More love for sketch+Accessibility

5:00-7:00 PM, 8:00-9:30 PM - Today I added the item list tool window to the sketch+accessability project. This window shows all of the objects that are currently stored in the graphics view by name. Right now it's a window with a table in it. It also has a refresh button. Incidentally, the sketch+accessability also uses bindings heavily, and those are kicking my butt. So I'm making refresh calls to the table, which is less than optimal. Someday I'll understand bindings, but for now it's just in my way. :/ Anyhow, the idea is to be able to select multiple items both with your cursor like it did before as well as within this window. This will help to organize the order of the object drawings as well as hopefully make creating and editing a given picture easier, since the selection method is less than ideal. The background is going to have to be done independently of SKTImage I think, otherwise it will get tied up with the rest of the drawing code, which could be bad. I'm not 100% sure how I'm going to handle that yet, but that will have to be finished. Along with other details about the drawing that need to all go together… (category, item name, brief description? etc) Wish me luck, I'll need it. =)

I realize now that at some point I've revisited sketch and ripped out all of the per-pixel specifics and didn't log that.  It's more vanilla and I'll use transforms to get the drawing to draw where I need it.  The window does resize the grey box automatically to the optimal size right now for the iPad, but since I'm not doing other odd pixelly things you can use the already built tools like the grid and zoom features to help draw.  Adding curves to this also helps immensely.  Still no word on if I'll support text, I kind of don't expect to, but we shall see.

Riq is a cool project maintainer

9:30 PM - 10:45 PM - Riq, the creator/maintainer of cocos2d fixed the previous problem. Apparently CCRenderTexture was making bad assumptions on how to get the screen position. I fixed that and added it to my app. I also commented on the cocos2d forums and added (hopefully) proper suspend/resume capability to cocos2d.

cocos2d revisited

10:45 PM - 12:00 AM - Updated to the new cocos2d release candidate (0.99.4rc2 to be exact) and found a bug with it. Did some exploring and posted how to reproduce it on the cocos2d forums. Pict works respectably well on the new iPhone, it looks pretty close to the iPad version actually, which makes sense as far as the resolution goes. Fun to see it on there and work with the new phone some. Here, have a screenshot of the bug.

This is a screenshot from the new iPhone 4 itself, unmodified. That's a lot of pixels to fit on a 3.5 inch screen!

sketch editor gets some love

10:30 PM - 11:30 PM - Played with the image editor some. I think we are going to need either layer support or some kind of object selection tool more than just the arrow. If you have a bunch of objects then it will be difficult to adjust things around. Additionally, we will want to adjust the points so that they are more or less sequential. When it draws it could be random, but that is probably less ideal than having the person making the image adjust it to the "ideal". We will see, I may need to automate this somehow, but for now it is drawing on the object order added, from back to front.

Anyhow.

I fixed the background to be grey instead of white and made it 512x512, which I think we decided upon for the iPad version. The new iPhone version should work OK at this resolution as well, though if I do make this a universal app then I think I will be scaling it down to work with older devices as well. The drawing program already supports images, so I will need to tap into the images code and auto-position the image. No huge technical hurdles (that I'm aware of) left other than possibly the huge performance hit that I'm seeing on straight lines and figuring out particles to add a little spice to the graphics. Going to have to solve that performance one here soon. For now I'm going to try to get a decent example demo going of a drawing that fades into a background picture. But tonight I just need to go to bed.

Wow, I actually did something!

10:15 PM - 1:15 AM:
Did some actual work on Pict this evening. This past week I've taken a couple of hours looking into how to do curves. Lagrange curves, Aitken algorithms, Bezier curves, etc. I ended up using a bezier curve inside of a rectangle in the image editor. So you can now add curves in the line drawing program. I am currently working on finishing adding importing the curves into Pict for drawing but I may not get that completed this evening.

[time passes]

Okay, initial curve support is in and working. Yay! Next stop, background images.

catchup

I need to catch up for the past few months, I've neglected my log.

I've worked quite a bit on the Folder app. It's gone from a simple app to load/send files to also be able to email, preview and delete files. Additionally I learned more about the iPhone 4 OS (now called iOS 4) and made it not just for the iPad, but also for the iPhone, iPod touch. That's taken the majority of my programming time. We also purchased some recreational land. We have been looking since the previous summer, I'm happy to have found something! That has taken up a lot of free time as well. I have made the decision in mid-april to have real pictures or images that fade into the drawn pictures. This will add a decent amount of work and means that the drawing needs to be more precise. I guess we will see how that goes.