at field for your attachment model to throw in some "if older than x days, refresh the image" type logic. Lastly, I'd put this all in a background job using something like resque (railscast) so that the user isn't blocked when waiting for screenshots to render. Pass the array of returned URLs from WSAPI to background workers in resque that will generate the images via IMGKit--saving them to S3 via paperclip/carrierwave, basically. All of these projects are well-documented, and the Railscasts will walk you through the basics of the resque and carrierwave gems.
I haven't crunched the numbers, but you can against hosting the images yourself on S3 versus any other external provider of web thumbnail generation. Of course, doing it yourself gives you full control over how the image looks (quality, format, etc.), whereas most of the services I've come across only offer a small thumbnail, so there's something to be said for that. If you don't cache the images from previous searches, then your costs reduces even further, since you'll always be rendering the images on the fly. However I suspect that this won't scale very well, as you may end up paying a lot more for server power (for IMGKit and image processing) and bandwidth (for external requests to fetch the source HTML for IMGKit). I'd be sure to include some metrics in your project to attach some exact numbers to the kind of requests you're dealing with to help determine what the subsequent costs would be.
Anywho, that would be my high-level approach. I hope it helps some.
Screen shotting web pages reliably is extremely hard to pull off. The main problem is that all the current solutions (khtml2png, CutyCapt, Phantom.js etc) are all based around QT which provides access to an embedded Webkit library. However that webkit build is quite old and with HTML5 and CSS3, most of the effects either don't show, or render incorrectly.
One of my colleagues has used most, if not all, of the current technologies for generating screenshots of web pages for one of his personal projects. He has written an informative post about it here about how he now uses a SaaS solution instead of trying to maintain a solution himself.
The TLDR version; he now uses URL2PNG to do all his thumbnail and full size screenshots. It isn't free, but he says that it does the job for him. If you don't want to use them, they have a list of their competitors here.