Tilt shift photography is an effect traditionally achieved using small to medium format cameras and special lenses. The resulting photograph gives the impression that a life sized subject or location looks like a miniature model. I am going to show you how to quickly (depending on your processor speed) achieve this effect by using Photoshop.

First, you will need a photo taken from a good vantage point. Choose something taken from a high altitude or from afar. I took this one whilst walking along the Thames in London:

Now open your image in Photoshop and click the Quick Mask button located at the bottom of the tool bar (see image on the right).

Select the gradient tool and apply it onto the quick mask layer so that the areas you wish to be out of focus are red. See the screen shot below:

Now click the quick mask button once again, and go to Filter > Blur > Lens Blur. You will see dialog below:

You can then simply play with the Radius and other sliders to simulate your desired ‘depth of field’. Check out my final tilt shifted photo here. Have fun

Interfacing with JavaScript from Flash is pretty easy actually! It’s done with the help of a nifty little class called “ExternalInterface”. The process is simple; you import the class and then use the “call” method to call a JavaScript function on the parent page and parse any parameter you may want.

Here is a simple bit of actionscript demonstrating how to do this:

// Import the ExternalInterface class
import flash.external.*;

// Call the JavaScript function 'myFunction' and parse the value 'myParameter'
myMovie.onRelease = function () {
	ExternalInterface.call('myFunction', 'myParamenter');
}

Get your sneak peak here!

Widgets are small applications that can be embedded on a page. Whether it be a blog, a MySpace profile or a web site, it is a great viral way of distributing your brand across multiple third party sites.

We have partnered up with dotdashcreate, the popular blogging network, to develop a exciting new viral widget and we’ve decided to give you a sneaky peak inside the Blemble lab

The widget will be distributed to all users on the network and has many cool features!

We looked closely at dotdashcreates’ competition and realized that much of the widget applications distributed by other similar networks were simply not pushing the boundaries in terms of functionality, aesthetics and usability.

We want to introduce a new dimension in our widget and raise the bar for other widgets. The first thing we thought of is to introduce multiple states in the form of tabular information. There will be four tabs; Updates, Info, Stats and Blogs. Users will be able to choose the tabs that they want on their widget, which is definitely something not done before by any competitors!

Updates

The updates tab will contain the users’ recent status updates and also display whether or not it has been submitted to Twitter, a popular micro-blogging service.

Info

This state will simply display the users’ profile picture, country of origin and short ‘blurb’ about themselves. It will also include a link back to their dotdashcreate profile at the bottom. This is a simple screen but very useful for users who simply want to have a short ‘about me’ section without the hassle of re-writing the content.

Stats

We thought it would be a good idea for the user to display how many blog views they have had, so we incuded this on the ’stats’ tab! This is something that (so far) no-one else is doing and we hope to mould it in to something of a unique selling point! We may also include a grid of user avatars on this tab, displaying the most recent visitors!

Blogs

This tab is pretty self explanatory and displays a nice little list of all the users’ blogs. This helps the user to promote their other ventures!

Full Gigya integration

Gigya provide some great widget distribution technologies. We will use these in the final distribution.

This will enable us to maximize the spread of the widget and make it truly viral. Users will be able to add the widget to their MySpace profiles, Facebook profiles, blogs and web sites all in a few clicks via a nice interface - no tricky stuff!

Other great customizable features

The widget will be fully resizable and will do so whilst keeping everything in proportion. This is a great advantage for the user as it can be moulded to their page perfectly, inevitably boosting the installation rate for dotdashcreate. The widget will also automatically inherit the background color from whatever page that it is placed on!