The context is that in a Xamarin.Forms project, I want to right-click and add an item from VS in the usual project content menu as maybe an entry called "Add Image Asset", let's say a raster or SVG image, and have it programmatically add those to the resources folder in Android and the Assets.xcassets in the IOS and Mac projects. Maybe it could even size or resize the input image or vector assets to fit into different dpi sizes, which would cut down on a lot of front-end redundancy.
So, an extension would have to be created I would think.
On VS for Windows this isn't such a problem, but be it that the Mac version is Monodevelop-based, is what I want to do even possible, and how?
Firstly this is something that is built-in into MFractor so you might want to take a look (you can request a free trial to see how it works). If you are not willing to spend money on such a tool then I believe you can try writing your own extension. This article should be a good starting point.
If I were you I would try using MFractor with a trial license so you can decide whether it's worth the money or not. In my opinion, it's a must in XF development (it has so many nice features), but I can understand that there are companies that are not willing to spend money on it. If you are interested you can contact Matthew for more details.
Related
I work with Windows Phone 8. I want to be able to take a button, tap it and load a picture from the phone into a window to edit it. Can someone please direct me to where I can find info on this or tutorials? I'm not asking someone to do this for me, just help on how to do it myself.
Welcome to StackOverflow! Your question is a bit too broad for StackOverflow, next time please try to focus on a smaller problem. "Windows Phone 8 Picture Editing" is too general.
But I know it is a hard topic to start on, and there are not many resources about it (especially compared to iOS). If you are not good with Windows Phone app development, I'd first recommend some easier examples.
Anyway, here is a simple app that demonstrates setting an image onto a view from a local file: http://developer.nokia.com/Community/Wiki/Loading_local_image_file_on_Tap_events_in_Windows_Phone
If you want to choose an existing photo, it is even easier. You can
follow the instructions at this link:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsphone/develop/hh394019%28v=vs.105%29.aspx
To take a photo, you can use the camera capture task, which is very
similar to the photo picker. Here is how to use it:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsphone/develop/hh394006%28v=vs.105%29.aspx
If you need a more advanced/custom camera, you can implement your own
camera. A relatively simpler example is here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsphone/develop/microsoft.devices.photocamera%28v=vs.105%29.aspx
If you trust yourself, a much advanced example is here (I also
followed the same tutorial for creating an advanced photo filtering
app):
If that is too hard, you should definitely take a look at the Nokia
Imaging SDK for Windows Phone 8. It has many built-in filters that
anyone who is interested in making a photo editing app would like:
http://developer.nokia.com/Develop/Windows_Phone/nokia_apis/imaging.xhtml
If you still need more, or if you want something more lightweight and
smaller than Nokia Imaging SDK, just look at
WriteableBitmapExtensions that enables you to perform simple
operations: http://writeablebitmapex.codeplex.com/
When you are done with the actual image editing/programming, you should consider the user experience and total integration in more general.
To extend the phone to make your app a fully-featured editing app, head over here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/wpapps/Photo-Extensibility-Sample-db289044
This also explains the topic on extending the editing section in greater detail: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsphone/develop/jj662932%28v=vs.105%29.aspx
I could write hundreds of lines of code directly here, but it wouldn't have meant anything. I hope these links help you (and many others) as a starting point for image editing on Windows Phone. But remember to ask more specific questions next time :)
I wanna develop a little paint-program (SVG business-card designer) which should be hosted in the cloud, im trying to get my head around what technology i should settle on.
Possible answers as i see it would be SilverLight, Flash, Java, HTML5.
I would be happy to avoid SilverLight and Flash for several reasons, HTML5 im worried about due to compatibillity with ex. IE browser ? Java i dont know enough about to understand if that would be the right way.
One example im quite impressed about is :
http://code.google.com/p/svg-edit/
And looking to somewhat hit the same as that, but again IE explorer ( which is what majority uses ) is an issue here too regarding SVG format.
I might be able to live with only ex. IE9, but wondering what you guys would think would be the right approach/language/framework/technology to make such an application ?
Thanks alot.
For a business card designer, you should be concentrating on font and page layout, in which case you need to use an online editor. There are lots of free WYSIWYG editirors that run from web pages and there are soe very sophisticated ones like FCKeditor. FCK also includes everything that you need for uploading images and maintaining a clipart gallery. I beleieve that it's available for both Windows and Apache web servers and it doesn't require admin permission to install, once the upload folders have write permissions.
I want to develop a desktop application/widget, and would love to use a web technology stack. so I can...
Reuse existing skills
Run on multiple platforms (OsX, Windows)
Update application code without having the user upgrade (part/all of the code gets downloaded from the web)
Running in a browser is probably the best option, but one thing that is getting in the way is the browser's chrome (frame, tabs menus etc.) and background, as I want to create a transparent application (e.g. a semi-transparent, round clock that would display on top of other apps).
I'm thinking that a custom version of a browser (chrome or firefox) is probably the answer. All I would need to do is have a shortcut like:
...\chrome.exe -transparent -no_chrome ...\mywidget.html
Seems to me like a fairly obvious need, so before I consider forking chromium, I'm thinking there must be something like this already.
I know there's http://awesomium.com/ ($2,900 license cost), but it is an overkill as I don't need to embed a browser into a desktop app, API and all, and the cost is prohibitively high for a low-cost, limited distribution app.
There is also http://mozillalabs.com/chromeless/ but it doesn't seem actively maintained.
In addition, for both options, the installation overhead is huge (installing a full-fledged browser for the sake of running a widget).
Any suggestions? (please not Adobe Air - I want to use a standard web tech stack)
Take a look at this discussion for several options
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2829126
-FT
I want to make a site from scratch, and Im considering to use Flex to make a R.I.A instead of the standard approach (xhtml + css + some ajax).
The kind of site I want to make is something like e-bay, but less complicated.
But.. I know that 95%+ of the sites like that are built in the previous mentioned techs... so, what are the cons and pros if I want to make a pure Flex site?
Thx.
If you write an entire website in Flash, the entire website lives at one URL. (Short of mucking around with whatever Flash provides to let you offer deeper links.)
Whereas a website written in HTML, unless you go mad with your AJAX, lets people link to the stuff they’re actually interested in, like unicorns:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/DESPICABLE-ME-AGNES-Unicorn-Doll-Plush-Character-Doll-/180602861597?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2a0cc4f81d#ht_1755wt_907
Or for a non-eBay example, Stack Overflow questions:
Flash for business web applications - why not?
HTML also has a pretty standard and understood user interface: links, and form controls. (Mainly links.)
Flash doesn't work on iPhone/iPad. End of story.
Other reasons: not a web standard, often quite slow, not good for SEO, etc.
It requires users to have a proprietary plugin which some users don't want and other users can't have (since isn't available for all platforms (iOS being a key example)).
It also has performance and stability issues on some platforms (OS X and Linux being prime candidates).
While some search engines have started to index Flash content (so long as it exposes the information), the results aren't as good as for content rich HTML sites.
You can do that simply using traditional xhtml + css + jQuery (or any JS framework if you want to increase UX). Flex won't do much in your scenario.
In my experience, performance is not a real issue unless you play video - one can write bad programs in JavaScript, too...
Your pros are mostly on the development side: You can have a great looking site quickly, and you can almost completely forget about browser incompatibilites.
You rely on the customers having the plugin installed, though, and you rely on Adobe's technology for development and playing of the content.
If this is not important to you, and you can afford to do without all iPhone and iPad users, accessibility and standards compliance... go for it!
Flex is good if you want to install as an application using Air. ebay actually has a RIA version, or at least they did for a while.
There are several concerns with a Flash site, some of which Adobe has addressed in the last couple of years.
One is accessibility. It is more difficult to make a Flash site accessible to the visually impaired, who use screenreaders.
Related, people like to be able to copy and paste content, as well as print. With standard web pages, the developer need do nothing to support this, it just works from the browser. With Flash, you'll have to take care to make your text content selectable, and I'm not sure a user could ever select a section of text + images. I've never done it, but I can only imagine that implementing printing ability in your Flash site would be nightmarish, at best.
Another is linking and addressability. For most sites, you can copy or at least get a link that you can share or save to get back to where you want to be. With Flash, you usually go to a single address and then the rest of of your experience happens inside the Flash "window" and the browser isn't actually navigating any pages. It is far more difficult to implement this ability in a Flash site.
A Flash site is usually very slow to load, especially the first time, and page load times are immeasurably important to a site's success.
Finally, you've perhaps heard the furor over the last couple of years about different vendors supporting or not supporting Flash in their products/devices. An all-flash site would be completely inaccessible on any iPhone or iPad, for example, which do not support Flash at all. Furthermore, some employers do not allow plugins like Flash to be installed on work machines, so you'd eliminate that portion of possible traffic, as well.
Nobody has yet mentioned Silverlight.?
I mostly agree with Jay's answer concerning accessibility, but as a further note would like to add that development in Flex/Flash vs HTML/CSS/JS could be more costly not only in terms of money but also for maintenance. Many Flex/Flash devs typically charge a higher price and their dev tools, which are necessary for compilation, usually aren't free, compared to HTML/CSS/JS devs, who often use freely available text editors.
Although I've done programming, I'm not a programmer. I've recently agreed to coordinate getting a Website up for a club. The resources are--me, who has done Web content maintenance (putting content into HTML and ColdFusion templates via a gatekeeper to the site itself; doing simple HTML and XML coding); a serious Web developer who does database programming, ColdFusion, etc., and talks way over the heads of the rest of us; two designers who use Dreamweaver; the guy who created the original (and now badly broken) site in Front Page and wants to use Expression Web; and assorted other club members who are even less technically inclined.
What we need up first is some text and graphics (a gorgeous design has been created in Dreamweaver), some links (including to existing PDF newsletters for download), and maybe hooking up an existing Blogspot blog. Later (or earlier if it's not hard), we may add mouseover menus to the links, a gallery, a calendar, a few Mapquest hotlinks, and so on.
My question--First, is there any real problem with sticking with HTML and jpegs for the initial site? Second, for the "later" part of the site development, what's the simplest we can go with? Third, are there costs in doing this the simple way that will make us regret it down the road? Also, is there a good site/resource where I can learn more about this from a newbie perspective?
If you don't require any dynamic content, heck, if you don't plan on editing the content more than once a week, I'd say stick to basic HTML.
Later, you'd probably want a basic, no-fuss and easily installable CMS. The brand really depends on the platform (most likely PHP/Rails/ASP), but most of them can be found by typing " CMS" into Google. Try prefixing it with "free" or "open source" if you want.
I'm pretty sure you can do all this for absolutely free. Most PHP and Ruby CMS's are free and web hosting is free/extremely cheap if you're not demanding.
And last/best tip: Find someone who has done this before, preferably more than once. He'll probably set you up so you never have to look at anything more complicated than a WYSIWYG editor.
Plain old HTML is fine, just as long as you don't use tags like blink and marquee.
I personally love tools like CityDesk.
And I'm not just plugging Joel. (There are others out there in this class I'm sure.) The point is they make making a static website very easy:
The structure is just a filesystem structure
pages have templates to consolidate formatting
all resources are contained in one file
easy and fast Preview and Publish functions
For a dynamic collaborative site, I would just install one of many open source CMSs available on shared hosting sites.
If you're familiar with html/javascript basics I'd look into a CMS - wordpress, drupal, joomla, nuke, etc. All of these are free. Very often your web hosting company will install one of these by default which takes all of the hard part out of your hands. Next is just learning to customize the system and there's tons of docs out there for any of those systems.
All that being said there is noting wrong with good old fashioned html.
In addition to some of the great content management systems already mentioned, consider cms made simple.
It makes it very easy to turn a static site into a content managed site (which sounds like exactly what you might need to do in the future), and the admin area is very easy to use. Our clients have found it much simpler to use than the likes of Joomla.
It's also free and open source.
Good luck!
There's no reason to not go with plain old HTML and JPGs if you don't know any server side scripting languages. Also, once you want to get more advanced, most cheap hosting services have tools that can be installed with one click, and provide things like blogs, photo galleries, bulletin boards (PHPBB), and even content management tools like Joomla.
I had the same problem myself, I was just looking for something really easy to smash together a website quickly. First I went with just plain old HTML, but then I realised a simple CMS would be better.
I went for Wordpress. Wordpress is mostly known as a blogging platform, but in my opinion it is really great as a deadly simple CMS as well.
why not simply use Google pages?
Here is an example of a website I did, takes about 2 hours, easy to maintain (not that I do (-: ) and FREE.
I think that suggesting you mess with HTML for what you need is crazy!
Plain HTML is great, gives you the most control. If you want to make updating a bit easier though, you could use SSI. Most servers have this enabled. It basically let's you attach one file to many pages.
For example, you could have your menu in navigation.html and every page would include this file. That way you wouldn't have to update this one file on every page each time you need to update.
<!--#include virtual="navigation.html" -->
I agree with the other commenters that a CMS might be useful to you, however as I see it, probably a solution like Webby might do it for you. It generates plain HTML pages based on Templates. Think about it as a "webpage preprocessor" which outputs plain HTML files. It has most of the advantages of using a server-based CMS, but without a lot of load on the server, and making it easy for you to change stuff on any of the templates you might use.
It's fine
Rails (or purchase / use a CMS)
Not unless you start becoming crazy-popular
It really depends on what you go with for 2. Rails has a plethora of tutorials on the net and any product you go with will have its own community etc.
To be perfectly honest though, if the dynamic part is someone elses blog and you move the gallery out into flikr you may find that you can actually live with large parts of it being static HTML for a very long time.
If a to Implement a website With User Profiles/Logins, Extensions, Gallery's etc s a Newbi then a CMS like Joomla, Etc are good , but Else if you presently have only Static Content then Its good to go with Good Old HTML, About JPEG , I though Presently Its better to use PNG or GIF as its Less Bulky.
Also About you Query About Shifting to Server Scripts , When you have Database Driven Material or When you have Other Things that Require Advanced Prog Languages , Just use PHP Scripts inside PHP , and Rename teh File as a PHP, Thats IT, No Loss to you HTML Data.....
Do Go Ahead and Launch you Site ......
Dude, you're talking about HTML, obviously you'll be styling your content with CSS. Wait till you run into IE issues and god forbid your client wants ie6 compatibility.
Go with the HTML for now, I'm sure you guys will hack it through. Our prayers are with you.
Personally, I'd never use JPEG images on a website, mainly because of three reasons:
JPEGs often contains artifacts.
Quality is often proportional
with filesize.
Does not support
alpha transparency.
That said, I'd recommend you to use PNGs for images since it's lossless and a 24-bit palette (meaning full colors + alpha transparency). The only quirk is that IE6 and below does not support native alpha for PNGs, however this could be resolved by running a javascript which would fix this issue.
As for designing a website, there's both pros and cons for this. I suggest you read through:
37 Signal's Why We Skip Photoshop
Jeff Croft's Why We Don't Skip Photoshop
As for newbie resources, I'd recommend you flip through the pages at W3 Schools.