Greetings!
I've made a program that lets you draw shapes. All shapes are contained in a vector. What I need help with is; when several shapes are stacked on top of each other, I want to cycle through them, top to bottom, if the user clicks repeatedly. I'm thinking something along the lines of:
Store every object under the mouse location where the user clicked in some sort of container
Keep track of which object was first in queue, and should be last (?) after the next click
Repeat step two until the user clicks somewhere that results in a different queue
This is more of a general programming question, rather than just C++, but any help would be greatly appreciated, and if that answer also provides a pretty solution in C++, all the better!
A popular approach to this is to assign each item a z-order. Items with higher z-order hide items with lower z-order if they overlap. In your case, you would just have to find all items below the cursor and rotate their z-orders when the user clicks.
Related
Not sure if this is possible, but I have two CListBox controls which I need to vertically sync, but the controls may have different amount of data in them as well as each row may be of different heights. I want it such that no matter what is in each control, when I get to the top or bottom of one, I get to the same top or bottom of the other.
To do this right, I need to vertically scroll the items such that they don't necessarily align on an item boundary. Like the following example:
Left side shows the top of row one, the middle shows the top of row two. The right image shows a partial of row 1, which is what I need.
Is this possible, or am I going to have to do a major refactor requiring that I swap the controls out with something else? (definitely not preferable due to potential risk)
Oh, and before anyone asks why it was done like this, the answer is legacy.
I'm still looking into this, but if the control can't be forced to to this, might there be a workaround where I could have some sort of virtual CListBox which I could possibly BitBlt from, or would that entail more work then swapping out controls? Is there a better way?
Perhaps I could encapsulate the control in another window which would be able to have a larger view and clip that view to what I want to see?
I want to make a menu that will take an undetermined quantity of labels and spread them out horizontally so that 3 are visible on screen at once. When pressing left/right it will go to the next one, the one that is selected is always in the center of the screen horizontally with the other two on the left/right of the screen.
The problem is that I also want a smooth transition not just a replacement. They need to wrap endlessly.
Not sure where to begin, not finding examples on google.
The concept you are talking about was popularized by Apple under the name "Cover Flow".
There is a widget like that available under a permissive license here: https://code.google.com/p/pictureflow/
I take it you want something a bit simpler (only show three labels, less fancy 3D effect), but I assume this is a good starting point.
Another one is the PathView QML element:
http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5/qml-qtquick-pathview.html#details
It is even closer to what you like to do, feature-wise. It is also available in Qt4 and there is a tutorial here: http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/declarative-modelviews-pathview.html
I'm making my own UI from scratch using OpenGL that is why I'm asking this and please don't make any discouragement as this is just a hobby project.
Currently, I'm stuck implementing how this scrollbars really work. In my current implementation, the content scrolls at the wrong step value as well as the thumb, meaning, I set the value manually like 1px step for each of them.
The structure of my scrollbar implementation is describe as follows:
I draw scrollbars i.e the main rectangle where the 3 button lies.
Those 3 buttons are, thumb, buttonBack and buttonNext.
All of them do the basic logic of scrollbars i.e when I click each one of them, they moved. But the whole part(scrollbar) don't know how to scroll contents
So what I did is: I make another object and I call it scrollarea
It has two scrollbars, vertical and horizontal scrollbar.
I made a function called scrollToX and scrollToY which
does what I named to them.
But the step values I set to them are
manually set up.
I try to google some scrollbar, scrollarea, scrollview or whatever you call to that scrollable rectangle thing, but all I see are implementation and I cannot find any guides how to build your own. I have no choice but to look at their implementation. I try my best to comprehend what they did but their implementation of how their whole UI structure is very different to mine, and I cannot find anything useful there.
So I ask again here if anybody can explain me well how to make a properly functional scrollbar.
Most specific things I'm really concerned of are:
How do I determine the thumb step value?
How do I determine the content step value?
All of these depend on your content -
Is it just an image ? If so, you only need to change the offset depending on the size of the image.
Is it a list of values like in Windows explorer ? Then you need to create a data structure first that contains all of it, and shows the content that fits within the window as it scrolls.
OpenGL does not fit into this discussion.
This is related to one of my other questions.
If I am tiling a large image by creating a separate QGraphicsItem (with the raster data as its pixmap), how do I keep track of the QGraphicsItem's position within the scene? Obviously for raster data, it is important to keep all the tiles "touching" to make a continuous image and they also have to be in the right place so the image doesnt look jumbled.
Does each tile have to have positioning methods that move it in relation to it's neighbors on the top/left/bottom/right? This seems kind of clunky. Is there a better way to make them all move together?
In other words, if I pan the scene with scroll bars, or pick up the image and drag/move it around in the scene, I want all the tiles to also move and stay in the right position relative to each other.
What is the best approach for controlling the layout, which tiles need to be rendered (i.e. only the visible ones), and populating the data only once it is needed? Also, once a tile has been rendered, is the data from it ever dropped, and repopulated from the image file, say if it stays out of view for a while, then comes back later if someone pans to that section?
There are (more than) 2 ways of doing this:
Use QGraphicsItemGroup which
handles grouping of your tile items
for you. It moves, selects, updates
it's group members as if they are
one. I've never used it but from the
doc, it seems to work with typical
applications.
Paint the tiles yourself in the
paint() of one custom item. This
gives you total control on how to
place and draw the tiles while the
item truly acts as one item since it
is, well, one item. This is what I
do.
I have a ListView-like control that displays a list of items of various heights. The contents of the list, and the heights of the items can change – a background thread is populating the list and calculating the layout of each item, possibly even while the user is scrolling the content.
Which brings me to my question: How do I display a useful vertical scrollbar for this view? I’ve seen cases (notably web browsers) where the slider “jumps away” from the mouse cursor while the user is dragging it, the result of the underlying content growing in height. I don’t want that.
So far
Instead of the slider representing the viewport height relative to the content height, maybe it could represent a point in a timeline instead? (The items are sorted by timestamp). This would at least prevent the scrollbar from changing as item layouts are calculated.
Get rid of the scrollbar altogether and use a forward/backward rocker switch like the one used in Picasa (the further the slider is pulled upwards or downwards, the faster the view is scrolled, until the user releases the slider). If I take this route, are there any controls you can recommend?
I am using Qt, but this applies to UI design in general.
IMO the fundamental problem with a classic scrollbar is that due to background population, the valid range is changing - and thus, the meaning of a scrollbar position changes.
If you can predict the full range of items, you can still provide a scrollbar and replace yet-unknown items with "loading...".
Otherwise, a rocker (is that an official name?) would be the next best thing to use.
However, since you have a dedicated scale (timeline), it might be better to have separate buttons that jump a dedicated time (e.g. one minute, one hour, one day, ..). For a fancier look, you could create a rocker with "hot" areas that jump for a specific time, whereas the areas inbetween are interpolated (linear or or logarithmic, depending on the scale to cover).
i.e. line this (drawing just the "backward" half):
--------------------------
|##|XXXXXXX|##|XXXXXXX|##|
--------------------------
-1h -1m -1s