Tag: javascript

Javascript: Using Canvas to cut an area of an image

By Ashish Datta | 2 Comments on Javascript: Using Canvas to cut an area of an image

Over the few weeks I’ve been working on a Canvas based side project (more on that soon) that involved cutting a mask out of a source image and placing it on a Canvas. In Photoshop parlance, this would be similar to creating a clipping mask and then using it to extract a path from the image into a new layer. So visually, we’re looking to achieve something similar to:

At face value, it looks like doing this with Canvas is pretty straightforward using the getImageData function. Unfortunately, if you look at the parameters that function accepts it’ll only support slicing out rectangular areas which isn’t what we’re looking to do. Luckily, if you look a bit further in the docs it turns out Canvas supports setting globalCompositeOperation which allows you to control how image data is drawn onto the canvas. The idea is to draw the mask on a canvas, turn on the “source-in” setting, and then draw on the image that you want to generate the slice off. The big thing to note here is that putImageData isn’t effected by the globalCompositeOperation setting so you have to use drawImage to draw the mask and image data.

So concretely how do you do this? Well check it out:

The code is running over at http://symf.setfive.com/canvas_puzzle/grass.html if you want to see it in action.

Anyway, happy canvasing!

JavaScript: Using ChipmunkJS to build ping pong

By Ashish Datta | Leave a Comment on JavaScript: Using ChipmunkJS to build ping pong

A couple of weeks ago, we picked up a RaspberryPi for the office and started brainstorming ideas for cool hacks for it. One of the ideas that was floated was using the Pi as a server for some sort of multiplayer JavaScript game. I’ve actually never written a game before so I figured it would be an interesting project. We ended up trying to use node-qt for graphics along with ws to receive input via websockets but the refresh rate of Qt was just to low. A story for another time.

Anyway, so back to ping pong. One of the things we wanted to avoid was writing our own code to manage the game objects, we really wanted to use a game engine for this. The only caveat we had was that the engine had to be UI agnostic since we were planning to output graphics on Qt instead of a HTML5 Canvas. After looking around, most of the JavaScript game engines have strong dependencies on Canvas so we started looking at other options. The two strongest options were Box2JS and ChipmunkJS. We decided to go with ChipmunkJS in part because it was handwritten while Box2JS was automatically converted from ActionScript so the resulting code is harder to follow.

Getting ChipmunkJS setup is relatively painless, just include the file and you’re off to the races. Since we were looking to eventually use Qt, we tried our best to cleanly separate the Chipmunk code from what we’d be using to draw the objects on the screen. Because of that, it’s pretty easy to follow what’s going on with the Chipmunk code. If you take a look at cpPong.js it basically initializes the physics space and then starts the game.

With the physics space setup, the next step is setting up the drawing. Following the Chipmunk demo’s lead, I added specific “draw” methods to the Prototypes of each shape. Doing this, allows you to just iterate over each shape in the scene and call “draw” to have it appear on Canvas or Qt. Check out pong.html to see how we added the draw methods to the shapes. And that’s about it! The only other interesting part is using “requestAnimationFrame” to avoid using setTimeout to update the scene.

There’s a live demo running here and of course the code on GitHub.

Any questions or comments welcome!

Phonegap: Fixing black bars on iOS7/iPhone5

By Ashish Datta | 2 Comments on Phonegap: Fixing black bars on iOS7/iPhone5

Last week, we were using Phonegap Build to build an iOS IPA for a project an ran into an odd issue. When we launched the app on an iPhone 5 running iOS7 black bars appeared at the top and bottom of the screen. On top of that, when launching the app we were observing the same issue with the splash screen.

In typical Phonegap fashion, Googling for people suffering from similar issues brought back dozens of results across several versions each with a different root cause and solution. One of the first promising leads we noticed was this comment in the top of the default Phonegap template:

Unfortunately, that comment seems either be invalid or the issue has since been resolved since removing those meta attributes had no effect.

As it turns out, the issue is that the “config.xml” file created by the default Phonegap “Hello world” project is missing an entry for the iPhone5’s screen size. Oddly enough, there’s actually a splash screen image of the correct height in the demo project but its not referenced in the config file. To resolve this issue, you just need to add this line to your config.xml:

Just make sure that you have a file named “res/screen/ios/screen-iphone-portrait-568h-2x.png” where the rest of your splash screens are and you should be good to go.

Phonegap: Recording audio with Phonegap

By Ashish Datta | 7 Comments on Phonegap: Recording audio with Phonegap

I was working on a Phonegap app recently and one of the goals was to allow the user to record some feedback as an audio file which would later be shared. If you hit Google, there’s plenty of StackOverflow threads which claim to have working sample code. Almost all of the SO code is using the Phonegap Media API with the “startRecording”/”stopRecording” functions. Despite it looking simple, I could never get the Media based code working on iOS. For whatever reason, I kept hitting iOS permission errors trying to create the recording file. On Android, the code works but I kept ending up with an “AMR” file instead of the expected 3gp recording.

So what’s the alternative? Turns out there’s another Phonegap API called Capture which has a captureAudio method which lets you record audio. As opposed to Media, captureAudio uses the device’s native audio recording UI to let you to record audio. Because of this, captureAudio won’t work for all use cases but the implementation is straightforward and consistent across Android and iOS.

Anyway, here’s the code to record some audio and upload it to a server:

Then, on the server you can just grab the file from say the $_FILES[“file”] variable.

Javascript: Using PhantomJS-node with Deferreds

By Ashish Datta | 4 Comments on Javascript: Using PhantomJS-node with Deferreds

Earlier this week, a buddy of mine reached out asking for a good solution to programmatically taking screenshots of a few thousand URLs. For whatever reason, this question seems to come up ever so often so I pointed him towards PhantomJS and figured he’d be on his way. Wrong. Not one to pass up free beer and the opportunity to learn something I agreed to write up the script to generate screenshots from a list of URLs.

Looking at PhantomJS, it seems relatively straightforward but it’s clear you’d really need something “else” to orchestrate this entire process. After some poking around, NodeJS, everyone’s favorite hipster runtime, seemed to be the obvious choice. There’s a handful of node modules that basically “bridge” node with phantom and allow a node script to asynchronously manipulate a PhantomJS instance. Based solely on the funny description I decided to run with phantomjs-node and was off to the races.

Getting everything setup was straightforward enough but then as I started looking at the phantomjs-node examples I started realizing this was a one way trip to callback soup. I’ve been doing some PhoneGap work recently and using jQuery’s Deferreds has significantly help keep the project from becoming a mess of callbacks. On the NodeJS side, it looks like there’s two functionally equivalent implementations but I decided to run with Q since the “wrapper” function names are shorter.

The Code

Anyway, the main problem we’re trying to address is that with multiple nested callbacks code becomes particularly difficult to follow. It’s hard to read, hard to trace control flow, and obviously hard to debug. Take for example, the phantomjs-node example:

It’s already THREE callbacks deep and all it’s done is initialize PhantomJS and load a page. Imagine layering on a few more asynchronous operations, doing all of this in a loop, and then some post-processing. Enter Deferreds. How To Node has an eloquent explanation of what deferreds are and how Node impliments them but in a nutshell they’re useful for making asynchronous code easier to follow.

The main issue I ran into using Q was that “Q.ninvoke” and “Q.npost” wrapper functions kept causing exceptions while using them with phantomjs-node. What I ended up doing instead was creating my own Deferreds in separate functions and then resolving them inside a normal callback.

My PhantomJS-node code ended up looking like:

It’s without a doubt easier to follow and would also make it much easier to do more complicated PhantomJS related tasks.

So how did screenshotting a few thousand domains go? Well there’s a story about that as well…