Category Archives: Tools

Sharpening My Tools Part 2

Developing an iOS application is full of small bits of repetitive tasks. When you develop User Interface in code, you must create and handle constraints in code. Depending on what you have to do this could become extremely repetitive and complicated. You can write each constraint yourself, but this gets time consuming and could become messy and confusing.

I decided to create a function that accepts the child view and the parent LayoutGuide, this solved the issue for if you want the child to fill the parent. It however doesn’t solve all issues, example when you don’t want the bottom side to match the parent. Initially I decided to allow booleans to be passed in for each constraint to disable them and still allow them to be manual.

However this still left my code messy and complicated. So I decided to make it more inclusive of the other needs. In the next version I decided to allow up to 3 parameters for each of the side constraints, one named for the side to enable and disable it, a constant to allow a distance from the anchor, and a target for those times when it shouldn’t be pinned to the parent element.

However this wasn’t quite enough I needed two other capabilities. The first, one I needed the ability to enable and disable constraints inside of other classes. I return a class with they NSLayoutConstraint for each constraint allowing other classes to access these. The other major capability is the ability to have width and height anchor constraint, therefore I allow these constants to be passed in as parameters.

This utility class has cleaned up my code quite a bit, I hope others will find it useful. It is available on Github at https://github.com/all12jus/ConstraintUtils.swift.

Sharpening My Tool Part 1

I’ve been working on a full fledged pdf reader application for iOS. During the process of developing for this I have wanted to use Icons from Font Awesome; as buttons in the app.

Apple’s iOS doesn’t like SVG files or the font awesome font files, to work around this I’ve decided to make a tool that will convert Font Awesome SVG files into image files that can then be used directly in the application.

The tool that I wrote is a command line tool that generates three image files that corresponds to the 1x, 2x, and 3x that apps require. However this isn’t quite enough to finish the process, in the normal process you must then create an imageset in xCode then drag in the images. We can automate this process by creating a specific directory structure and json files to tell xCode where the files are.

The source code of this script is available on GitHub. It can be modified for use with any SVG image set, I use it with both Font Awesome Free Version and Font Awesome Pro. The source can be downloaded from https://github.com/all12jus/SVGToXcassets.

Unity Custom Editor

This week I have been working on a Unity custom editor, with the goal of making meshes easier to work with.

It made sense to show this editor for the MeshFilter type, since that’s the script unity uses to store the Mesh object on. Anytime the MeshFilter selected in the editor the inspector shows the custom editor inspector.

The plan for the inspector was to show just the details of the Mesh; such as the number of vertices and the number of triangles. This could then be expanded to show the values of the vertices and triangles, and lastly allow them to be live editable.

The first part of the custom inspector; showing the details; was very simple, code shown below.

for (int idx = 0; idx < mesh.vertices.Length; idx++)
{
    string str = string.Format("{0} {1}", idx, mesh.vertices[idx].ToString());
    EditorGUILayout.LabelField(str);
}
int count = 0;
for (int idx = 0; idx < mesh.triangles.Length / 3; idx++)
{
    string str = string.Format(
        "{0}, {1}, {2}",
        mesh.triangles[count++],
        mesh.triangles[count++],
        mesh.triangles[count++]
    );
    EditorGUILayout.LabelField(str);
}

Showing the values of the vertices and triangles was simple. After viewing the output of this I came to the realization that most meshes have many duplicate vertices; hinting to me that an optimize functionality would come in handy. More on this optimization later. Below is the code used to display the mesh details.

public (Vector3[], int[]) Optimize(Mesh mesh)
{
    List<Vector3> verts = new List<Vector3>();
    Dictionary<int, int> nLocation = new Dictionary<int, int>();
    List<int> tris = new List<int>();
    for (int vIndex = 0; vIndex < mesh.vertices.Length; vIndex++)
    {
        Vector3 vert = mesh.vertices[vIndex];
        int idx = verts.IndexOf(vert);
        if (idx == -1)
        {
            idx = verts.Count;
            verts.Add(vert);
        }
        nLocation[vIndex] = idx;
    }
    for (int tIndex = 0; tIndex < mesh.triangles.Length; tIndex++)
    {
        int nLoc = nLocation[mesh.triangles[tIndex]];
        Debug.Log(nLoc);
        tris.Add(nLocation[mesh.triangles[tIndex]]);
    }
    Mesh m2 = new Mesh();
    m2.triangles = new int[0];
    m2.vertices = verts.ToArray();
    m2.triangles = tris.ToArray();
    return (verts.ToArray(), tris.ToArray());
}

After running this code on the Cube mesh the results contain much less vertices, while retaining the original shape.