I'd say QC is great for stuff like this, because it's very fast to set up and runs well. If you want to change things it's generally a 10 minute job instead of digging through lots of obscure openGL code.
Apart from that, pretty much what Toby said - pass a big structure into QC and iterate through it. If it was me, I'd have 3 levels in the structure: groups (your 90%, 80% matches etc.); genomes in the group, and then attributes for individual genomes (label text, colour, perhaps an image if it's appropriate, and perhaps position on screen (you can work that out in QC, but sometimes it's easier outside)). You'd need a couple of nested iterators to work through the levels.
The possible downside of using QC is that iterator performance isn't so hot. It's not normally an issue, but if you need to iterate through a lot (as in hundreds or more) it will get slow. (This only really matters if you're animating though I guess.. for a static view it won't matter much if it's running at 5fps).
I find the following design pattern invaluable:
- Have your application output a structure to the QC patch detailing the state that QC should draw
- Iterate through the items of that structure in QC.
- Inside those iterations you can enable / disable macro patches that render the data in certain styles depending on the state information.
If QC doesn't do it for you, have a look at open frameworks.
Toby
On 6 Jul 2009, at 21:01, Rick Schmidt wrote:
Hi Everybody,
I am working on a visualization app for metagenomic data and I am exploring different frameworks to visualize the data. The app itself is in its earliest stages but will be a cocoa app written in a mix of objective c and c++. I am exploring using quartz composer to design the visualizer that will be used in the app. Right now I am trying to find out if the data from a class in my app can return a value that will be used to create a certain number of objects in a view. For example once the genomic results are determined the function will return 20 possible genomes that are 90% equivalent to the sample, another 10 that are 80% equivalent etc. I would like an ellipse to appear that would represent each hit and have a text label and maybe a link. I can't find anyway in quartz to create a different amount of ellipses every time. It sounds possible right? Any thoughts if I should use quartz, or core animation, or even openGL? Thanks in advance.
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