I wonder if every developer would have to code statistic visualization by him/herself, or if there's a lib already that can be used to draw charts, curves, stats, etc. (like in the stock app for example)?
Take a look at this graphing package, it will also compile on the iPhone:
http://www.mpkju.fr/~graphview/page1/page1.html
Note that I've not used it yet, I ran across it before and made a note of the potential usefulness of it.
You might use the Google Charts API, and just use the images that come back from that:
http://code.google.com/apis/chart/
For instance, you can retrieve the bytes from this URL
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=t:60,40&chs=250x100&chl=Hello|World
and insert them into an NSImage, or just let the web view do the rendering for you.
Core Plot is a cross-platform (Mac / iPhone) plotting framework being developed by a group of scientifically-minded Cocoa developers. It is based on Core Animation, and was advancing quite quickly the last time I checked in. You might want to read the mailing list archives to get an idea of the design goals and current state of the framework.
Related
We need to build an image processing application for smartphones (mainly for iPhone). The operations consist of:
image filtering
composite geometrical transformation
region growing
Also, the user is required to specify (touch) some parts of the image. Those parts would serve as inputs for the app. Example: eyes and lip in a face.
We have built a desktop version of this app. The processing part is quite heavy and we extensively used BufferedImage class.
Should we use CodeNameOne for building this app? If not then what alternatives do you suggest?
Please consider the following factors:
Performance
Ease of writing the code (for image processing)
I gave an answer for this in our discussion forum but I think its a worthwhile question for a duplicate post:
Generally for most platforms you should be fine in terms of performance except for iOS & arguably Windows Phone.
Codename One is optimized for common use cases, since iOS doesn't allow for JIT's it can never be as fast as Java on the desktop since its really hard to do some optimizations e.g. array bound check elimination. So every access to an array will contain a branch check which can be pretty expensive for image processing.
Add to that the fact that we don't have any image processing API's other than basic ARGB and you can get the "picture", it just won't be efficient or easy.
The problem is that this is a very specific field, I highly doubt you will find any solution that will help you with this sort of code. So your only approach AFAIK is to build native code to do the actual image processing heavy lifting.
You can do this with Codename One by using the NativeInterface API which allows you to invoke critical code in native code and use cn1lib's to wrap them as libraries. You would then be able to get native performance for that portion of the code but this would only make sense for critical sections in the code. If you write a lot of native code the benefits of Codename One start to dissipate and you might as well go to native.
What would be the easiest way to graph a line graph on a iOS app? I am building a iOS app that needs a line graph I don't need anything complex just something that will graph a int.
I have seen core graph but not sure if thats the way to go.
You're probably thinking of core-plot, which would be a fine solution if you want something that has a lot of features and is ready out of the box.
If you want something more minimal, you could create your own line graph UIView subclass very easily and make it do exactly what you want. Building a general-purpose graph library is a lot of work because there are so many ways that people like to vary their graphs. If you know exactly what you want and don't need something more flexible, rolling your own can be a quick and effective solution.
If you do decide to roll your own, Matt Gallagher's Cocoa With Love blog has a number of very good graphics entries to get you started.
Apple's Accelerometer sample app (on their iOS Developer Center web site) includes some example code for a simple line graph.
Nuclios http://www.infragistics.com/products/ios/ is a pre-built library that has a bunch of graphing styles. It's not free but I don't think the license fee is outrageous either ~$250
You could take a look at BEMSimpleLineGraph.
It's modeled after UITableView and offers a wide range of features.
I am about to start building an app that will be used across all platforms. I will using monotouch and monodriod so I can keep things in .net
I'm a little lazy so I want to be able to reuse as much code as possible.
Lets say I want to create an application that stores contact information. e.g. Name & Phone number
My application needs to be able to retrieve data from a web service and also store data locally.
The MVVM pattern looks like the way to go but im not sure my approach below is 100% correct
Is this correct?
A project that contains my models
A project that contains my views,local storage methods and also view models which I bind my views to. In this case there would be 3 different projects based on the 3 os's
A data access layer project that is used for binding to services and local data storage
Any suggestions would be great.
Thanks for your time
Not specifically answering your question, but here are some lazy pointers...
you can definitely reuse a lot of code across all 3 platforms (plus MonoWebOS?!)
reusing the code is pretty easy, but you'll need to maintain separate project files for every library on each platform (this can be a chore)
MVVM certainly works for WP7. It's not quite as well catered for in MonoTouch and MonoDroid
some of the main areas you'll need to code separately for each device are:
UI abstractions - each platform has their own idea of "tabs", "lists", "toasts", etc
network operations - the System.Net capabilities are slightly different on each
file IO
multitasking capabilities
device interaction (e.g. location, making calls etc)
interface abstraction and IoC (Ninject?) could help with all of these
The same unit tests should be able to run all 3 platforms?
Update - I can't believe I just stumbled across my own answer... :) In addition to this answer, you might want to look at MonoCross and MvvmCross - and no doubt plenty of other hybrid platforms on the way:
https://github.com/slodge/MvvmCross
http://monocross.net (MVC Rather then Mvvm)
Jonas Follesoe's cross platform development talk: Has to be the most comprehensive resource out there at the moment. He talks about how best to share code and resources, abstract out much of the UI and UX differences, shows viable reusable usage of MVVM across platforms and nice techniques for putting together an almost automated build. (yes, that includes a way for you to compile you monotouch stuff on Visual Studio)
Best of all he has a available source code for the finished product and for a number of the major component individually placed in its own workshop project and a 50 + page pdf detailing the steps to do so.FlightsNorway on github
IMO the only thing missing is how best to handle local data storage across all platforms. In which case I would direct you to Vici Cool Storage an ORM that can work with WP7, MonoTouch and (while not officially supported) MonoDroid.
*Disclaimer* The site documentation isn't the most updated but the source code is available. (Because documentation is Kriptonite to many a programmer)
I think the easiest way to write the code once and have it work on all three platforms will probably be a web-based application. Check out Untappd for example.
You can start by looking at Robert Kozak's MonoTouch MVVM framework. It's just a start though.
MonoTouch MVVM
I've done a bit of iPhone development (3 apps in the appstore currently) but the interface has been pretty plain. I've used the stock components for the most part (UITableViewController, etc.) with a little bit of customization, but for the most part everything looks pretty generic. I'd like to get started developing apps with a richer user interface, but haven't found any good resources to get me started.
What resources have you all come across that outline how to create more advanced iOS interfaces (both iPhone and iPad)? Books? Blog entries? Just looking at the apps I have installed right now, some of the interfaces I've been very impressed with are the ESPN Score Center, XFINITY TV, Facebook, etc.
What about 3rd party interface component libraries? Are there any you recommend that provide more advanced interface components than those in the stock iOS library?
I'd love to take a look at any resources that you recommend for getting started.
I love Ray Wenderlich's tutorials. He's got one on Core Graphics which allows you to draw your own Table Views with headers, buttons, and bezier-curved footers!
Here's a little secret that often gets overlooked: a lot of the cool UI elements you see are stock Apple elements that have been customised to the brink of no return.
The main reason for this is Apple have put a lot of time and effort into making components that just plain work. A UIScrollView, for example, has had many more combined hours of testing than any app you write could hope to achieve.
The trick is to know exactly how to customise elements. A UITabBar is a good example: I've seen several apps that use their own custom tab bars. The problem is, often they don't handle edge cases particularly well. You might have issues if somebody tries to hit two items at the same time (I've actually seen an app that used their own implementation of a tab-bar crash if you pressed two items at the same time).
But if you use Apple's UITabBarController and either subclass, categorise, or otherwise overload it to get the customisation you want, you get a lot of the low-level event handling stuff for free.
You would be amazed with what you can do with a UITableViewController, and you get things like view recycling for free (some of the apps I've worked on have things like independent cell resizing, customised animation of cells, horizontal implementations of a tableview, etc).
Not a particularly useful answer, I grant you, but the point I want to get across here is once you've designed your kick-ass UI step back and consider what can be achieved with the existing toolset before rolling your own. You'll thank me when you come to bug fixing!
I also like Three20. Until now I didn't use it in my projects, but I played with it. And there's some really cool stuff in it. ;-) I think that's one way to extend your standard User Interfaces.
Another really cool part is designing your own elements. I like this really. Because you then have in your App something nobody else has. :-D
I've started looking into using Opacity for Mac, it's a pretty neat desktop application where you can generate your own graphical elements (buttons, switches, icons, etc) and then automatically generate the CocoaTouch / Quartz2D classes and headers to drop in your app ... Some elements work best when they're natively drawn on the device, rather than stored/loaded as pngs, or whatever. Moreover, you get #2x Retina display support for free. While not an interface dress-up framework, the fact that it generates Quartz2D code for you makes this a real contender for anyone who's remotely graphically creative but short on complex 2D programming skills.
Speaking of beautiful interfaces, if you're looking for inspiration or actual graphical elements to put in your interface, I frequently get some great ideas at 365psd ... they actually provide the Photoshop documents to reproduce some eye dropping UI goods, for FREE. Some places may just give you a PNG, but this does little good if you want to scale it (#2x or iPad) or customize it to fit your needs. It's like open source for graphical UI design.
I was wondering if anyone knew of a simple way to implement graphing in an iPhone/iPad application. I've spent quite a bit of time googling and can't seem to find any sort of a solution. Maybe I'm just searching with the wrong terms since a lot of consumers are asking about "graphing" in terms of using their applications, not developing them, the search-space is rather polluted.
It seems like a lot of iPad/iPhone applications have embedded graphs... and I can't imagine that every developer has invented their own graphing engine from the ground up. Or, maybe they have... Does anyone have any suggestions?
Core Plot is one popular option.
I have herd wonders about core plot but for myself i wrote a graph View Class which creates a standard graph.
Have a look
http://sebkade.wordpress.com/2010/05/06/basic-graph-class-for-iphone/
hope it helps
From my experience graphs are best done through UIWebView's and then written in HTML/JavaScript - there are many great html/javascript libraries for graphings. Personally, I like
http://www.highcharts.com
but these exist as well.
http://www.sencha.com/products/touch/charts
https://developers.google.com/chart/
http://www.zingchart.com/#welcome