When you are using desktop application, to make operation efficient you could use keyboard shortcuts. You must have seen when professionals are using applications they hardly use mouse. You can trigger actions way faster with keyboard than mouse when you get use to it.
Not only desktop applications, web applications also let you to use keyboard shortcuts, especially rich internet applications. You most favorite webmail service, Gmail is also providing you that service. However in settings you won’t be able to find any way to customize keyboard shortcuts. You like it or not you have to stick with default keyboard shortcuts.
Previously we used several Gmail lab features to get features which are not there in Gmail by default. If you need to customize keyboard shortcuts, again Gmail labs comes to save your day.
Getting Started With Custom Keyboard Shortcuts
Go to Gmail -> Settings -> Labs -> Search and enable Custom Keyboard Shortcuts
It will refresh whole Gmail. Give it some time
After refreshing go to Settings and take a look at tabs
Now you can see a new tab named Keyboard shortcuts
There you can see a long list of operators and their keyboard shortcuts
You can change the keys in text boxes and assign alternative key as well
After setting all the keyboard shortcuts the way you want, save settings and go to inbox
Now you can use new customized keyboard shortcuts
This will solve one of the major problems in Gmail when you are using it in professional environment. It’s speedy almost same as installed desktop application. But it could not customize its keyboard shortcuts like other application. Now that problem is solved.
Always remember you are using a Lab feature in Gmail. It may give you some glitches in some operations. If you suffer any side effects, go to Settings -> Lab and disable it. If your Gmail got crashed due to a Lab feature, Click Here to start Gmail without any lab feature.
When you are using webmail system one problem you will face there is you can do only one task at a time. If you go to another page, all the processes in the previous page get terminated. That’s a major limitation in any web application. The most popular webmail service, Gmail has taken steps to avoid this as far as possible. But when you are sending email you have to be on the same page till “Sending..” notification goes away.
Most of the time, it will take less than one second. But things get difficult when you are sending heavy content and network is congested. In such a cases, you have to wait a long time till sending process is completed.
In order to solve this problem, there is a nice Gmail lab feature. It’s letting you send email in background. While email is sending you can go back to your inbox or do any other work in Gmail interface.
How to Start Using Background Email Sending In Gmail?
Go to Settings -> Lab -> Search for Background Send and enable it. Save changes before you exit the page.
Now background sending feature is enabled. Let’s test it.
Compose an email, type recipient address and other details, and then hit Send.
Now you will see a different notification than before. It says “Sending in the background”.
You will notice another thing. Normally Gmail keep you in the compose window till the mail sending completed. Now it’s taking you to inbox instantly while it sending email in background.
I tested this feature with several types of emails in different environments and browsers. No Glitches so far. One sad note that this plug-in is not letting to navigate away from the compose page while attachment uploading is going on. However, it will streamline operations by sending email in background. In a general situation it will give you on a couple of seconds. But when you are working with a poor internet it will save you significant amount of time.
Most of NOG readers out there must be using the world’s most popular online email service, Gmail. In previous articles I was talking about add new features to Gmail using browser plug-ins such as scheduling, tracking and reminding. For that we use Boomerang and RightInbox browser plug-ins.
Quick Catch-up
Browser plug-in is not the only way or the best way to add new features to Gmail. If you go to another computer you won’t be able to use featured added by browser plug-ins. There is a way to add new features to Gmail using Gmail Labs. This is a common term from you if you are a Google power user. Using Labs you can add experimental new features in to Gmail in browser or platform independent way.
Today I’m going to introduce you a very useful Gmail Lab features you can use to Undo Send in Gmail. Using this you can reverse sending email even after it reaching recipient inbox. You can use this feature with full confident and I personally tested most of the possible operations with this.
How to Use Undo Send in Gmail?
Go to Gmail Settings -> Labs -> Undo Send and enable it. Save changes before you exit.
This will refresh the whole Gmail page. Give it few seconds.
Now compose an email, type recipient email, subject and other details. For testing purpose you can give your own email address.
Finally click Send.
In sending notification you will find a new Cancel button. By clicking on it you can cancel sending before it happen.
After sending you will be able to see the default notification. There also you will be able to see an Undo button and it will be there for few seconds.
By pressing it you can Undo sending even after it reach recipient inbox. It will automatically delete it from his inbox.
In Settings -> General -> Undo Send you can Set the cancelation period.
If you can cancel sending before it happen it will not even reach the recipient inbox. Once thing to be noted, if you undo send after it happen, still recipient will be able to find the email in his trash folder. Either way you have few seconds to change your mind.
This is a great Lab feature to save your day by undoing accidental email sending. It worked perfectly undo while sending as well as after it. Always remember that this is a lab feature. You may not be able to guaranty its reliability. So try to minimize it’s usage as far as possible. If you suffer any side effects, simply disable it from Gmail labs.
DropBox is all time favorite cloud storage service for most of the people out there. Recently Google Drive came out and Microsoft SkyDrive got re launched. But still nothing could take DropBox users away from it by giving more features and comfort. It’s working great on web interface, with desktop client as well as Android app.
One thing many people love about DropBox is. It’s image sharing options. If you want to share a public photo album, all you have to do is put all the images in to a folder and simply drag and drop it in to Photos folder in DropBox. By right clicking on the folder you can get the public gallery link and share it anywhere.
It’s automatically creating a nice image gallery for public viewing, but unfortunately it’s no customizable. If you want customizable image gallery with DropBox hosted images, there is a great 3rd part application, views.fm. There you can link your DropBox image folder and create amazingly customizable image galleries and share them online. This works for folder listing and other multimedia types as well.
Quick Catch-up
Go to Views.fm home page
You can sign in with DropBox login or you can create account with email
It will take you to Views.fm dashboard
There you can see your activity feed and in the right hand side you can find my views, public, private and saved views
Still you don’t have any views or related activities, so it will be empty
Go to settings and there you can check your access details and set your avatar
You may like to change your login URL
Go to browse from main navigation bar to see DropBox folder listing
When you take your mouse over a folder, you will see a link to create new view. Click on that.
Fill the details, enable or disable comments and create it publicly or privately.
Views.fm will show you the view URL and you can share it anywhere.
You can see created views in my views section.
Go to Settings -> Design at the side bar.
There you can change text colors, background colors and set header logo.
Created design will be applied for all your views.
Your public views will be displayed in your profile and could be access by anyone. They will be listed in search engines as well. Your private views could be views only through URL. All the views will be themed as you set it before in settings.
View.fm, let you to share your DropBox files with Style. All the operations are extremely simply and take only few clicks and key strokes. Going beyond day to day use, this is a great way to share your professional work as well. You can create a great looking, customized and branded online portfolio. To update it all you have to do is put your new work in related DropBox folder.
Try Views.fm to present your Dropbox files in style. You may find more tips and trick in Views.fm. Never forget to share those here with NOG community.
Nokia is one of the world most famous and the oldest telecommunication company. They produced networking equipment mobile phones, smart phones and mobile computers. They become popular in to public mainly because of their mobile phones. Back in 1990s they were the company which was holding the largest part of the GSM mobile phone market. Before that they were going great with the 1st and 2nd generation mobile phones as well. Their smooth combination of hardware and software let them be the mobile phone market giant for decades.
However with the trend of mobile smart phones and table PCs, lots of competitors came in to market including Apple, Samsung and HP. They came up with competitive products especially in smart phones. The mobile phone giant was not doing so well in this trend though it was taking the lead in many of previous mobile devices trends. Therefore its popularity was falling. Recently they have taken some steps to be back on the track with other competitors and they attracted the public interest back to Nokia.
Company History
Early time
The mother country of the Nokia cooperation is Finland and then it expanded to hundreds of countries with manufacturing network. It was originally founded back in 1865 and by that time they were producing paper under the Russian empire. With the improvement of telecommunication Nokia produces its very first electronic device which was for nuclear plants back in 1962. In 1970s Nokia was more focused on developing telecommunication devices including telephone switches and many other highly sophisticated telecommunication equipments. Mainly they were involved in improving communication security by applying encrypted protocols to communication mediums.
Mobile Telecommunication Industry
In the early stage of mobile telephones which was 0G Nokia was developing mobile communication devices for military purposes. With the 1st generation mobile communication technology Nokia released Mobira Senator which could be considered as Nokia’s very first commercial mobile phone. In that time mobile phone was not really mobile, it was a considerable huge device. So Nokia was in a mission to make it smaller and make it actually a mobile phone. And they were taking the lead in 2nd generation and 3rd generation mobile trends with their amazing technology.
Mobile Phone was not the only manufacturing in Nokia. Other than mobile phones there were producing various different mobile devices including notebook PCs, communicators which is an original concept of Nokia itself.
Company Growth
Most of the time Nokia was doing great and they were growing in financial side continuously. In history Nokia could acquire many other companies and expand their telecommunication empire. In 1990 Nokia Company was more focused on telecommunication industry and taking their focus away from non-telecommunication businesses. Down this path Nokia became the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer in late 1990s. In early 2000s company was facing tight market competition and most of the time it could not take the lead as it used to do. Therefore financial status of the company was started to getting weaker and stock price was also falling.
Technology
Operating system
One of the most attractive features in Nokia mobile phone was its operation system. The OS that used in early mobile phone was commonly known as Nokia OS. By that time mobile Phones were having black and white carbon display (monochrome). Therefore the aesthetic application was limited. Yet, Nokia OS was doing a great job and stand out among entire other OS available in that time with its extra smooth user-friendly experience. They have extended same OS to the early versions of color display mobile phones and they worked just fine with them as well.
With the improvement of mobile devices Nokia started using the Symbian OS by Symbian LTD. Back in 2008 it was bought be Nokia itself. Symbian OS was giving many options to its user to select the way it should appear in the phone display. the most popular one was windows desktop like icon based menu. It allowed the user to organize the icon in folders and feature the desired icon in the standby screen as well. Symbian OS powered Nokia mobile phones for long and it contributed to its popularity in a significant way.
Down the time the requirement of Mobile smart phones was getting complex and many competitors were addressing those with their new mobile operating systems. Therefore Nokia decided to move to new linux based operation system which is MeeGo. The later version of Nokia N series was powered by MeeGo OS. MeeGo is an open source OS and it gave the ultimate flexibility to latest Nokia mobile devices. However according to my personal point of view it could not give the competitive edge for Nokia to stand out in Smart phone market.
Recently Nokia has released mobile smart phone with Windows Mobile OS which is one the latest and the most versatile mobile OS. This is one of the significant steps taken by Nokia to stand out in Smart phone market. The latest Nokia Lumia 800 is powered with windows mobile OS 7 and it was launched in 2011 October. Nokia has invested huge amount of money and effort in this device and having high hope about its success.
Online Service
Nokia is providing various different online services to its customers. The most significant one is Nokia Ovi dashboard which is an online portal to many other services. The main services that offered in here were N-Gage mobile gaming service and Ovi Maps for Nokia devices with GPS. The Ovi map is an amazing product that converts your mobile start phone in to high end navigation system. It getting updated frequently and cover all major continents with turn to turn voice guidance. Additionally Nokia online service provides and online backup system for customers where they can save their important information and could be transfer to any other Nokia mobile phone instantly. There is an email service provided by Nokia as well.
Multimedia Capturing
In the early stage of mobile phone which can capture still images Nokia was the leader and they provided state of art capturing devices embedded with the mobile phones. Sometimes ago I used a Nokia 7650 which came with 0.3 megapixel camera, yet produced good quality still images with its software enhancements. Today it has developed to 12 megapixel embedded cameras with sophisticated Carl Zeiss optics which allow the users to capture professional quality still images and video with their mobile phone.
Device Milestone
Mobira Senator: Nokia’s first mobile phone released back in 1982, 1G brick type with monochrome display.
Nokia 100: Very First original series phone released back in 1987, 1G candy bar type with monochrome display.
Nokia 1011: Nokia’s very first GSM phone released back in 1992, Candy bar type phone with monochrome display.
Nokia 1600: Color display phone with 96px display, GSM phone with candy bar design.
Nokia 6600: came with a 0.3 mega pixel camera.
Nokia 7650: Slide type phone came with 0.3 mega pixel camera.
Nokia 9000 Communicator: Released in 1996 with Clamshell design.
Nokia E72: Came with 5 mega pixel camera back in 2009
Nokia N70: First release in N series in 2005
Nokia N85: Two way slide phone customized for music came with 5 mega pixel camera and in built GPS
Nokia N8: Touch screen phone came with 12 mega pixel camera which can capture 720p HD video
Nokia Lumia 800: Latest release in 2011 powered by Windows Mobile OS 7.
Market Competition
Apple iPhone
Apple was one of the most evident threats to the Nokia Empire and it was able to take away large part of Nokia users already with their product Apple iPhone which is one of the most popular consumer electronic devices in this millennium. They have their state of art touch screen powered hardware system and one of the most aesthetic looking operation systems which is apple iOS. At this moment iPhone could be identified as the world’s most popular smart phone and they have build a new empire in mobile phone market within a short period of time like Nokia used to have for decades.
HTC
HTC is one of the oldest mobile phone manufacturers and gave birth to, many smart phones long time ago. Recently they have released attractive series of mobile smart phones with latest OS Android and Windows Mobile OS 7 which Nokia also using for their latest devices. According to the latest statistics HTC phones are reaching its maximum popularity as represented by sales and almost hitting iPhone and surpassing it if you consider entire series of HTC phones becoming a good competitor to Nokia Empire and newly built Apple Smartphone Empire too.
Samsung
A south Koran company which produces many consumer electronic products came in to mobile smart phone competition, more than a competition is a war. They have recently come up with series of touch display smart phones with attractive OS like Android and its customized version. Additionally they are equipped with latest stills and video capturing devices which capable of recording even 720p HD video. Of course they are giving good competition to entire mobile smart phone manufactures including Nokia.
Future Plans
Windows Mobile OS 7
The immediate next plan of Nokia is it seems manufacture amazing devices in collaboration with Microsoft with their Windows Mobile OS 7. Nokia Lumia 800 is the latest attraction in this stream. Additionally they have investing huge effort in design aesthetic smart phone design like they always used to do with their entire series of phone. Even if you go back in to 1990s Nokia phones were always smart looking and it was always prestigious to use one. They are going to take the same advantage back again with innovative designs. They have recently officially released a video documentary about the design of Nokia Lumia 800.
Hardware Improvements
The next feature they will probably be focused on is the hardware especially Touch sensitive screen, accelerometer, altimeter and GPS device. The main attraction in iPhone was its highly accurate touch screen and according to my experience no one could come up with that accurate touch screen so far which made the iPhone Empire untouched. Currently HTC and Samsung have come up with excellent touch-screens so Nokia also have done and nice job with Lumia 800, yet they need to come up with more WOW stuff to stand out in the market.
Nokia already having amazing GPS based navigation system which is Ovi Maps and never seen anyone else provides something similar. They can improve the hardware capabilities in GPS units in side forthcoming Smart phones and at the same time improve Ovi maps with more up to date details and features including 3D views and real Street views.
Concept Smart Phones
Nokia has published many smart phone concepts in their official web site including The Morph Concept which is smart phone comes as a hand band and ear piece. It will be flexible and can shape in to a normal phone as well.
Additionally Nokia has conceptualized mobile device to monitor the environment conditions, personal health conditions and weather conditions. This could be innovative concepts which may reshape the human civilization and its continuation.
Managing storage space in Smartphone or tablet is not as easy as in a computer. There are temporary files, app data, and downloaded installation etc. consuming huge amount of storage. If it was a computer you could have done a disk clean up or use another tool to get it done. But in a Smartphone it’s not the case.
There are several applications on Google play which you can use to clean unnecessary files in your Android Smartphone. I tried few of them but none worked well for me. So finally I decided to clean up storage in my Android phone myself ‘like a BOSS’! For this all you need is a good file browser. My best recommendation is Storage Analyser. It’s giving you file browser, show size of each folder, sorting and file manipulation. That’s all we need and let’s get started!
Getting Started With Storage Analyser
Download and install Storage Analszer on your Smartphone or Tablet from Google play
As usual you should take a look at preference.
You can change the UI in display settings. For most of the people default will work.
In expert options you can use SU rights and set it to show system partitions.
Now go back to main screen. Down there you have 3 buttons to switch storage type, filter and sort files. For a start set it to SD card and Sort by size.
How to Clear Up Unwanted Files with Storage Analyser?
How to identify the most space consuming folder is the first step and Storage analyser will do it for you. We already set folder listing to sort by size. So you will get biggest folder at the top once you open the app.
Images, Videos, eBooks etc
Browse the space consuming folders and check whether there are any images, videos, books etc you don’t want to keep. If so remove them. You can do it right here in Storage Analyser. Tap and hold any file or folder and it will show you a menu where you can copy, cut and delete them. For multiple selections, use checkboxes in front of folders and files.
Temporary files, Cache etc
Removing images, videos etc might not solve your problem. The major space consuming items are temporary files, cache etc. Most of the applications are providing you options to clear them. But for that you have to open several applications and go through many options. You can clear them easily with Storage Analyser. Before that you should know how to identify them.
Generally you can find those in SD card with name cache or temp along with application name may be. If those are consuming huge amount of space, you can clear them up.
Then you can clear cache of YouTube, DropBox, and Maps etc. For that you have to go in to Android -> Data in your SD card. If they are consuming significant space, you can clear them up as well.
Hardware: Samsung Galaxy Nexus
OS: Android 4.1.1
Now your phone doesn’t have unwanted images, videos and eBooks etc. And you have removed space consuming cache and temporary files as well. Now you can enjoy well managed storage space in your phone. Never forget to share new things you get to know specially with different devices and different versions of Android.
Hi folks! Today I am writing about yet another interesting CSS tutorial. When you are designing a website, you might have come across the requirement of adding tabs to your design. If not, you might need to do so in the future.
So when you need to add tabs how many of you consider designing it on your own? Most of you will take the easy way and download various libraries or ready-made tabs. But if that be the case, the power of customization is very limited unless you are an expert in manipulating scripts and styles.
But today I will be explaining how to create a tabular design on your own and customize it according to your requirements. Surprisingly this does require expert knowledge. If you can simply find your way through some CSS then you are good to go!
The First Step
As the first step, we need to create the tab menu, just like the one we see in ‘www.pizzahut.com’:
In order to do so we will need to create an unordered list with the tab menu elements. This is how it is done.
Tab 01
Tab 02
Tab 03
Tab 04
You will see the output like this.
Now we have to arrange these list items in to one line to make it look like a tabular menu. As explained in my previous article on creating a CSS Dropdown Menu, we will be making use of CSS style attributes ‘float’ and ‘position’ for this purpose.
Here’s how the styling goes:
body
{
background-color:#000000;
}
#tab-menu ul li
{
list-style: none;
position: relative;
float: left;
width:150px;
height: 50px;
text-align: center;
background-color: #cc99cc;
line-height: 50px;
border: solid;
border-width: 1px 1px 0 1px;
border-color:#ffffff;
}
#tab-menu li a
{
text-decoration:none;
color: #ffffff;
}
And this is how the formatted tabular menu will appear:
You will notice that in the menu, the menu elements do not have the bottom border.
border-width: 1px 1px 0 1px;
This is one of the styling tricks used to make the tabs look more realistic. You will understand why when you read along.
Creating the Content Area
Now we have to design the content areas of the tabs. This is done using elements.
I will add a DIV to create the common content area as ‘tab-content’ and inside that I am going to specify four DIV’s for the four tabs. Here’s how it’s done.
Content in Tab 01 goes here.
Content in Tab 02 goes here.
Content in Tab 03 goes here.
Content in Tab 04 goes here.
Here you will see that content of all DIV’s are displayed together. But what actually should happen is, only the content of the particular selected tab should be displayed.
For that we have to keep one tab selected by default as a start. In this case I’m assuming that my ‘Tab 02’ is selected by default and I’m displaying the content of Tab 02 while hiding the rest.
The way that it uses energy is the main success factor in Hybrid Electric Vehicles. It goes in as few steps which mentioned below.
Start: it take the first move with electric motor. Only when vehicle started moving it ignites the fossil fuel engine. This saves lots of fossil fuel in many ways. Primarily, it saves fuel required to initial acceleration. Then it start ignition while engines components are moving and that will save lots of startup energy required, again saves fuel.
Accelerate: When the vehicle is moving at a normal speed, it starts giving more fuel power. This will result it smooth initial acceleration which will add extra color to vehicle other than fuel consumption. When the vehicle required more power and need more acceleration transmission will gradually give more weight to fuel engine automatically.
High Speeds: When the vehicle is moving in a good speed, may be in a motorway, the transmission lean more toward fuel engine. In such a situation, very less amount of fuel needs to be burned to keep the speed. Further, most of the hybrid vehicles are designed very carefully to gain maximum advantage from aerodynamics.
Braking: Generally braking will transform kinetic energy to thermal energy and potential energy in front suspension. In other words it takes the entire power off the vehicles to stop it. But, hybrid vehicles are having a generator. Whenever vehicle breaks, it comes to picture and transforms kinetic energy back to electrical energy, then store in batteries. That’s how most of the hybrid vehicles do great millage in city stop-n-go type driving conditions.
Stopping: When you ready to stop the vehicles and once you reach a certain lower speed, it completely shut down fuel engine. Again it stops while it’s moving and it saves significant amount of fuel which might come out from exhaust, might be half burnt. Other than fuel saving, it will give a smooth stop and parking again adds color to vehicle and delivers excellent comfortable driving experience.
Advantages
Drive Green
The main attraction in hybrid vehicles is their lesser environmental impact. They emit carbon approximately 40% lower than a traditional internal combustion engine which is really great. And we are dealing with millions of motor cars, so even a smaller change will be reflected big in the long run. However, the contribution from the Hybrid Electric vehicles is huge and significant. When there is increased number of them on the roads, we will feel the difference very clearly. Additionally, they generate much lesser noise than traditional internal combustion engine and that also could be considered as major contribution to ‘Live green’ concept. In near future our roads will be much lesser nosier than they are now, thanks to Hybrid electric vehicles.
Lesser Fuel Consumption
Then comes, the next major factor which is fuel consumption level. No matter how environmentalist try to make people see, what we are doing to environment and how it will back fire on us, There are very few people who understand that and try to contribute to make a change. But, we have limited fossil fuel supply. At this rate it won’t even last for, no more than 100 years. That will hit every one, affect every one unlike the environmental impact, it’s clearly accountable, in numbers. Hybrid vehicles will be our savior in there as well. As long as they consume fuel almost half of general internal combustion engine, we will have fossil fuel for significant number of more years which is cool. After all it will be good for your pocket as well!
Smooth Driving Experience
Hybrid vehicles give more, but take less. It’s not just about carbon emission, live green etc. It will give you better comfortable driving experience as well. Unlike in traditional internal combustion engines, these are not totally based on pistons. Most of the situations, they will be powered by motor as well as Fuel. So obviously, engine vibration will be lesser. If you drive only with motor, when you just start the car and going to park, there will be almost no noise or vibrations. Other than that most of the latest hybrid cars are good with aerodynamics, so it will add extra comfort to high speed drives.
Market Statistics
Toyota Prius with a Power Split hybrid engine is the top selling hybrid Electric car in US and Japan. It reached global 2 million sales by 2010. The second most selling hybrid car is Honda Civic powered with parallel hybrid engine. They hit 300,000 units’ sales in 2010. Ford also in the picture and they have done around 150, 000 units by 2010. As you can see, Toyota is leading the game and way ahead from all the others.
When it comes to countries Japan is the country that uses most number of Hybrid vehicles by 2010. Almost half of the worlds’ hybrid cars are in Japan. Then comes USA and they have approximately 40% of world Hybrid cars.
Recently most of the countries reduce or totally remove import taxes for Hybrid vehicles having the objective of motivate people to buy them to protect environment as well as save fossil fuel. This huge demand made a direct impact to car auction in Japan mainly. The car prices went up rapidly by nearly 50% in last 6 months. This trend is more likely to continue for some time. At the same time manufactures are continuously introducing new models with latest technological advancements.
Future Development
Future of hybrid cars is very important, to entire human civilization. It saves the main source of power which was using for centuries to empower most of our technological advancements. Most probably, human technology will be focused on sustainable energy in future. As a sign, latest Hybrid cars are having solar panel to recharge the batteries.
In Hybrid Electric vehicle development, scientists are trying different types of fuels. BMW has already proved that diesel is better than gasolier in hybrid engines. So Diesel hybrid could be a next big trend. Other than that people are looking in to cleaner energy like Hydrogen. In that case it could be used to generate electricity using Hydrogen fuel cell as well as in an internal combustion engine. Once technology develops to generate Hydrogen with lesser cost, we will be able to say good bye to ‘Fossil fuel’ with these advancement of Hybrid vehicles.
The Digital camera has becomes a day to day consumer item due to its ease of use and reduced cost today. The images taken from all over the world which is there in social media is the best example to prove the popularity of digital camera. Most of the “point and shoot” digital cameras are having auto focusing system using built in lens kit which allows any general user to come up with a classy photograph. Additionally all the other controllers including ISO, shutter speed and f stop are also been automated to make it even easier. Even with all those automation most of the general photographers face problems with focusing when they are using general “point and shoot” cameras as well as advanced DSLR cameras. The most common problem is, the user figure out that the object in focus in not what he really wants to focus in the picture, yet what camera assume what the user need. By the time he figures out that he need another object in focus, he is too late, because the focusing effect is irreversible.
Even in professional photography, experienced photographers face problem with focusing. Some of them are using advanced auto focus system in DSLR cameras, still run in to above problems. Some of them are focusing manually to get what he really need, yet it takes time and effect is again irreversible. When they are covering an event with lots of fast motion and lots of objects like sports festival, they can focus only one object at a time. When they try to focus on another object, it will become totally different frame due to movement in objects.
In order to address above issues a revolutionary digital camera coming to market in early 2012 with the name Lytro. It allows the photographers to select the focus point of the image even after taking the photograph. So photographers can capture the fame without thinking about the focus point. Further they can compose different photograph from same image simply by changing the focus point to different objects. Importantly focus point change could be done anytime, may be after years of taking the photograph as long as you have the original RAW file. The secret behind this concept “Shoot Now, Focus Later” is the Light Field Sensor.
History of Light Field Sensor
History of Light field sensor goes back more than 15 years. It was initiated by Stanford University as a research project. In early time it required a super computer to process the captured light field and clean room environment for most of the equipments. Therefore it was limited to very high end applications like space photography and academic research. The company, Lytro founded by Dr. Ren Ng, light field sensor researcher in Stanford, back in 2007. He was very careful to make this a secret till he come up with a good result. His objective was to develop a light field camera which can be used by any general user. As a result, the first light field camera was announced in 19th October 2011. The specification of Lytro is been officially released by now. They accept online orders and camera is ready to be shipped by early 2012.
Technology
Conventional Image Sensor
Any conventional image sensor found in point and shoot cameras as well as advanced DSLR cameras identify the color and amount of light in each pixel to generate image. The entire focusing mechanism will be controlled by the attached lens kit. Different lens kit could be use to generate different type of focusing effects by controlling depth of field and angle of capturing by altering f stop and focal length. Therefore the image comes to sensor is already been focused and it just captures it. Hence focus point is burn in to image and it’s irreversible. Though we call it capture a moment using a camera, actually it does is capture a selected set of light rays in a moment and omit entire remaining.
Light Field Sensor
When it comes to Light field sensor it capture extra details of light rays unlike in conventional image sensor. It captures amount of light and color in each pixel as usual. Additionally it records the direction of the entire light rays as well. The direction of each light ray will be stored along with the image as vectors. Therefore light ray processor can re generate the image with a different focus point. The calculation of focus point and depth of field will be based on above mentioned extra details of direction of light rays recorded as vectors. Therefore light ray sensor actually captures the moment and records entire lights rays in the field, called “Living pictures”. The term “Frame” is no longer usable in Photography. Photographers will have to call it “Field” with this new technology.
Advantages of Light Field Sensor
The major advantage of light field sensor is photographer can capture the moment without worrying about the focusing. It gave birth to the concept “Shoot now, Focus later”. The creative application of this would be limitless since you can choose various different focus points in exactly same image capture in one moment. In addition to that this could be use to fast action photography since you can capture more photographs in a minimum time due to reduced or zero focusing delay. Another main problem faced in conventional image sensor was low light performance. Most of the cases the images taken in low light environment were too noisy and unusable. The light field sensor capture entire light rays in field, hence it is providing exceptional low light performance which allow you to do low light photography even without a flasher. The images captured using light field sensor could be use to deliver 3D photo experience to users, mainly in web applications. This could be expanded to social media as well which allow the user to share 3D images with friends. This kind of service is already providing by Lytro where you can upload the picture to Lytro and embed it in any social media site as 3D photograph.
Shape of Lytro
Lytro is the very first consumer digital camera that comes with light field sensor. The look and feel of the camera is different as it uses different revolutionary technology inside. It looks like a box. In one end you can find the lens while other end holds LCD touch display to control the camera functionalities. It comes in 3 different stylish colors which are hot red, graphite and electric blue. There are 2 versions of camera which has different storage capacity
8 GB – 350 Pictures
16 GB – 750 Pictures
The lens is providing 8X optical zooming and F/2 aperture throughout the zooming range. The captured light fields (can’t call them images anymore as I said before) could be exported to a Software which allow you to select the focus point and continue with other editing. This software is capable of changing focus point and re-processes the image with appropriate depth of field using the direction of light rays recorded as vectors. However it still having only MAC version, yet according to the official Lytro web site windows version of the software is coming soon.
Lytro will be start shipping in USA in the early 2012, and through the official web site you can reserve yours. 16 GB camera is $499 and 8 GB one is $399.
Evolution of Lytro
The early light field camera required a high end super computer, yet within a short period of time the magic of technology could warp the super supercomputer based light field processor in to a handy box and convert it to a consumer digital camera. The speed of technology gives us sign where this light field sensor goes next. Its next target would be mobile smart phones. They already have high end cameras built in with still imaging capabilities as well as HD video recording capabilities. There is no reason to stop including light field camera in a near future mobile smart phone.
The current light field camera Lytro comes with 8X optical zooming which is a good enough to do day to day photography. In near future it will be equipped with even more powerful zooming lens and dominate mainly the sports optics and then space photography as well.
Lytro, the light field cameras has already revolutionaries the photography industry and it just a beginning. It will attract lots of customers with its exceptional imaging capability “Shoot now, Focus later”, stylish design and good price. The day when we can find Light field camera in every ones’ pocket is not too far.
In my previous tutorial I have explained How to create a simple tab design in CSS. Today we’ll learn about making the tabs work!
If you take websites with tabbed design, most of them will usually refresh the page when displaying the content of that particular tab or simply link the tab with another page. But this is very annoying sometimes and does not offer a good user experience.
Here are some examples:
Commonwealth Bank:
http://www.commbank.com.au/
Pizzahut:
http://www.pizzahut.com/
So, in order to make the maximum use of the tabbed design, we can display the content relevant to a selected tab in the same page without having to refresh/reload or linking with another. How cool is that?
Today I will explain you how to make your tabs work, without refreshing the page, using Javacript! It’s true that you can download different Javascript libraries that will animate the tabs for you, but have you ever considered writing your own code for that? It’s no rocket science. If you are familiar with the basic Javascript then you can try this out yourself!
For this purpose we will be using the tabbed design we created in the previous Article.
Ok, here’s what should happen when clicking on tabs. When I select a particular tab menu, it should display the tab content DIV relevant to that and hide the rest of the tabs.
For this we will be making use of the CSS Style attribute ‘display’.
First Step
As the first step I will rename my tab menu list with proper id’s like below:
Tab 01
Tab 02
Tab 03
Tab 04
Content in Tab 01 goes here.
Content in Tab 02 goes here.
Content in Tab 03 goes here.
Content in Tab 04 goes here.
Second Step
Next we have to write a simple function in Javascript that will display the relevant DIV and hide the rest. I am going to write this function in the simplest way.
Likewise add more ‘else if’ blocks to the function to animate all your tabs.
Next we have to call this function when a tab menu is clicked. So for that we are going to replace our
tag with the following:
Tab 01
Note that the ‘#’ in the href attribute was replaced by ‘javascript:void(0);’. This is a good practice when we want to block the usual function of an anchor tag and call a javascript instead.
Likewise replace the other
tags too accordingly.
Now you will see that the tabs are actually working without having to reload the page! But if you take a look at the javascript function you will see that lots of lines of code had been repeated several times. This is not considered as a good practice. So I’m going to offer you a more generic algorithm to do the same with lesser number of lines.
Here you will see in the first line I have specified as ‘var no_of_tabs = 4+1’. 4 is the number of tabs and I have added 1 more so that it will be easier to write the condition in the’ for loop’ subsequently.
