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• Rendering a Long Document on iPad

  - by benjismith

  I'm implementing a document viewer with highlighting/annotation capabilities for a custom document format on iPad. The documents are kind of long (100 to 200 pages, if printed on paper) and I've had a hard time finding the right approach. Here are the requirments: 1) Basic rich-text styling: control of left/right margins. Control of font name, size, foreground/background color, and line spacing. Bold, italics, underline, etc. 2) Selection and highlighting of arbitrary text regions (not limited to paragraph boundaries, like in Safari/UIWebView). 3) Customization of the Cut/Copy/Paste popup (what is that thing called anyhow? UIActionBar?) This is one of the essential requirements of the app. My first implementation was based on UIWebView. I just rendered the document as HTML with CSS for text styling. But I couldn't get the kind of text selection behavior I wanted (across paragraph boundaries) and the UIActionBar can't be customized from within UIWebView. So I started working on a javascript approach, faking the device text-selection behavior using JQuery to trap touch events and dynamically modifying the DOM to change the background color of selected regions of text. I built a fake UIActionBar control as a hidden DIV, positioning it and unhiding it whenever there was an active selection region. Not too shabby. The main problem is that it's SLOOOOOOOW. Scrolling through the document is nice and quick, but dynamically changing the DOM is not very snappy. Plus, I couldn't figure out how to recreate the magnifier loupe, so my fake text-selection GUI doesn't look quite the same as the native implementation. Also, I haven't yet implemented the communication bridge between the javascript layer and the objective-c layer (where the rest of the app lives), but it was shaping up to be a huge hassle. So I've been looking at CoreText, but there are precious few examples on the web. I spent a little time with this simple little demo: http://github.com/jonasschnelli/I7CoreTextExample/ It shows how to use CoreText to draw an NSAttributedText string into a UIView. But it has its own problems: It doesn't implement text-selection behavior, and it doesn't present a UIActionBar, so I don't have any idea how to make that happen. And, more importantly, it tries to draw the entire document all at once, with significant performance degradations for long documents. My documents can have thousands of paragraphs, and less than 1% of the document is ever on screen at a time. On the plus side, these documents already contain precise formatting information. I know the exact page-position of every line of text, so I don't need a layout engine. Does anyone know how to implement this sort of view using CoreText? I understand that a full-fledged implementation is overkill for a question like this, but I'm looking for a good CoreText example with a few basic requirements: 1) Precise layout & formatting control (using the formatting metrics and text styles I've already calculated). 2) Arbitrary selection of text. 3) Customization of the UIActionBar. 4) Efficient recycling of resources for off-screen objects. I'd be happy to implement my own recycling when text elements scroll off-screen, but wouldn't that require re-implementing UIScrollView? I'm brand-new to iPhone development, and still getting used to Objective-C, but I've been working in other languages (Java, C#, flex/actionscript, etc) for more than ten years, so I feel confident in my ability to get the work done, if only I had a better feel for the iPhone SDK and the common coding patterns for stuff like this. Is it just me, or does the SDK documentation really suck? Anyhow, thanks for your help!

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• Agile: User Stories for Machine Learning Project?

  - by benjismith

  I've just finished up with a prototype implementation of a supervised learning algorithm, automatically assigning categorical tags to all the items in our company database (roughly 5 million items). The results look good, and I've been given the go-ahead to plan the production implementation project. I've done this kind of work before, so I know how the functional components of the software. I need a collection of web crawlers to fetch data. I need to extract features from the crawled documents. Those documents need to be segregated into a "training set" and a "classification set", and feature-vectors need to be extracted from each document. Those feature vectors are self-organized into clusters, and the clusters are passed through a series of rebalancing operations. Etc etc etc etc. So I put together a plan, with about 30 unique development/deployment tasks, each with time estimates. The first stage of development -- ignoring some advanced features that we'd like to have in the long-term, but aren't high enough priority to make it into the development schedule yet -- is slated for about two months worth of work. (Keep in mind that I already have a working prototype, so the final implementation is significantly simpler than if the project was starting from scratch.) My manager said the plan looked good to him, but he asked if I could reorganize the tasks into user stories, for a few reasons: (1) our project management software is totally organized around user stories; (2) all of our scheduling is based on fitting entire user stories into sprints, rather than individually scheduling tasks; (3) other teams -- like the web developers -- have made great use of agile methodologies, and they've benefited from modelling all the software features as user stories. So I created a user story at the top level of the project: As a user of the system, I want to search for items by category, so that I can easily find the most relevant items within a huge, complex database. Or maybe a better top-level story for this feature would be: As a content editor, I want to automatically create categorical designations for the items in our database, so that customers can easily find high-value data within our huge, complex database. But that's not the real problem. The tricky part, for me, is figuring out how to create subordinate user stories for the rest of the machine learning architecture. Case in point... I know that the algorithm requires two major architectural subdivisions: (A) training, and (B) classification. And I know that the training portion of the architecture requires construction of a cluster-space. All the Agile Development literature I've read seems to indicate that a user story should be the "smallest possible implementation that provides any business value". And that makes a lot of sense when designing a piece of end-user software. Start small, and then incrementally add value when users demand additional functionality. But a cluster-space, in and of itself, provides zero business value. Nor does a crawler, or a feature-extractor. There's no business value (not for the end-user, or for any of the roles internal to the company) in a partial system. A trained cluster-space is only possible with the crawler and feature extractor, and only relevant if we also develop an accompanying classifier. I suppose it would be possible to create user stories where the subordinate components of the system act as the users in the stories: As a supervised-learning cluster-space construction routine, I want to consume data from a feature extractor, so that I can exist. But that seems really weird. What benefit does it provide me as the developer (or our users, or any other stakeholders, for that matter) to model my user stories like that? Although the main story can be easily divided along architectural-component boundaries (crawler, trainer, classifier, etc), I can't think of any useful decomposition from a user's perspective. What do you guys think? How do you plan Agile user stories for sophisticated, indivisible, non-user-facing components?

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• How to Implement Rich Document Editor for iPhone

  - by benjismith

  I'm just getting started on a new iPhone/iPad development project, and I need to display a document with rich styled text (potentially with embedded images). The user will touch the document, dragging to highlight individual words or multiline text spans. When the text is highlighted, a context menu will appear, letting them change the color of highlighting or add margin notes (or other various bits of structured metadata). If you're familiar with adding comments to a Word document (or annotating a PDF), then this is the same sort of thing. But in my case, the typical user will spend many many hours within the app, adding thousands (in some cases, tens of thousands) of small annotations to the central document. All of those bits of metadata will be stored locally awaiting synchronization with a remote web service. I've read other pieces of advice, where developers suggest creating a UIWebView control and passing it an HTML string. But that seems kind of clunky, especially with all the context-sensitivity that I want to include. Anyhow, I'm brand new to iPhone development and Objective-C, though I have ten years of software development experience, using a variety of languages on many different platforms, so I'm not worried about getting my hands dirty writing new functionality from scratch. But if anyone has experience building a similar kind of component, I'm interested in hearing strategies for enabling that kind of rich document markup and annotation.

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