Tutorials

Gmail: Mark All Unread Mail as Read

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 | General, Tutorials, Web Design | 2 Comments

For the longest time I had 648 unread message in my gmail account. When I created the account, I didn’t use it as much as I do now, so it got polluted with unread messages that I never really planned on going back to read. I finally discovered a way to get my unread count back to 0, which delivers the impression that my inbox is clean.

Step 1:

  • Log into your account
Please don’t make me include this…

Step 1a:

  • Click: Select: All

gmail_mark_inbox_as_read

Step 2:

  • Click: Select all ### conversations in Inbox

gmail_mark_all_unread_mail_as_read

Step 3:

  • Click: More Actions > Mark as readgmail_mark_all_as_read

Tilt Shift Video and Photography

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 | Technology, Tutorials | No Comments

Tilt Shift photography is a technique in which an image or video appears tiny due to a change in the depth of field.  This effect can be achieved via a special “shifting” lens or via post-production editing.  The shifting lens has a larger then normal field of view.  By angling the lens you can distort the focus on a specific area which causes everything around the area in focus to appear blurry causing a special appearance of depth of field.

Example of Tilt Shift Photography

By linking a bunch of Tilt Shift images together, you can create a Tilt Shift video like the one above created by Keith Loutit.

There are tons of Tilt Shift photoshop tutorials explaining how to achieve this effect post-production.  Here are a few good tutorials:

I think I’ll try my hand at this when I find myself with some free time.  Probably sometime next year…

Update:  All State has created a new commercial using this technique

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MapQuest Flash/Flex API – Customize POI

Monday, May 11th, 2009 | Technology, Tutorials | No Comments

Changing the default POI in the MapQuest Flash/Flex API is pretty easy.  The MapQuest POI API has built in methods to replace the default POI icon image, as well as a few other properties like the size, location and label of that POI.  We’ll our company wanted to really customize the POI to show a dynamic label that changed with our results.  I have successfully achieved this result with MapQuest’s JavaScript API on our jsp pages, but recently I’ve been working on a new Flex project that uses MapQuest’s services to show our clubs.  The MapQuest documentation doesn’t provide a lot of insight on how to customize the POI label and the forums doesn’t explicitly tell you how to achieve this.  So after a little tinkering I was able to get the desired results.  It all comes down to overloading the POI class.

Inside our Flex project I created a new Action Script class called “POIExtended.as” which extends the Poi class:

public class POIExtended extends Poi
{
public function POIExtended(latLng:IPointLL, mapIcon:MapIcon=null)
{
super(latLng, mapIcon);
}

Inside this class I overrode the “setLabel()” method:

override public function setLabel(label:String, format:TextFormat = null): void {

var textField:TextField;

var mapIcon:MapIcon = this.getIcon();

textField = new TextField();
textField.text = label;
textField.width=30;
textField.height=30;
textField.y = 4;
textField.x = 3;
textField.mouseEnabled = false;

if (format) {
textField.setTextFormat(format);
}

mapIcon.addChild(textField);

}

This code moves the label assigned to the POI to the center of the icon.  I ran into a problem where the mouse over area on the POI was too big, causing a huge area that targeted the POI.  By limiting the height and width to a size just smaller then the POI icon image and disabling the mouse, it fixed this problem.

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