Illustrated anatomy of Gamera and foes
The anatomical features of Gamera and his foes are detailed in a set of illustrations found in one volume of the Kaijū-Kaijin Daizenshū movie monster book series published by Keibunsha in 1972.
Cutting Large Images into Tiles for UIScrollView
If you ever need to display an obscenely large image on an iOS device using a UIScrollView, there’s a session available in the WWDC 2010 videos that will show you exactly how to do it without eating up all of your available memory. The basic idea is that you have multiple versions of your image stored at different scales, and you chop each of them up into tiles and use a CATiledLayer to display them. That way, you don’t have to maintain the entire obscenely large image in memory all at once and your app’s scroll performance stays snappy.
Of course, you have to get the images chopped up into tiles in order to use this technique.
There’s a great command-line open source tool called ImageMagick that will, among other things, chop an image up into tiles that can be used for this purpose. Unfortunately, I didn’t find ImageMagick very useful for really, really large images (over around 100 megs). The program would just sit and churn and fill up my hard drive with gigs of swap space without generating any tiles. It worked fine for smaller images, but I needed something that would work on big ones.
So, I went looking for an alternative tool without much luck. There are a handful of commercial tools that will do this, but the ones I found were for Windows. I know Photoshop has the ability to do this with slices, but I didn’t want to go down that route for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is that I don’t have a current version of Photoshop and don’t want to give Adobe any money.
After some fruitless Googling, I decided to take advantage of the fact that I’m a programmer, and I rolled my own app to do this. It was nice to be back in the Cocoa APIs, but I must admit that they feel a little krufty compared to the iOS APIs. Anyway, I call the program “Tile Cutter”. It’s not the most original name, I admit, but it was developed as an in-house product and didn’t need a witty title.
Tile Cutter is rather bare bones and was developed in about a half-day, but it seems to work well. I was able to slice up a 1.3 gig image (yes, really) into 400×400 chunks in about 15 minutes on my laptop. I would imagine I’m not the only person who needs to slice up images to use in UIScrollView, so I’ve decided to release Tile Cutter as a free utility (of course, with no warranties or whatnot). I will also be releasing the source code on GitHub once I’ve had a chance to clean up the code a little.
Here’s a screenshot of the main interface:
And the progress bars that display in a sheet when Tile Cutter’s churning away. You’ll actually only see the progress bars on very large images, however, since it operates quite quickly on more reasonably sized images.
Download Tile Cutter 1.0. Feedback, as always, is welcome.
http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com
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A Collection of Simply Amazing iPhone Homescreen Wallpapers
iOS 4 has been around for a while now, and the iPhone 4 makes iOS 4 look perfect to throw a wallpaper on. Still, wallpapers have been spread out far and wide, that a lot of people stick to the default wallpapers. So we’ve gone through the trouble of scrounging for some good ones, especially since we can see all the beautiful homescreens uploaded on homescreen.me. Rounded up are but a few stunning iPhone 4 backgrounds (and background packs) that fit perfectly behind your app icons without distracting your vision. All these wallpapers are retina display optimised, so iPhone 4 owners, go nuts.
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Doing Spy Stuff with Mathematica
I was reading about the IT problems of the recently arrested, alleged Russian spies, and I wondered if they could have managed secret communications better with Mathematica.
One of the claims was that they were using digital steganography tools that kept crashing. I wanted to see how quickly I could implement digital image steganography in Mathematica using a method known as “least significant bit insertion”.
Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage
We present a system that composes a realistic picture from a simple freehand sketch annotated with text labels. The composed picture is generated by seamlessly stitching several photographs in agreement with the sketch and text labels; these are found by searching the Internet. Although online image search generates many inappropriate results, our system is able to automatically select suitable photographs to generate a high quality composition, using a filtering scheme to exclude undesirable images. We also provide a novel image blending algorithm to allow seamless image composition. Each blending result is given a numeric score, allowing us to find an optimal combination of discovered images. Experimental results show the method is very successful; we also evaluate our system using the results from two user studies.