J.D. Hodges

Apple iPhone Tech Talk Debriefing – Part 2 (Vector graphics and animation) http://riactant.wordpress.com/2007/08/27/apple-iphone-tech-talk-debriefing-part-2-vector-graphics-and-animation/First, we all know that iPhone doesn’t support the Adobe Flash plug-in or SVG. So how does one incorporate scalable vector graphics and animation into a web app intended for an iPhone Safari audience? The answer is Canvas.

iPhone SDK, First Impressions » Mac Developer Tips http://macdevelopertips.com/iphone/iphone-sdk-first-impressions.htmlSecond, and even more compelling from a user interaction perspective, is the Media layer. Quartz is a 2-D drawing engine. Through the C-based API one can work with vector graphics, lines and shapes, etc. Core Animation is an Objective-C API providing animation and is also part-and-parcel to providing dynamic feedback from the UI. Many of the standard animations that make the iPhone so compelling (screens sliding, flipping over, etc) are included in View classes in the UIKit. OpenGL ES is a mobile version of the OpenGL standard and is the engine behind 3-D graphics. When high-frame rates are in order (think games), OpenGL is the answer.

Safari on iPhone Graphics, Media, and Visual Effects Coding How-To’s http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/codinghowtos/Mobile/GraphicsMediaAndVisualEffects/index.htmlYou can use the HTML5 tag to set up a 2D bitmap context and then draw to that context using JavaScript. Graphics that can be drawn to the context of the tag include lines, arcs, bezier curves, quadratic curves, images, shadows, and gradients. Many of the graphics that you see in Dashboard widgets on Mac OS X – such as the graph in the Stocks widget, and the hands of the World Clock widget – are drawn using the tag.

Import/use vector graphic files? – iPhone Dev SDK Forum http://www.iphonedevsdk.com/forum/iphone-sdk-development/18083-import-use-vector-graphic-files.htmlI am a very new would-be developer with a design background. I am thinking of developing a graphics-type iphone application that would use vector-based files that I would have created in another application (Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop/Acrobat, for example). My limited understanding suggests that for the 2-D images that I am contemplating, a Quartz -type application would be best (or maybe OpenGL?). Does anyone know if there is a way to load a saved vector graphics file (.EPS, .SVG, .PDF?) or something better?) into an iphone application, and whether a third-party application like Illustrator or Acrobat can create these files? I guess I am trying to save the effort of hand-coding these graphics. Maybe PDFs are the way to go?

I reckon that it may be simpler to use a .PNG file(s) instead, but my feeling is that these file types would require too much storage space and be slow to load for the full-screen graphics that I contemplate. There may be a threshold where raster files may be simpler and quicker, but I am too new at this to understand where that might fall.