Animations and Web browsers

[Ken Kearney]

Hi,

I have 2 questions

1. Is it possible to move a web browser implemented using an active X control to the back of the screen and superimpose a picture i.e. a circle over a portion of the browser to highlight a specific section? If not could the browser be implemented in a different way to achieve such functionality?

2. Is it possible to display animations e.g. gif files or other types of animations on the screen? What I am finding is that I cannot copy these types of animations onto the front panel and I want to 'jazz up' the screen in order to improve the presentability of the software.

Any ideas?

Ken

[PJS]

Not sure on your first question, but as to your second, I regularly use animated gifs on my front panels.  I simply drag and drop from explorer to LabVIEW.

[PJS]

I have played around with a couple of ideas about superimposing, nothing has worked.  What is the end goal of the browser?  Not much help with a work-around unless we know what you are trying to achieve.

[Ken Kearney]

What I am doing is to have a map downloaded from an external site and then I want to set up a boundary. The way I would like to do this is to draw a red circle on the map and this is what I am trying to do.

Ken

[PJS]

Does the map need to be interactive?  Can it be saved as an image and manipulated?

[falkpl]

One way to do this is to download the image into a image control and draw directly to the copy of the image, this would involve converting the image to a format of the picture control, finding the center pixel of the circle and draw a circle of desired radius over the image with a transparent fill.  This wouldn't use the browser directly for display but you can still download the image through http.

Paul

[Ken Kearney]

That actually sounds like exactly what I'm looking for. The only bit I'm not sure of is the 'downloading the image' bit. How do I do that if I'm not using an active X control?

[Ken Kearney]

One thing that I am able to do is to do this manually i.e. if I stop the program and download the image and put it into a control etc. but this has to happen automatically i.e. I need to have a routine to do all this

[Nomis]

Here's one way of doing it if the image is in jpg, png or bmp format - the attached Markup Internet Image.vi retrieves an image from the internet, saves it to file, then uses Labview picture functions to read it back in, display it in a picture indicator & draw a circle.

Note: It's functional but not pretty & very little error checking is done. I've only tested it with jpgs.

Enjoy!
Simon

[falkpl]

Can you post it in LV 7.0?  This is probably what I have been thinking of, using TCP and http GET to get the source http, parsing to get the name of the image files, then retrieving the image, saving it, modifying it and posting it to an image control.

Paul