Frequently Asked Questions

How do I change a population's name or comment?

In the Library View, select a population from the Library list on the left, which will show the population's details in the Population Information panel on the right. To the right of the population's name at the top is a plain button with the name Edit. Tap this button, and a popup will be displayed allowing you to change the population's name and comment.

How do I set a turtle's name or comment?

The only means of setting a turtle's name or comment is in the Turtle Details view. Open the turtle in the Turtle Details view, then tap on the Info view selector in the toolbar at the bottom of the view. This will display the information view in Turtle Details. At the top of this view, you will see the Name and Comment fields that allow you to enter a name and comment for the turtle. Your changes are automatically saved when you close the Turtle Details view.

How do I get rid of the cover page when I create PDF documents?

In the Configuration View, under the Image Sizes section, you will see the segment controller to configure the PDF Document Page Size. To the right of that is a switch called Title Page. Move the switch to the OFF position, and the cover page will no longer be added to your PDF documents.

How do I import a population or turtle that another user emailed to me?

When you open the email in the email app on your iPad, the email app should show the attached population or turtle definition attachment as an icon. Typically, the attachment icon will have Evolved Art's icon, but may not. You should be able to long press (tap and hold) on the attachment icon to cause the email app to show you a popup with a list of apps that can open the attachment. Typically only Evolved Art will be listed, but other apps may be listed as well. Select Evolved Art from the list in the popup and the population or turtle should open in Evolved Art.

Why do my immortal turtles get reset when I close the Population View?

The immortal state of a turtle is kept in memory. If you wish for a turtle's immortal state to be remembered after you close the Population View, you need to checkpoint the turtle or the population. The Population View provides an action to Checkpoint Immortals that allows you to checkpoint all of your immortal turtles with one action.

When I try to import a population or turtle from another app, Evolved Art shows an alert saying "Only Available In Library View".

This is a limitation of the way that Evolved Art is coded. Due to the way that the import view is displayed, it can only be displayed from the Library View. Open Evolved Art and maneuver to the Library View and attempt the import again and it should work fine.

When I try to replace a turtle from a population, the Turtle Picker does not show the current turtles in the population I am evolving.

The Turtle Picker accesses turtles from the database, not from the currently evolved generation displayed in the Population View. If you wish to replace a turtle with one that is currently displayed in the Population View, you can either copy it to a gene pool or checkpoint that turtle, and then it will be dislayed by the Turtle Picker.

Why is selecting a population or opening the Population View so slow?

Evolved Art is very demanding when it comes to computation and display. Each turtle must iterate through 10,000 steps when it draws itself, including the computation of angle and distance. Then the drawing must be scaled into the image that is displayed on your screen. Frankly, it is very impressive that the iPad performs as well as it does. In general, the larger a population becomes, the longer these operations will take, so keeping your populations and gene pools smaller in size will improve the response times for displaying and opening them. Drawing times also depend on the turtle's program itself - some turtles simply draw slower than others. This is why some small populations will actually open slower than a larger populations. Unfortunately, you do not have any control over this.

Note that the turtle images displayed in the preview at the bottom of the Library View, as well as the turtle images displayed by the Turtle Picker, are cached into the database as they are created. So displaying populations in these views will be slow on their first viewing, but should be much faster on subsequent viewings. However, when you evolve the population and checkpoint, the cached images must be regenerated when redisplayed in those views, which will cause their display to be slow once again until the images are cached.

Why is Evolved Art using so much memory on my iPad.

Evolved Art populations use significant memory in the database, since every turtle's program must be stored as a text string along with names and comments. However, even large populations typically require less than 10MB of storage. So even 100 populations should consume less than 1GB of your iPad's memory. However, if you are also exporting populations and turtles to iTunes, those files are also stored on your iPad. If you have many populations or turtles exported to iTunes, you might wish to consider saving them to disk and removing them from the iTunes file sharing area. Also consider using DropBox or Google Drive as alternatives to the iTunes file sharing feature.