Bitmap Object

Bitmap object is a window to display images. It support's bmp, jpg, pcx, png, tif formats. Let try to insert a bitmap to our MMB project.

1.    Press Bitmap icon from the toolbar or select Create>Object>Bitmap from menu.

2.    Place the cursor to the page

3.    Select image file.

4. If necessary resize the bitmap. If you want to keep aspect ratio press CTRL while resizing. To restore to the original size select "Restore Original" from the Effects menu.

Adjusting Properties

Double click on the bitmap object. The properties pop-up will be opened.

a. Size related properties

There are two main options:

• Keeping the image at original size [Keep Actual Image Size] or

This option preserve the actual Image dimensions. Even you resize the Bitmap object, the image size stay unchanged. It will allow you to make smaller/larger Bitmap object with the scrollable content. To scroll image inside the smaller/larger Bitmap object you can use Scroll Bars (enable "Show Scroll Bars" option), dragging the mouse inside the Bitmap object (enable "Allow Mouse to Scroll Image" option) and finally the ScrollImageView function. With "Keep Actual Image Size" enabled you can also zoom the image inside the Bitmap object. This will allow you to zoom the image inside the Bitmap object

• resizing the image to the containers size [Strech Image To Fit Window]

If you keep the image at original size you could also have some options

• whether image is centered within the container or not [Center image]
• whether the scrollbars are visible or not and [Show scroll bars]
• whether cursor could scroll the image within the container or not [Allow mouse to scroll image]
• Zoom in or out at the original image [Use image zoom]

If you select resizing the image to the containers size you could have an option that whether keeping aspect ratio or not. To keep aspect ratio simply click the check box.

b. Container related properties

You could fit the containers size to the original image sizes. Look at the above illustirations. The image is at the same size at the both side. But the container is resized at the right.

You could also select a background color for container. Check above illustarion.

c. Location related properties

Normaly, MMB embeds the media sources (images, sounds, etc.) This will give us an opportunity to make a standalone application. So it will be distributed & installed easly. But sometimes there are many media sources, many images and many sounds. If you embed all the sources in to the MMB, then the compiled EXE will be very large. This is an unexpected situtation because a large file limits distributing, sharing, e-mailing, using etc. What can we do?

The answer is not to embedding image files. This means image files could be located outside the EXE and we could load it when it needed. Check the below images:





Image storage: External Storage:
Now you can specify the image object to be loaded internally (as previously on project start) or Externally (on each page by demand loaded from external file)

This is good if you:
- Need to often change images in your projects (for example multilingual etc..)
- Need to develop application with many images and don't want to store them in the autorun itself, the autorun will be smaller and it will need far less memory - images on each page will be loaded by demand and then when exiting from the page they will be flushed from the memory.

All is done in seamlessway - you don't have to really worry about the external images until you Check & Distribute your project.
It is important that you acknowledge this:

• You work with the image object as before.
• In designer all the images will be stored internally in the mbd file. You will only set option if you want the image during playback load internally or load from external file. That means the project file doesn't depend on any external image files - all are inside the project as before.
• Test Run or Debug still uses the internal images
• All necessary things are done during Check & Distribute. External images will be copied from the internal project into the distribution location in the \Images folder.
• That means you can simply use any project you already have and set some images to be external. You don't need the original files - the images will be pulled from the project itself and saved.
• You can use *.jpg or *.bmp as your desired image. You can also use any other extension. (For example *.oscar) in such case the image will be saved with this extension as jpeg.
  
• The Check & Distribute has few more options for the External images
  
  The Copy Image Files to Destination will do what was described above - copy the images from internal storage to the \Images folder. If you already have images there and you don't want to create the images every time you Check&Distribute - uncheck this option
  Replace if Exist - during copying replace the files if they are with the same name in the \Images directory.
  Test Mode - this will make again the external images internal, no images will be created and all will be stored in the autorun itself as it was done before.
• Loading Time: Internal images are all loaded on the project start, that means they take more memory and the start of the application is delayed, however the jumping within pages is fast. External images loads only on particular page. The memory is freed as soon as you exit from the page. That means less memory requirements for many pages on player machine and faster startup. However loading each page may be delayed depending on the number of images needed to load.
• The result autorun containing external images is obviously much smaller than if the images are internal - but you need to carry the \Images directory.
• If you carefully read all the above you would know that during designing nothing is changed. Not even test run from within designer - during internal Run or Debug the images are still used from internal storage. Only if you use Run External Player in location (Menu Tools - Testing from Designer) then the images will be indeed copied and the player will simulate the real thing. And of course during Check & Distribution...
• Even if you can now create presentation which doesn't need much memory to run since images can be loaded dynamically, you still need memory during designing - again because in designer the images are not loaded dynamically.
• It is indeed very easy to use, even if our explanation could be scary.

d. Transprency related properties

The transparency related properties is as same as the other objects transparency features.

To make an image (or part of it) transparent or semitransparent, you have to use more sophisticated tools û Alpha Transparency Map.
It is usually Black & White pictures where Black means Full transparent and White is opaque or it has the opacity  specified in the Opacity box ( 0 û fully transparent, 1 - opaque).
You can switch on/off the alpha transparency by checking Enable Alpha Transparency check box.
If you donÆt define the transparency map, but you enable the Alpha Transparency, the image will blend with the background with opacity defined in the Opacity edit box.
You can apply a few useful effects with the transparency map û invert, make it grayscale and blur the map.
The typical usage of the transparency map is the Glow or Drop Shadow. The image is just rectangular with some color. The shape and the effect is done by the Transparency map.

If the Transparency map is smaller than the image, it will be tilled, so you can use it for some nice effects.

Fill button û near the Color combo box.
You can fill whole images with a single color as defined in the color box. A great way to change the color of the Glow or Drop shadow like objects.

NOTE: If you resize the Image object placed in the project page or you change the Zoom level in the Image Properties dialog, then the copy (invisible) of the original bitmap will be created. The main disadvantage of this fact is that it can significantly increase the size of the project file and the compiled exe. Of course, you can remove this redundant copy of the image (File>>>Reduce Size menu), but this will avoid restoring the image to it's original size (by RestoreImage scripting command) or the zoom level to the original value.

Limitations: Rotate/Resize image functions will not work for bitmap object with "Keep Actual Image Size" option enabled. Only Zoom image is alowed for that object.

For Images related scripting commands look here. An image example projects can be found here