I am reconstructing a massive collection of medical modules that were created in Flash. All of the modules are being redesigned for cross platform enjoyment (js and HTML5). I have been searching for a library or plugin that will add arrows(with rollover capabilities) and text above an image when the user clicks a button. I have had little luck.
The closest package I have found is Zoomify, but it's still not what I am looking for. They are asking for too much money for maximum development capabilities. I was really hoping to find a JQuery plugin or javascript library that would allow me to fully customize the interface. Here is a screenshot of an OLD FLASH module:
The red arrow corresponds to the link selected on the left. The new design is much more appealing but the underlying idea is the same, click buttons point to the objects.
If there is no such library or plugin should I create a simple javascript image viewer and store overlay coordinates in a database? Or is that overkill? I have hunderds of these things to do... maybe thousands :( Any help/direction would be greatly appreciated.
What you are asking for is provided by CSS, which enables one to place text directly on top of an image or other rendered HTML. The key CSS properties to investigate are:
position set to 'absolute'
values for at least two of top, right, bottom or left
use z-index to specifying layering/order
Lightbox is a good option "Lightbox is a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on top of the current page. It's a snap to setup and works on all modern browsers."
Related
I found a lot of resources about my question, but I'd just like opinions based off of a high level overview of what I'm trying to do.
Basically, I'm using a combination of Javascript, and HTML to build a customizer for a friends' website. I should start by saying that I have some HTML experience but this is the first time I'm using Javascript (I am experienced with Java). The ultimate goal will be something like a customizer to allow users to select the parts of a bicycle and change their colors to place custom orders.
I've got the various parts of the bike as images files, and I'm using this jscolor color picker found at: http://jscolor.com/examples/#example-showing-hiding to allow the user to select a color from the color map. My plan is to layer a given part (photo) on top of a copy of the same photo, and fill only one of them, like layering in Photoshop. This way, the part fills in the correct shape, instead of filling as an entire square of the image file. As the cursor moves, the color should change in realtime. Once done, they can save the part and the color record will be kept on the back-end.
As I'm new to Javascript and not that experienced with HTML, I'm finding it a bit challenging to get this on the right track. So I'm hoping for some advice from some people who are experienced with HTML/Javascript/CSS to point me in the right direction to get this going along a better track than it is currently. I wasn't sure how to "phrase" what I'm trying to do.
The three main parts I'm addressing:
Using HTML buttons to load a different bike part (essentially load a separate image file).
Adding the color from the jscolor picker to the image of the selected part.
Saving the state of the part when the user clicks a Save button.
I will continue to search the forums as I already saw a few leads similar to what I want to do, but I mostly want to know if my approach seems feasible for what I'm attempting to do.
Thanks in advance!
Using normal HTML buttons will make things complex for you.
I think leveraging HTML5 Canvas API is a better way to approach this problem. Canvas is the HTML5 element for helping out you do the graphics manipulations using JavaScript. Learn more about canvas here.
You can make use of a library such as Fabric.js to make things easier.
I'm in a search for some jQuery resources or other things that will help me building a customizable start page for users.
I'm talking about tiles that have to be aligned reasonably in the screen (usually a parent div).
The tiles have equal size and if possible I want to let the user drag them for customization (Not a must).
The main issue is aligning the tiles in a rasonable way.
I found some jQuery plugins like freewall etc. but they usually try to fill an area and less appropriate for my cause...
When you using Freewall you can choice option for not fill by set:
fixSize: 0
even you can control the gaps too, by using method setHoles.
please check there links for know how to control the gaps:
http://vnjs.net/www/project/freewall/404.html
http://vnjs.net/www/project/freewall/
Best
I've found a very appropriate plugin:
http://masonry.desandro.com/
It's capaable of performing layout and placing the tiles centered in the given space.
Perfect for me.
Any recommendations on zooming a large image and panning around? ideally inline on the page.
I've been using PanoJS (aka GSV2), but now more people are using iPhone/iPad/Android type devices, this library is either too slow, or the older versions do not support dragging (the one I'm using at the moment).
http://code.google.com/p/panojs/
http://www.dimin.net/software/panojs/
My current thought is that using the tiled images approach is too much for these little processors (at maximum zoom trying to drag 144 individual images, from a 3000 x 3000px original image, where each tile is 250x250px).
So probably looking more at loading the original image in an with a set width/height... and either writing my own JS to zoom/drag, or using another library (which I can't seem to find at the moment)... then there is the question of using jQuery (with jQuery UI for draggable support), or just writing the raw JS myself to keep the amount of code down.
More so answering my own question, as the standard libraries don't seem to work as well as I needed, I ended up creating my own solution:
https://github.com/craigfrancis/zoomify
The intention is that you can copy this code and then customise it to your own particular requirements... so ideally you should be able to read/understand the code, rather than just dropping it into your project and hoping for the best.
I would suggest making a viewport for mobile devices of screen width.
set all the images that are outside the viewport for more than one tile to display:none.
Then when the user pans just update the display property.
That way the browser will mainly compute a large element moving with a few images, and then compute the on and off state of some images.
a lot less graphics intensive than to recalculate a graphics heavy div element.
After looking around for this too, I decided to use OpenSeadragon (New BSD licence), an open-source, web-based viewer for high-resolution zoomable images (desktop and mobile). I needed it for the Image Pyramid sources with Multi-Image support and filtering capabilities (via one of a multitude of plugins)
Another strong contender was OpenLayers (2-Clause BSD). Here's a simple example with a static image, and here's the complete list of examples.
i am building a workout website that tracks exercises. Each exercise has a mapping to a certain part of the body (bench press --> Chest)
I am trying to figure out a way to visualize this and i thought of the idea of putting an image of a person "highlighting" the affected muscles. Sort of like This:
(source: aquaviews.net)
Assuming i have found a good picture without any areas highlighted, is there anyway to dynamically "highlight" areas in a picture (the red section) with javascript (client side) or C# (server side) or do i need a seperate picture for every exercise?
You COULD overlay the the base image with SVG or a <canvas> element.
But then you have cross-browser issues, possible alignment problems, and probably a cheesy look.
I'd have an artistically inclined person do the highlights as a separate graphic for each exercise.
But rather than have these as separate images, keep/combine them in a single file -- as a CSS Sprite. Then you get a professional appearance, great cross-browser support and easy, minimal coding.
You can use css to position your links over said muscle group and use a rollover to show the highlighed part...
Edit:
Sorry I guess I should have elaborated. You can absolutely position the elements with CSS and use an image rollover to swap out that section of the image to the highlighted section of that image. You can either do this by putting each muscle group into it's own div and putting an image of the corresponding muscle group into the background image. Then swap it out on rollow over. or you can use z-index and absolutely position the rollover elements where they need to be and change the z-index when needed.
Interestingly enough, I used to be a personal trainer and I did this same thing but did it in flash. That's my recommendation.
However, if you want to do it with JS and CSS, Brock's suggestion of the sprites is likely the way to go.
What you could do, very simply, would be to have an image map that for certain areas called a js function to swap about the background image with the same version of that image with the highlighted sections. Rather than several small images, you have the same image but with one part highlighted.
One question though, will you be doing compound exercises that would require you to have two sections highlighted? For instance, an incline press would highlight part of the chest and part of the delts. This makes the whole proposition more complicated due to the specificity of your roll overs.
i think you seeking a way to do this without requiring separate images, and if so - the answer is No - you are going to need to create separate images for at least the highlighted areas. Short of perhaps using a CANVAS element which has cross-browser issues, I don't believe there is any way to impose a filter to an arbitrary region of an image element.
And even if you Could apply an alpha filter, you would still need the geometry of every shape, so the effort/work is perhaps the same...
Once you have the various images there are sundry ways to approach the problem after that...
This is a simple implementation as i have done this highlighting with a county map. Use an image map. Then find a highlighting script like (mapper.netzgesta.de) mapper.js. All you need to do is have a properly set up image map (image must be suuounded by a div) and a link to this script. The highlighting starts immediately. Please check the license. Ther are several other that scripts that use javascript css and jquery to achieve this same effect. Just research highlight image map in google. Sorry i cant give you a link to my implementation of this as it is on a secure site for work. Good Luck.
What is the best cross-browser way to get a flat mouse coordinate input data and simple callback for mouse events for my rectangular game area on my web page, even when it has loads of larger and smaller images and text string overlaid haphazard onto it?
And what is the best way to insert or remove a text string or semi-transparent image overlay at an arbitrary location (and Z order, specified relative to existing objects) in a board game rectangle with cross-browser DHTML?
And how can I stop the user selecting part or all of my montage of images (I just want them to interact with it as if it was Flash), and can I stop the right click menus coming up in IE, FF etc?
I want to do this without Flash because I want something that will work both on desktops and on iPhone and potentially other mobile platforms too.
I appreciate there are serious limitations (eg less image scaling capabilities, not vector, no rotation capability) to what I can do if I'm not using Flash but I'm very interested to know what capabilities are available.
Are there perhaps any frameworks available to make it easier than coding from scratch?
Would J/Query be a good match for some of the requirements? What else do I need?
I would recommend Google Web Toolkit. It lets you program in Java, which gives you all the type-safety and nice IDE functionality that Java entails, but compiles to Javascript so that you can just run it in a browser. It also does a ton of optimization and supports tons of features.
jQuery is excellent at doing this. I used jQuery's UI and Ajax functionality to implement the frontend for a game of chess.
I made it a little easier by creating an 8-by-8 table with unique div names for each tile, so Javascript can access them by getting the elements by id. If you can't create something like that, you do have the option of placing elements anywhere on the page (either absolute or relative to a given element). You can also easily change the z-index, including when the use is dragging a piece or when they have dropped it.
As far as disable right click and item selection goes, that's something that I didn't figure out how to do. You might want to take a look at some other Ajax games like Grand Strategy, which are much more polished than my experiment and may have figured out how to do this.
There are two main APIs for working with arbitrary drawing and positioning on the web, Canvas and SVG.
Take a look at Chrome Canvas Experiments and the Raphael Javascript toolkit to see some examples and Javascript abstractions.
The key is element.style.position = 'absolute'. To illustrate just what's possible here's how far I've managed to push javascript (and from scratch at that!):
http://slebetman.110mb.com/tank3.html - RTS in DOM! Click on units/squads then click somewhere else to tell them where to go. You can control both sides.