Design question - suggestions?
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As part of an application I want to display a map (physical map, like a map of France or a building). What I need:
- Easy update - the original is probably a papercopy.
- Normal operations like zooming, panning, color adjustments.
- "Hot regions" - clicking on a area will highlight it and provide additional data.
- Portable to WinCE/Pocket PC
The ideas I have gone through:
- Two bitmaps, one for the map and one for the regions.
- Bitmap for the map, regions stored as some kind of polygons.
- Metafiles. Don't know much about them, especially not how they are handled by WinCE GDI.
- Using the WebBrowser control: map as jpeg of gif and regions using <MAP> or ISMAP. Hard to control, I think.
- Other format for map and regions.
Any suggestions here would be greatly appreciated. At the moment I think I will go with option 2. - unless someone points out a serious flaw or suggests a better solution. Thanks in advance /moliate
Two o'clock and walking through familiar London - Or what was familiar London before the cursor deleted certain certainties - I watch a suit and tie man giving suck to the Psion Organizer lodged in his breast pocket its serial interface like a cool mouth hunting his chest for sustenance, familiar feeling, and I'm watching my breath steam in the air.
Neil Gaiman - Cold Colours
-
As part of an application I want to display a map (physical map, like a map of France or a building). What I need:
- Easy update - the original is probably a papercopy.
- Normal operations like zooming, panning, color adjustments.
- "Hot regions" - clicking on a area will highlight it and provide additional data.
- Portable to WinCE/Pocket PC
The ideas I have gone through:
- Two bitmaps, one for the map and one for the regions.
- Bitmap for the map, regions stored as some kind of polygons.
- Metafiles. Don't know much about them, especially not how they are handled by WinCE GDI.
- Using the WebBrowser control: map as jpeg of gif and regions using <MAP> or ISMAP. Hard to control, I think.
- Other format for map and regions.
Any suggestions here would be greatly appreciated. At the moment I think I will go with option 2. - unless someone points out a serious flaw or suggests a better solution. Thanks in advance /moliate
Two o'clock and walking through familiar London - Or what was familiar London before the cursor deleted certain certainties - I watch a suit and tie man giving suck to the Psion Organizer lodged in his breast pocket its serial interface like a cool mouth hunting his chest for sustenance, familiar feeling, and I'm watching my breath steam in the air.
Neil Gaiman - Cold Colours
I'd use one full sized image that is blown up to the desired detail you need. Scale it down to the size you need retaining the detail. Then use regions to define your hotspots, so as the user clicks or hovers over these regions scale up the part of the image the region contains. Display it to the user and show the information you want. I know with GDI+ this is a breeze to do, I use it all the time but I'm not positive of the top of my head that GDI+ is even part of the WinCE api. If not, then it should be fairly easly done without it still using the method I mentioned above which I think is the better way to do. Hopefully I 'v helped you or given you another approach that helps you or I thoroughly confused you - I havn't had my morning coffee yet and my daughter dragged to her swim competition early in the morning.:~
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I'd use one full sized image that is blown up to the desired detail you need. Scale it down to the size you need retaining the detail. Then use regions to define your hotspots, so as the user clicks or hovers over these regions scale up the part of the image the region contains. Display it to the user and show the information you want. I know with GDI+ this is a breeze to do, I use it all the time but I'm not positive of the top of my head that GDI+ is even part of the WinCE api. If not, then it should be fairly easly done without it still using the method I mentioned above which I think is the better way to do. Hopefully I 'v helped you or given you another approach that helps you or I thoroughly confused you - I havn't had my morning coffee yet and my daughter dragged to her swim competition early in the morning.:~
-
As part of an application I want to display a map (physical map, like a map of France or a building). What I need:
- Easy update - the original is probably a papercopy.
- Normal operations like zooming, panning, color adjustments.
- "Hot regions" - clicking on a area will highlight it and provide additional data.
- Portable to WinCE/Pocket PC
The ideas I have gone through:
- Two bitmaps, one for the map and one for the regions.
- Bitmap for the map, regions stored as some kind of polygons.
- Metafiles. Don't know much about them, especially not how they are handled by WinCE GDI.
- Using the WebBrowser control: map as jpeg of gif and regions using <MAP> or ISMAP. Hard to control, I think.
- Other format for map and regions.
Any suggestions here would be greatly appreciated. At the moment I think I will go with option 2. - unless someone points out a serious flaw or suggests a better solution. Thanks in advance /moliate
Two o'clock and walking through familiar London - Or what was familiar London before the cursor deleted certain certainties - I watch a suit and tie man giving suck to the Psion Organizer lodged in his breast pocket its serial interface like a cool mouth hunting his chest for sustenance, familiar feeling, and I'm watching my breath steam in the air.
Neil Gaiman - Cold Colours
It may be a little bit of work to get a map in vector format, but unless you have a very large amount of disk space to work with I would steer away from Bitmaps. Depending on how big the bitmap that you are using needs to be when you are zoomed in all of the way, I would look more to meta files. Meta files are vector based so it does not matter how far you zoom in, the size of the file will not increase significantly.
Build a man a fire, and he will be warm for a day
Light a man on fire, and he will be warm for the rest of his life!