How can I most performantly display musical chord sheets in HTML5? - html

I am currently working on my final year project for my degree in Software Engineering. I have decided that my project will be to develop a web application using HTML5 that will display chord sheets in a web browser (specifically Google Chrome). The idea is that each member of a band might have some sort of device in front of them (iPad, laptop etc.) which can access the application where they can log in, view the chords for the songs as the progress through a set and add annotations which are stored in the database and then shown to the user each time the song is displayed on their screem.
However, I am having a problem with how best to display all this in a browser window. I want it to have a similar appearance to that of a PDF document displayed in a browser window in that the user is able to scroll horizontally and vertically and zoom in and out as if they were viewing a PDF document. Is using SVG graphics the best way to achieve this? Or is there another way?
Rendering speed is going to be important as the idea is that this will be a system that could potentially be used in live situation, and I need to make sure I keep page loading/rendering times as low as possible.
I would greatly appreciate any thoughts you have!

Check out Vexflow! It’s an open-source web-based music notation rendering API, written completely in JavaScript, and runs right in the browser. VexFlow supports HTML5 canvas and SVG.
Here’s a demo and here’s a tutorial.

Related

Is HTML rendering possible in libgdx (or, what is the best practice to create a help screen)?

I want to create a help screen for my game. This screen contains text and pictures that describe the game.
One option is to create a stage and add a table to it that will define the position of the different labels and images. However, this option seems to be "unnatural", limited when it comes to format options, and a potential headache when it comes to code maintenance.
The content of the screen is static which makes it a good candidate for an HTML document. My idea is to create the help screen document in HTML and then have it rendered inside my help screen. My question is, is this possible in libgdx? If not, what other way would I have to implement this?
As it is not possible to embed a browser in your LibGDX app (as nicely explained here), you could either link to an external website in the device's browser or use the libgdx-stagebuilder to build up the Scene2D stage using XML. Or you just stick to the normal LibGDX way. Unfortunately, I don't see any other option than those.
I don't think this is supported in libGDX as of yet, but it should be possible using platform specific code. How you do it will vary from platform to platform, so I can't tell you exactly what to look up, but android has something called webview you might want to look at.

Can a website be made in cocos2d-html?

I have been working with cocos2d-iPhone, cocos2d-x, and cocos2d-html5 for quite some time. I wanted to ask if it is okay to build a website with cocos2d-html5. I want to do it because I want the website look interactive, animated, and scroll around like a game. We can do this with javascript, but is it possible to write it in cocos3d-html5? What are the drawbacks of doing this? And is there any existing website that is built on cocos2d?
Thank you for the help.
As i figured out, you cannot make a cocos2d-html based website as it is for making web apps for web sites. Although a web app can cover up the whole screen but there are a large number of issues assigned to creating such a situation. The internet users are used to using the refresh and back buttons on the web browser as well as opening in the new tab, nothing of these options would work in a cocos2d-html based web app as the navigation would be all done within the application and in no way can the button in the browser respond in the appropriate manner.

Embed 3D models on website

Is there a way to embed Sketchup models on a website? Preferably a free one, if it's a commercial solution I'd like a confirmation that it's actually worth the money... I know about the 3D warehouse thingy where you can rotate it (javascript and some images), but I can't upload anything to the 3D warehouse 'cause it always "resets the connection".
You can try the upcoming WebGL Functions in modern Browsers. There are some Javascript Libraries that can read model files and show them within your (HTML 5?) website. I have not used them yet, but try these links if this sounds interesting:
https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/
https://github.com/timjb/sketchup-threejs/
I made a patch of an example game in three.js. Added ColladaLoader and Sketchup model + Third Person Shooter controls:
https://github.com/irony/Nemesis
Try it out (Works best in Chrome)
http://peaceful-woodland-4410.herokuapp.com/index.html
You can use http://sketchfab.com, they even have a SketchUp exporter.
Yes, you can do it without cost. See here: https://help.sketchup.com/en/article/3000258
EDIT:
There were some free rendering sites apart from Google, but they don't seem to be in operation anymore. Posting to the Google 3D warehouse is going to be your best bet. Regarding your problem posting there, try it with Chrome.
EDIT #2:
If you don't want to upload to Google 3D Warehouse, you can achieve a similar effect with a little work. 3D Warehouse doesn't actually give the visitor the power to manipulate something in 3D, but rather it lets them "rotate" the image horizontally by simply showing a series of preset images of the 3D from various angles. You can take shots of your 3D object, import to Photoshop and create your own gif of the spinning object. A little more work than relying on Google, so you'll have to decide if it's worth it.
EDIT #3: If all else fails you can simply post the 3D model on your site as a downloadable file and advise visitors to get Sketchup to view it.

Are HTML Image Maps still used?

Do people still use the old HTML Image Maps? The ones with:
<map name="test" id="test">
<area shape="poly" alt="" title="" coords=...
Or is there a newer, better alternative?
Yes, people do still use image maps. An alternative would be to position elements using absolute positioning and CSS but that's not necessarily better. It also doesn't allow you to have shapes like in image maps
They are in the HTML5 specification, so they will not get deprecated.
You can still freely use them, they certainly still have their place in web development. Or I could say, those rare occasions exist where you can best solve something with an image map.
An alternative solution to using CSS or image maps would be to make use of SVG graphics embedded into the HTML dom.
One tutorial on how to achieve mouseover effects using this technique is described in this tutorial: http://www.petercollingridge.co.uk/data-visualisation/mouseover-effects-svgs
The key takeaway being that SVG elements also trigger traditional dom events including onmouseover and onmouseout.
Yes html image maps are good especially if you want your area to be a polygon. You can add rollover effects to you map as well with javascript. There is a nice tutorial and demo here:
http://www.tutorialized.com/view/tutorial/Image-Map-Rollover/3484
Image Maps are still in HTML5 specifications, supported by all browsers.
They can be adapted to responsive design using jQuery RWD Image Maps:
https://github.com/stowball/jQuery-rwdImageMaps
It detects and automatically resize the image maps coordinates.
It's also available for Wordpress developers as plugin:
http://wordpress.org/plugins/responsive-image-maps/
Simple and effective solution.
Yes, I still use image maps, however my last project used Raphaël. It was pretty easy to get something up and running.
http://dmitrybaranovskiy.github.io/raphael/
From their web site:
Raphaël ['ræfeɪəl] uses the SVG W3C Recommendation and VML as a base
for creating graphics. This means every graphical object you create is
also a DOM object, so you can attach JavaScript event handlers or
modify them later. Raphaël’s goal is to provide an adapter that will
make drawing vector art compatible cross-browser and easy.
Nice simple image map example:
http://dmitrybaranovskiy.github.io/raphael/australia.html
While I rarely see them used on modern websites anymore, they do seem to be used by my clients in their email campaigns. However, I've noticed, and confirmed that there are some scaling issues with the coordinate system on mobile devices.
** I know this thread is old, I was just doing some additional research into this for a recent email campaign issue and thought it may help someone else down the line.
3rd party edit
The question on litmus.com on image map support is from 04/2014
Image maps do not support ALT tags, when images aren't loaded the ALT text isn't displayed in some clients.
Image map usage generally results in using large images which can cause deliverability issues and hinder download speed (especially
important to mobile users).
And most importantly, The iOS (iphone/ipad) doesn't scale the image map link coordinates when the image is scaled which breaks the
links. Since iOS represents a large majority of email opens (iPhone +
iPad = 38% via http://emailclientmarketshare.com/) this is important.
Yes, it still used
An image map allows a user to hyperlink to many pages by clicking different parts of an image.Simply by using image map we create lists of coordinates relating to a specific area of the same image and give the hyperlink to a different location. By using this within a single image we give multiple links.
More
image map is quite interesting option in html and html5 they are still being use and i personally love it i therefore find issuse in mobile devices my issue is relatd to scaling
yes i have experience it my self however i am a student enrolled in html html5 and for begineers i would like to follow w3chools link
http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_images.asp
you will gain alot from this [page

Image manipulation in ActionScript 3.0 : realistically editing faces

I am a flash developer who has worked mostly on small ActionScript projects, in particular websites, but I am dipping my toes into image manipulation with AS3. I have a project I'm working on to develop an application which would allow a user to upload their own picture into a swf, and then, using a slider, they can alter the image to make themselves look thinner or fatter. The condition is that it should require minimal user input - so ideally the most I could expect from the user would be a couple of control points identifying certain areas of the face in response to prompts e.g. 'click on the centre of the chin' and when the user clicks, the position would be stored, but this would need to be used sparingly, if at all.
So far, I have been able to use the FileReference class to handle the upload, and I am experimenting with using the DisplacementMap filter to edit certain parts of the uploaded image, but I am having serious trouble implementing this in a manner that would allow realistic deformation of the facial features in the image uploaded.
Is there anything that exists that might run along the same lines and that provides an explanation/source code I could look at to get a better idea of how to go around doing this? Or if there are any other ideas on how to manipulate and distort the image that doesn't use the DisplacementMap Filter?
Any feedback and help is greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time.
see http://sakri.net/technology/flash/flex/convolution_filter/ConvolutionFilterExplorer.html
(source code available)