Scaling of background picture

Hi,

After only an hour or so of experimentation the first feature that came to mind was that it would be much easier to create sensible graphics if the system allowed you to specify the size of the background image and it was scaled to that size by the browser, rather than using the native resolution of the image.

Stew.

This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 29/03/2007 09:20:04

Hi Stew,

Yes, that's a good idea. I believe the Javascript library (Dojo) already supports image resizing, and so technically should be easy enough to achieve. The only snag off the top of my head is that it should not allow re-sizing the image such that point views would end up outside of the background, but even that should be easy enough to detect.

We'll consider this for the next release, unless someone else beats us to it

. Thanks for the input.

Actually, thinking about this more, there are plenty of tools that are better than browsers at doing image resizing (such as Paint .NET). Is there a reason why it would be better to do this in the application at runtime than otherwise?

The main reason it would be good at runtime is so graphics can easily scale to screens with different resolutions. I guess this requires more effort than just scaling of the background images, but this is the 'Wishlist' after all.

Indeed it is a wishlist, and your point is valid. It's true though: the background and all of the point view images would need to be scaled, and the effects on the (un-scalable) text renderings would need to be taken into account. (Sure, text can be scaled, but only in a very quantized way compared with the granularity of image scaling.)

Overall it is a tricky thing to make work properly, but still possible.