I need to animate some vector icons smoothly moving about a 2d map. I have time-lat/lng pairs forming tracks. Down the road I would really like to be able to convey various GIS data like topography and roads on the map along with my smoothly animated icons.
Any suggestions on what to use? I find things like Quantum GIS but it seems geared to generating static maps. I've tried messing around with KML but I cannot find any way to make things move smoothly: marker icons clearly bounce along the waypoints even when I space them very closely.
EDIT: clarified I'm interested in a desktop widget
Animation options are limited in GIS as far as I am aware.
ESRI's ArcObjects could be used to create animations - see this chapter in the online help:
http://webhelp.esri.com/arcgisdesktop/9.3/index.cfm?TopicName=An_overview_of_animation
and these examples (however none have vectors moving around):
http://webhelp.esri.com/arcgisdesktop/9.3/index.cfm?TopicName=Sample_animation_videos
ESRI software is expensive to purchase, and users would also need the software if you wanted to provide more than an exported video.
You are probably best working with WPF (is this widget for Windows?), Silverlight, or Flash. ESRI have a Silverlight example here:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/showcase/GIS_Silverlight.aspx
There is also the following collection of WPF classes for the OpenSource SharpMap:
http://wpfsharpmapcontrols.codeplex.com/
However it seems very much in beta at this stage.
Alternatively it may be easier to use GIS software solely to provide a background image, and do all the animation elsewhere.
I would say, try this animation code for Google Earth; however, try emailing the osgeo or qgis userlists and they'll guide you
Related
Is there a Windows server with Photoshop running that process all these templates? It just happens too quickly. How did they achieve that?
I've been looking for the answer for quite a long time and didn't find anything worthy.
A way something like this would be done would be to have an overlay template that you'd place your image under and then all of the shading and such would would go on top of it. Then it's just a mater of rotating and skewing the angle of the picture underneath the overlay to get the right perspective. This can be done programmatically in a language of your choice like PHP, Python, C#, etc.
I believe what you're describing may be achieved using the Adobe Photoshop API. Click on try demo and take a look at the various options, including the Smart Object demo.
I need to add typical finger drawing to an app.
(The usual.... choose colors, erase, thickness - just the usual you see in every app made.)
It's hard to believe I have to program this from scratch, in this day and age?
It's hard to believe there is not a common solution for this?
All I could find is...
https://github.com/levinunnink/Smooth-Line-View
Review: that is a (beautifully written) example fragment of a few lines of code being how to draw with a path, with a good smooth result. It works perfectly, but it's just for drawing one "path." For example, you can't make a drawing with more than one color. there is no undo or anything like that. (See also note on the fourth review item here regarding path-math.)
https://github.com/sumanthk2006/Smooth-Line-View-1 (variation of above, but does not run under ARC, unfortunately demo does not properly launch etc)
Review: this is "abandonedware" or maybe "frustrationware" :) It does not run and is not ARC-ready. It is a seemingly well-written class that claims to do undo, colors, erase, etc. It even has a proper delegate to track your button states. But it doesn't work.
UPDATE Regarding this paackage. As a matter of fact, if you massage it it works well. Suggest (i) throw away the example app files. (ii) using modern Xcode, use the "convert to ARC project" feature on the two main files. There are a coupe little problems like it should use awakeFromNib. If you get it working it actually does everything, really well.
THERE ARE SERIOUS BUGS in SmoothLineView1. just to be clear, it suffers some serious bugs - you'll see there's a "streaking" effect when you draw.
http://www.cdframeworks.com/product/brushengine
Review: This commercial package (under $100) is well made and email support is fast. Unfortunately it does not have undo so it's not suitable for many situations. (Also does not have erase.)
Mentioned below is this popular article:
http://mobile.tutsplus.com/tutorials/iphone/ios-sdk_freehand-drawing/
Review: this is a good article on the actual TECHNOLOGY of drawing curves, on the let's say "path-math". Unfortunately it's no help at all if you need a working, ready to use, drawing package (with the obvious features, undo, erase, colors etc) to use in an iOS app. Thus for example, whatever actual solution you were using, you may, perhaps, want to apply the math concepts in this article.
I appreciate that the basic concepts are very simple, it's easy enough to "start from scratch". But it's just - ridiculous - to have to do from scratch for something so commonplace. Is there a solid package I'm missing?
It's fairly amazing that the four scratchy references above are the only things out there.
Any ideas? What's the best package today (late 2013) for adding drawing to an iOS app? THANKS.
As of 2017, I use https://github.com/acerbetti/ACEDrawingView/.
It can be used through cocoa pods, and provide full functionality over integrating a drawing feature in your app (color, brush, size, eraser, undo/redo/, etc).
http://mobile.tutsplus.com/tutorials/iphone/ios-sdk_freehand-drawing/ has a good, clear tutorial on smooth freehand drawing on the ios. If you just follow the tutorial, you can implement it easily into whatever app you are trying to make. It has stuff about increasing line quality and smoothness, and stroke quality.http://www.raywenderlich.com/18840/ is another tutorial on a simple drawing app, self-contained. You can combine aspects of both to get what you want.
edit: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/samplecode/GLPaint/Introduction/Intro.html is the GLPaint sample provided by apple, which includes detecting shake. I thought it seemed more official, since it's from apple
to answer your question, there is no package for drawing directly, but there is a UIKit class, UIBezierPath, that lets you draw shapes made of straight lines or some curves.
In an iOS application, I want to draw a United States map with states and counties outlined. I also want to draw individual states with counties outlined. I have researched using Shapefiles to do the drawing, but I can't find a good API that translates shapefiles. I have looked into ArcGIS, but it seems most of the drawing they do is web/server based, also without the ability to draw individual states, or outline counties.
Does anyone know of a good iOS API I can use to draw the following maps?
United States with states and counties outlined
Individual state with counties outlined
Take a look at MapBox, it will let you draw these types of maps, then you can pull them in as tiles and overlay them with MapKit.
They also have an iOS SDK, http://mapbox.com/mapbox-ios-sdk/ if you don't want to use MapKit.
I think ArcGIS for iOS is your answer here. The iOS API will allow you to add a MapView to your application.
You can add one or more geoservices to that MapView, as well as local graphic layers.
MapServices are rendered server-side. FeatureServices are rendered client-side. You can also take features (each county or state would be a feature) from the FeatureService and put them into the graphic layer to implement different effects such as selection, outlining...
If you want to have all data stored in the client (the device), then you can embed the json representation of the features and add them to the graphics layer in the MapView, without needing to connect to any geoservice (although geo applications work better when connecting to a server)
Start here: http://developers.arcgis.com/en/ios/sample-code/
This sample looks similar to what you are looking for: http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=417a0bf9dfda482c8110ebdbde3edd66
This also looks promising: http://developers.arcgis.com/en/ios/guide/cloud-storage-feature-services.htm
All good answers above. The solution that ended up working for me was to simply use an SVG image, drag it into PaintCode and PaintCode gives me all the code to draw the image. A very simple and elegant solution.
I'm coding iOS app that will explain complex numbers to the user. Complex numbers can be displayed in Cartesian coordinates and that's what I want to do; print one or more vectors on the screen.
I am looking for the easiest way to print 3 vectors into a coordinate system that will adjust itself to the vector-size (if x-coord is > y-coord adjust both axis to x-coord and vice versa).
I tried using Core Plot, which I think is way too multifunctional for my purpose.
Right now I am working with PowerPlot and my coordinate system looks okay already, but I still encounter some problems (x- and y-axis are set to the x and y values which results in a 45 degree angled line, no matter the user input).
The functionality of the examples in CorePlot and PowerPlot don't seem to meet my needs.
My last two approaches were using HTML and a web view, and doing it all myself with Quartz (not the simple way...)
Do you have any advice how to do this the simple way, as it is a simple problem, I guess?
If you're not wanting to do much actual graphing and plotting, then using Core Plot or similar sounds like overkill to me. The extra bloat of adding coreplot to your project, not to mention the time taken for you to understand how to use it, might not be worth it for some simple graphics.
Quartz is well equipped for the job of showing a few vectors on the screen, assuming you're not interested in fancy 3D graphics. There are plenty of tutorials and examples of using Core Graphics (AKA Quartz) to draw lines etc. If you're going the Quartz route, perhaps get some simple line drawing going in Quartz, then ask more questions if you need help with the maths aspect of it.
The typical technique used when rendering with Quartz is to override drawRect in a subclass of UIView and place calls to Core Graphics drawing functions in there.
A decent question and example of Quartz line drawing is here:
How do I draw a line on the iPhone?
If you aren't adverse to using Google Chart Image you can load reasonably complex data sets in a simple manner by calling the appropriate URL and then putting the image in a UIImageView. It takes very little code: here is a blog post explanation with sample code.
The limitations are
length of the data set is restricted by the max URL length you can request from Google (2048 characters, with encoding is large), though I've plotted with 120 data points in 4 series.
a net connection is required (at least to get the initial chart)
and perhaps the biggest problem, API is deprecated and will be discontinued in 2015 at some point. You would then have to switch to the UIWebView/Javascript Google Chart API implementation...
Sample image:
I want to write something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S4KpCkHDqM I mean, I want to have 2D gaming space, but to have stylized as 3D, so my characters will move on the surface, but will have nice 3D effect. I wounder if Flash/ActionScript will do? Any other suggestions?
Flash and Actionscript can definitely accomplish this. There are at least 2 ways to accomplish the 3D look in 2D space.
The easiest is to do as #Blender said in the comments. Render some 3D images and bring them into flash. There are easy tools in flash to create animated sprites, including a native movieClip class, that has a timeline to play back frame-based animation.
But there is also full 3D in flash. You can bring low-polygon 3D models into flash easily using free and open source libraries such as Away3d (away3d.org) and papervision (papervision3d.org). Presently, flash player 10 has runs slowly when using these libraries.
But Adobe is about to release a new version of the player (version 11) that supports open GL for 3D and has significant performance improvements.
Away3D and papervision have already developed version of their libraries to support the new beta player and openGL.
So to summarize, yes - flash can make a game like that. It is currently the best way to develop games that are intended to be played in a browser. Because at least for the time being it has the most widespread support, and is stable between platforms and browsers.
Your example is pretty much entirely 2D: it just uses effects like shadows, animation and parallax scrolling between layers to achieve a (mildly) 3D effect.
As Plastic Sturgeon and Blender have pointed out, Blender might help for creating your assets - but it has a pretty steep learning curve, and you might be more comfortable 'faking it' in Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop if you've used those before.
Once you've created your assets, you need a platform to put together your gameplay: Flash is one possibility, but you could also look at Unity3D, which has good support for 2D and 3D, and has a browser plug-in if you want to make your game web-based.
If you're looking for a java-based solution, you could try Processing, which is cross-platform, and can export to javascript for web deployment. It's not exactly designed as a gaming environment, but it might do the trick - and it's free.
Hope this helps.