Ok, I've got a XIB class called MenuItemView with 3 sub views, a UIImage, a UILabel, and a UITextView.
I'm dynamically loading instances of MenuItemView as pages in a UIScrollView. It creates a similar effect of scrolling through food items in the Chipotle app.
My problem is, the text in both the UILabel and UITextView are becoming very pixelated when loading the views.
Has anyone run into this before? Is there something I'm just overlooking here?
Are you using the shouldRasterize option on the layer of the label/textview? I was doing this awhile back and it seems to mess up the contents of UILabels and TextViews
Can you post a screenshot somewhere to better explain what you mean by "pixelated" here? If what you mean is "blurry" then the most common cause of that is drawing on fractional pixels, which can happen if you do things like center the text without rounding/truncating the result to a whole pixel.
If you really mean pixelated (where oversized pixels are visible), then I would suspect that you are scaling a font inappropriately. This could happen if you apply a scaling transform to the view, or in some cases if you mess with the bounds.
Related
I've been working on a Crosswords app for a while and this problem keep returning no mater what i try.
The actual game runs in an UIScrollView because the player should be able to zoom, pan etc.
To the UIScrollview i have added a UIView. First i tried to add multiple UIImageViews and UILabels to the UIView but it resulted in very bad scrolling performance.
Now I've tried to create 3 subclassed UIViews where i wrote a custom drawRect method for each of them. I need 3 UIVIews because only two of the them needs to be redrawn, but not at the same time. The third one contains the clue numbers which are constant.
My UIScrollView hierarchy look like this:
UIScrollView
UIView
UIImageView (show the game board image)
UIView (shows the marked row/column)
UIView (shows the text the user writes)
UIView (shows the clue numbers)
I think the problem is that i have the UIImageView + 3 UIViews in one UIView. When I try to make this hierarchy it doesn't lag, but I'm not able to zoom, pan, scroll etc.:
UIScrollView
UIImageView (show the game board image)
UIView (shows the marked row/column)
UIView (shows the text the user writes)
UIView (shows the clue numbers)
Can you please try do guide me in the right direction. I will appreciate if I do not have to change too much, because the code in the three UIVIews are pretty long.
Thanks in advance :)
EDIT
Screenshot: http://crosswords-plus.com/puzzles/screen.png
First off, I'd recommend shrinking your UIScrollView and pulling the UIView containing the clues out of it. It sounds like it doesn't need to pan/zoom, so you're just adding to the overhead by having it contained inside the UIScrollView.
Secondly, it's hard to give much of an answer without seeing your implementation, but it seems to me that it's possible to turn the UIImageView/UIView/UIView hierarchy into 1 subclass that draws empty, blacked out or filled-in squares plus row/column numbering as necessary. That way, you only have 1 UIView in the UIScrollView and all of this is probably much simpler.
Is that helpful? Is there a reason you're using a UIImageView for the background? Is there a reason you're separating the row/column numbering from the text the user has entered?
I've got a pretty big UIScrollView (contentSize 8000 x 960) with a lot of small labels.
The labels are only added if you scroll to the area where the label belongs to. So, at first, the scrooling is smooth, but as more and more labels are loaded, the performance suffers more and more.
What's the best solution to keep the scrolling smooth? Is CATiledLayer the way to go? Or should the labels off the view should be hidden or something like that?
Thanks a lot for your help!
Stefan
EDIT:
I got a huge performance boost when drawing some objects instead of using views; but now, I've got another problem; if I draw directly onto the UIScrollView, everything performs great. But if I lay a UIView on the UIScrollView and draw on that, performance goes down again (both times calling setNeedsDisplayInRect: in scrollViewDidScroll:).
So hierarchy:
UIWindow
UIView
UIScrollView <== drawing here
works fine.
But hierarchy:
UIWindow
UIView
UIScrollView (size 8000x960)
UIView (size 8000 x 960) <== drawing here
performs bad.
Any ideas why? I need the UIView above because the drawing should be ABOVE some UIViews; so I place the UIViews in the scrollView and draw in the view above...
The label reuse is one of possible solutions. Sometimes it doesn't help a lot. When a new UIView appears the drawRect method will be called and that may cause problems with animation.
Sometimes the best solution is to draw your labels (I mean text) directly using Core Graphics without creating UILabel object or something else. The CALayer will increase performance, but there is a possibility that it will not help you a lot.
But first of all you should remember that views with alpha = 0 or hidden = YES will not be drawn at all, so there is no penalty for using them. Maybe you should try to hide unused ones before using Core Graphics.
The best way would be to have just a few UILabels and reuse them. But you'll have to implement - (void)scrollViewDidScroll:(UIScrollView *)scrollView and do some reusable logic there. Depending on case it might be easier to use a UITableView and transform it 90 degrees, so it looks like a scrollview. That way you can the build-in reusable logic of the TableView.
For others seeing this post, I was able to drastically improve performance and keep UIViews in a scroller without using a table by enabling each view's "shouldRasterize" property. This property renders the view as an image while the view is in motion, causing it to not need to be reprocess for each pixel it moves. So, if I have a UIButton called button, it gets enabled like this:
button.layer.shouldRasterize = YES;
Did u try something similar to UITableViewCell
dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier
Using a reuseIdentifer to reuse the once allocated labels..
I have a UIToolbar in IB with a custom UIBarButtonItem that is set to an image. The image height is larger than the UIToolbar height. The image does not load for some reason. Attached is a screenshot.
You should avoid using subviews that are larger than the parent view - even if it does work and draws the view outside of the bounds, you cannot always count on it because the clipping is skipped for performance reasons and depending on the drawing order the overlapping part of the subview might be covered later. Second problem is that only the part within the frame of the superview is able to handle the touch events.
As to why you don't see your image, it's probably a different problem, I doubt it has something to do with it going outside the frame. Post your code to get more feedback ;)
This is probably either real easy, real dumb, or my google fu has taken a serious turn for the worse. Anyway, I'm implementing custom view for my app, which is using pure CGContext drawing, no subviews (for now at least). The thing is, I want it to autorotate, so I have shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation return YES, and voila, the view rotates. But in doing so it's not actually redrawing the content (which I assume is rendered into a texture somewhere in the framework and splashed onto a rect, but that's not really relevant here), the rect is simply stretched, squishing the content. How can I get it to simply issue a draw of a bigger area while rotating? That is, my content is bigger than the screen, and I'd simply like the viewport to change during the rotation.
I've tried setting the view's contentMode to UIViewContentModeRedraw, but that didn't do anything, I've tried playing around with the autoresizeMask stuff, but didn't seem to help either. I've also tried inserting a setNeedsDisplay in willRotateToInterfaceOrientation, however that only caused it to redraw using the new bounds (i.e. squishing it first, and then stretching it out to the right size during the rotation), which is also not what I'd like to see.
Does anyone have any idea how I might go about getting this to work?
As it turns out, it's a mix of dumb and easy. I'm posting it here if anyone should care to read it someday. They way I managed to solve it was actually sandwiching a view between window and my view (I suppose you might be able to go to work on the window directly, but it felt more intuitive this way). That is, I added my view as a child view to that view, which I'll call the frame.
The frame is a resizing as normal, however, I turn OFF resizing of child views, and make my own view LARGER than the viewing area (square actually, 480x480, so it can cover the entire screen either way). Problem solved, basically.
Now I'm playing around with animating the offset of the view in the frame during willRotateToInterfaceOrientation, to have it appear to be rotating around the center, rather than the upper left corner, but that's a different question.
All,
I'm having trouble getting behavior that I want from CATiledLayer. Is there a way that I can trigger the tiles to redraw without having the side-effect that their areas are cleared to white first? I've already subclassed CATiledLayer to set fadeDuration to return 0.
To be more specific, here are the details of what I'm seeing and what I'm trying to achieve:
I have a UIScrollView with a big content size...~12000x800. Its content view is a UIView backed by a CATiledLayer.
The UIView is rendered with a lot of custom-drawn lines
Everything works fine, but the contents of the UIView sometimes change. When that happens, I'd like to redraw the tiles as seamlessly as possible. When I use setNeedsDisplay on the view, the tiles redraw but they are first cleared to white and there's a fraction-of-a-second delay before the new content is drawn. I've already subclassed CATiledLayer so that fadeDuration is set to 0.
The behavior that I want seems like it should be possible...when you zoom in on the scrollview and the content gets redrawn at a higher resolution, there's no blanking before the redraw; the new content is drawn right on top of the old one. That's what I'm looking for.
Thanks; I appreciate your ideas.
Update:
Just to follow up - I realized that the tiles weren't being cleared to white before the redraw, they're being taken out entirely; the white that I was seeing is the color of the view that's beneath my CATiledLayer-backed view.
As a quick hack/fix, I put a UIImageView beneath the UIScrollView, and before triggering a redraw of the CATiledLayer-backed view I render its visible section into the UIImageView and let it show. This smooths out the redraw significantly.
If anyone has a better solution, like keeping the redraw-targeted tiles from going away before being redrawn in the first place, I'd still love to hear it.
I've found that if you set levelsOfDetailBias and levelsOfDetail both to the same value (2 in my case), then it only redraws the tiles that are touched by my setNeedsDisplayInRect: call, as you'd hope.
However if the levelsOfDetail is different to LODB, then any calls to setNeedsDisplayInRect: redraw all the tiles.
You could add another layer (possibly a CATiledLayer) behind the existing tiled layer. (Sort of a double-buffered solution.) You would call setNeedsDisplay: on the second layer from a timer that fires after a few seconds to ensure that that layer doesn't redraw at the same time as the front layer.
Another potential option is to use the same delegate to draw content to a bitmap context and swap the bitmap into the backing store once the content is refreshed. This should produce a flicker-free result. That being said, I can't tell you how this might be done, and one nice thing about CATiledLayers is they automatically generate tiles when you zoom and pregenerate tiles when you pan once zoomed in.
I would like to see how you implement your application. I have been looking for weeks to find an example that uses a combination of UIScrollView and a CATiledLayer-back view with a lot of custom drawn lines. Apple has some great sample code - but it all involves images rather than line art, so no help for me.
Having read through these answers without a solution, I discovered that tiling a page was the dominant background task.
Preparing my lo-res placeholder image on a high priority queue solved this issue - the images now appear while the tiling is occurring. Caching the placeholder images further improves their appearance - they appear before the tiling begins.
With newer devices, the tiling it so fast, these tricks might not matter. A sample PDF consisting of large scanned images (e.g. a scanned book) tiles the slowest in my experience, and makes for good test data.
I had the same problem with iPad.
The solution was more simple than I thought and far more simple than using UIImageView to render display before redrawing... :
Just don't set any background color for the Layer!
I had CATiledLayer set in a similar way:
layer = [[CATiledLayer alloc] init];
layer.masksToBounds = YES;
layer.contentsGravity = kCAGravityLeft;
//layer.backgroundColor = [[UIColor whiteColor] CGColor];
layer.tileSize = CGSizeMake(1004.0, 1004.0);
layer.levelsOfDetail = 16;
layer.levelsOfDetailBias = 8;
Note that I have commented out the line setting layer's background color to white.
After that the white blank before redraw problem disappeared!
Let me know if anyone has tried that.