In CSS Sprites you will often find padding between each image. I believe the idea is so that if the page is resized then one image won't bleed into another.
I think this depends on the different types of browser zoom (best explained by Jeff).
However, I haven't been able to see this behaviour in my tests. Is this only a problem with older browsers? (I havent been able to test with IE6 at the current time so I'm counting that as 'old').
Should I still worry about leaving space? Its kind of a pain.
For instance :
A CSS Sprite I found for AOL has
padding between each image : VIEW
but The Daily Show decided not to
bother : VIEW
It shouldn't need to be padded, but when zoomed, especially in IE8 (betas more than the RC), there is image bleeding if there is no padding.
Best example is to go to Google.com -> Search, and zoom... you'll start to see "underlines" at the bottom right of the image as the zooming rounds up/down.
In theory, a 1px padding on all sides of a sprite should be fine.
Here's the sprite from Google (images)...
But when zoomed, the +,-,x icons bleed into the main Google logo.
Basically the answer is yes. Two years to the day after I asked this question will see the release of IE9. IE9 has this problem just as much - if not more than any other browser...
It's pretty infuriating because it's such a simple thing to fix.
With iPads increasing in marketshare - its's pretty essential to at least have a half decent experience with zooming un-uniform amounts.
I am going to have to put a single pixel border around every image to match the background color of the adjacent element (potentially different on each side). Fortunately I auto-generate all my csssprites based on an .xml file - so I can do this programatically without too much hastle. It's still a huge pain though...
Simon - My experience is that this is certainly still a problem.
In response to your second question, why not use transparent padding? (Perhaps you are still supporting ie6 and this is non-trivial, in which case, I'm really sorry).
Speaking of the older browsers (those using text zoom), you don't always need padding.
The main difference between your two examples is that the Daily Show sprite already includes the menu item's text in the image itself.
When using text zoom, the AOL menu items could stretch out vertically due to the larger font size, and the menu text might even wrap to two lines. To accommodate for such eventualities, those icons need a little padding to ensure they don't bleed. Typically, you'd just try to make sure it doesn't bleed on any of IE6's five text sizes.
Since The Daily Show's menu doesn't contain any (visible) HTML text its size won't be affected by text zoom (though you might need a line-height: 0; or so to be sure), so it doesn't need any padding.
As scunliffe already showed, browsers using page zoom may need sprites to have a little padding due to rounding errors.
Related
I've been trying different tiling WM's to see which one best fits my needs. Every time I try a new one, it looks good but I find other things that don't quite work the way I like. My requirements have evolved as I go. Initially, I didn't want to get into Awesome because having to learn Lua is not on my wish list but maybe I should give it a try IF it can do what I want better than the other tiling WM's out there.
I'm going to as specific as I can about what I want. I am running a 3440x1440 monitor. I want to use as much vertical space as possible (meaning, a full width, persistent but mostly empty status bar is not an option, but I do like the notification area and a date/time).
I understand it may not do everything exactly the way I want, which is oke. If it does more or less most of what I want I can weigh my options between Awesome and other tiling WM's (actually, only i3 which is what I'm using now but I'm open to better suggestions). I would very much appreciate it if people don't just say no to something it can't do, but say "no, but it can do ...". In other words, feel free to suggest alternatives that might be helpful as well.
Divide the screen in 3 columns, initially 30/45/25, with the right column split horizontally; Fully adjustable and resizable as needed during my work session;
Persistent layout; when closing the last application in a tile, I don't want that tile to disappear and the remaining tiles to resize. Just show an empty space and leave all tiles as they are.
tabbed tiles, so I see which applications are running in a tile (similar to i3).
Resizable tiles with the keyboard into 1 direction; When making the middle column/tile wider, I want that into a specific direction into another tile and leave the other side alone.
Certain applications I want to always launch into a specific tile. For instance, terminals always go into the right-most column top/bottom, browser/spotify always into the middle, atom/IDE always into the left. Some applications should always be floating. Obviously I want to be able to send them to a different tile after launch.
I don't want a 100% width status bar. It will be mostly empty which is a waste of screen estate. Preferably, I'd like a statusbar part of a tile, for example in the right-most tile, resizing with it. Otherwise I'd like it to be fixed to 30% and allow tiles which are not beneath it to use the full height of the screen. My reason for a statusbar is mute; I actually only want a notification area and a date time permanently visible. I don't need a "start menu", dmenu or similar is perfect, which I believe it has integrated.
Many thanks in advance!
The general answer is "Awesome configuration is code and it can do whatever you want". But there is a catch. Can Awesome be configured like you describe? Yes, totally. There is at least 2 distributions coming close enough (mine[1] and worron[2]) (at least for the tiling workflow, not the look).
The "catch" is that the workflow you describe isn't really the "Awesome way". Awesome is usually used as an automatic tiler. You have layouts that describe a workflow (code, web, internet) and manage the clients according to their programming. Manual tile management is rarely necessary once you have proper layouts. That doesn't mean you can't, I did, but it might be worth thinking outside the box and see if you can automate your workflow a bit further.
Also, the default layout system isn't very modern and makes it hard to implement the features you requested. My layout system (see link below) can be used as a module or as a branch and supports all features described above. Awesome is extremely configurable and it's components can be replaced by modules.
https://github.com/awesomeWM/awesome/pull/644
The layout "serialization" documentation is here:
https://elv13.github.io/libraries/awful.layout.html#awful.layout.suit.dynamic.manual
It is similar to i3 but has more layouts and containers. As for the "leaving blank space" part, it is configured using the fill_strategy:
https://awesomewm.org/doc/api/classes/wibox.layout.ratio.html#wibox.layout.ratio.inner_fill_strategy
As a word of conclusion, I would note that what you ask is "work exactly like i3". If you want such thing, well, use i3. Awesome is a window manager framework. Its goal and purpose is to create a customized desktop shell / WM. If it's what you want, then go ahead and learn it, nothing else can come close to the possibility and the level of control you can get out of it. However it takes time and effort to get to the point where you have "your own perfect desktop". Our users perfect desktops:
https://github.com/awesomeWM/awesome/issues/1395
[1] https://gfycat.com/SmallTerribleAdamsstaghornedbeetle
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yNALqST1-Y
The WM your are looking for is herbstluftwm (hlwm). Its a manual tiling window manager. The tiles which you are talking about are called frames in hlwm. Each frame can contain multiple windows. A frame can also be empty. Only if you kill a frame the other frames will automatically resize. You can add new frames vertically and horizontally and resize them. Each frame can also have a different layout to organize the windows inside. The layout you are looking for is max. This will stack the windows inside a frame on each other. It doesn't show you tabs like i3 however. hlwm allows you to create rules to open certain applications always in certain frames and workspaces. hlwm doesn't have a statusbar buildin. I personally like to use tint2. It can be used as a replacement for your requirement to see running applications as tabs.
I'm experiencing painting issues when combining TScaledLayout and custom styles created from the bitmap style designer in fmx.
To demonstrate, I loaded the default custom style created by chosing "New style for VCL / FMX" -> "save as .style" in the bitmap style designer. I dropped several standard controls on some colored rectangles: The red & green ones on a TScaledLayout, the blue one directly on the form. As I stretch the form, colored lines appear on the controls on the ScaledLayout; the background is partially visible:
If I size the form to exactly match the design-time dimensions, the lines disappear. That seems like a pretty significant issue, I certainly can't use those two together like that. Does anybody have an idea for a possible fix or workaround?
Looks like this is a known issue with scaling and bitmaps. See the Google+ discussion here - https://plus.google.com/+PaulThornton/posts/ACAHkJD3a84. I'll quote Marco Cantu's thoughts:
I've found an internally reported issue of a similar case, but haven't
found one that matches this scenario. Certainly worth adding to quality
portal. Having said this, I fear that bitmap-based operations and
scaling don't really fit together very well, and it might be difficult
to have an all encompassing solution.
Let me explain with an example. Take a button. This is painted by FMX
with 9 sections (borders, corners, central part) so that regardless of
the size the bitmap elements are stretched in one direction at most,
often just draw. Stretching a single bitmap for the button to the
target size would break anti-aliasing and create a blurred image when
using colors.
This is example what happens with a ScaledLayout, given it takes the
complete final image and transforms it. ScaledLayout was originally
introduced with vector styles, and worked very well in that scenario.
With todays's bitmap styles things get a bit more complex.
Regardless of this explanation of there the issue lies, I'd recommend
reporting it on QC, and I'll make sure it doesn't get closed as design
(it could naturally happen, this is how the system works) but that we
do some investigation to address the issue -- turning this into a
feature request.
Recently I've discovered that TCanvas.StretchDraw will not work as expected for object which is a TIcon instance (quick look at TIcon.Draw and DrawIconEx method tells why). Delphi help acknowledges that fact. I know the workaround but I do not know the reason behind such design decision in VCL. Does anyone know why they decided to left TIcon untouched in this matter?
Icons are not regular bitmaps. This is mostly due to historical design and technical reasons.
It did make sense at time when icons were small 32x32 pixels large and 16 colors (good old days!) that icons were never to be stretched on screen.
But there is also a "common sense" technical reason. Such small bitmaps are usually very hard to be re-sized by an algorithm (and default GDI strech algoritm is very fast but produces also very bad result in respect to other interpolation modes, e.g. available with GDI+), so it was decided to embed a set of icons within the executable, as resources: one icon per size. The strech process benefits of being done at design time, at pixel level, by an icon designer. And - back those days - it was also much less resource consuming to use dedicated icons, with a reduced color palette.
Since you are supposed to have a set of icons with a pre-defined size for each, you do not need to use StrechDraw, but just select the right icon to display.
So if you want to display an icon with a given size, ensure you pickup the right size, or get the biggest icon and upsize it, using a temporary bitmap - or DrawIconEx(). Or, even better, do not use icons, but a bitmap, or a vectorial drawing if you expect huge picture size.
I'm looking for any advice on ways to have a rather large scrollview (let's say 8192x8192) which is essentially a grid and it has subviews of about 5-100 buttons placed in it.
The brute force approach runs out of memory as CALayer seems to be allocating a bitmap for the size of the scrollview's content (the memory issue is especially prominent when zooming is used)
I next added CATiledLayer to it, that's fixed the memory issue but there is a blurry effect on the grid as tiles are generated asynchronously and is still not ideal in that it's using a lot of memory for what is essentially a trivial 'draw some lines' task.
It seems like if I could somehow get control to draw my own grid via OpenGL each frame and tell UIKit not to create a bitmap buffer for the scrollview it would be perfect but not sure if this is feasible or even the right approach?
On Android I just took control of the entire drawing/zooming/panning but this seems vastly overkill on iOS which seems to offer most of this already?
You should check out the WWDC 2009 video session 102: "Mastering iPhone Scroll Views" along with the ScrollViewSuite sample project from Apple. They explain how to do a tiled scroll view with different zoom levels, which sounds like it is what you need.
My partner and I are trying to figure out how best to create scaling, colored performance bars for one of our mobile exam-prep apps. The goal is to create a horizontal bar that graphically represents a scale of 0 - 100% using Photoshop or something similar. We had hired a professional graphics designer but we're left holding the bag trying to figure out how to make the graphics actually "fill the bar" in the actual app.
(I can't post pictures yet, but you can see a link to the picture here):
http://www.productionplanningpro.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Screen-Shot-2012-06-25-at-9.47.24-PM.png
As the bar would reach certain percentages, it would change color from Red to Green appropriately. I'm trying to figure out how to give this to my contractor without handing him 100 files, each showing 1% more of the bar (and even then, I'm not a graphics artist, so this whole thing is above my head). I've done as much research as I can stand, and I've seen the fancy iOS graphing APIs - we're just looking to fill in these two bars.
Any insight or help is SUPER appreciated!! Thanks!
Jotuned
There are quite a few solutions to this problem. I'm sure there's a way to fill in the area with that shadow programmatically, and I'm also sure someone will come along with a masking solution sooner or later.
The quickest and easiest way, though, is to have your artist simply create that red filler bar one time, and have it fill the entire space (ie. drawn at 100%). Then you make sure that, in the graphic that is the 'outside' of the bar, the space where the red bar should be is an alpha channel.
When you actually get to coding it, place the red bar at the very bottom of all the objects you're drawing to the screen. The rest of your UI should entirely hide it. Then as progress moves from 0% to 100%, you move the bar slowly to the right, filling in the space (and showing through the alpha hole in the 'bar holder'.
Quick, simple, have done this many times before. Masking would work as well, but seems a bit overkill in your situation (and I don't have any experience with it on iOS, so I can't offer any assistance there!) Let me know if you have any questions while trying to implement this :)