Published on Monday, August 6, 2007 .
In the spirit of consistency, I decided to add a shadow to the tooltips (View the example). They just didn't blend in with the rest of the Google Maps overlays. So I set out to replicate the "standard" Google Maps shadows.
Replicating the Shadow
Through a mix of reasoning, instinctive guessing, and trial and error, I have devised a technique to replicate the shadows using Adobe Photoshop. It's a fairly simple process and the steps are outlined below.
- Make a copy of the overlay's layers and merge and rasterize the copies if needed
- Make the copy all black (I use a gradient map and set both ends to black)
- Perform a Free Transform and set the Height/Vertical Scale to 50% and the Horizontal Skew to -45°
- Apply the Gaussian Blur filter (I set it to .5 pixels for small images and 2 to 3 pixels for large ones)
- Set the Opacity to 45%
- Save the shadow layer only as a PNG
Continue reading 'The Google Maps Tooltip Gets a Shadow (and HTML Support)'
I've been working more and more with the Google Maps API recently. And one thing strikes me as odd; it's difficult to find examples of how to retrieve geocodes for addresses. If you're going to implement the API in a website, you usually have to take multiple addresses and convert them to geocodes. But how do you do this?
Enter Geocoder. You may be asking yourself, "Who's Geocoder?" No, no my friend; Geocoder is not a who, it's a what. It is a little web app that will retrieve the coordinates of any address (known to Google Maps), using the Google Maps API. The beautiful thing about Geocoder is that it allows you to perform batch retrievals using any character(s) to separate the records. Geocoder also gives you the ability to drop a draggable marker onto the map and it will tell you the coordinates of the location you move it to. This is extremely helpful for locations without addresses. And best of all, Geocoder is completely free and onemarco.com-independent. "How," you ask? Simple, you can download Geocoder and insert your Google Maps API key in the index file. It will run on any web server as long as you have an API key. I've even zipped it up into a convenient archive so that you can download all the files with one click.
Geocoder is free to use for any reason without any restrictions. Just credit me if you redistribute it.
P.S. I would like to thank Simon Reynolds for designing my masthead. You can check out his blog at SR28.com and his artwork at 4StoryStudio.com. His blog is designed beautifully.
Published on Wednesday, May 16, 2007 .
Welcome to my JavaScript blog, onemarco.com, or as I like to call it, Blog de Alionso. I've been developing with JavaScript for about six months now and I've learned so much from others' blogs. I'll be sharing some of the scripts I've developed recently, in the hopes that my experience and knowledge will help others.
What?
Today I present the Tooltip object for the Google Maps API. It is used to add quickly-appearing, easy-to-style (via CSS) tooltips to Google Maps' markers. This is in contrast to the built-in tooltips of versions 2.5 and higher, which appear after a short delay and cannot be styled. You can view an example the new example of the tooltips in action which also includes a sidebar.
View the Tooltip source code. The code is free to use for any reason without any restrictions. Just credit me if you redistribute it.
Why?
I developed the tooltips for two reasons. First, I find it difficult to figure out which marker a sidebar entry belongs to. It is time consuming to look at the letter for the entry and find the matching letter on the map, especially when markers overlap and hide each other. It is easier if the tooltip appears above the marker when I hover over the sidebar entry. Secondly, sometimes I just want to quickly figure out what a certain marker on the map is without having to look for its corresponding letter in the sidebar. And having to click on the marker to pull up the location's name is annoying, especially when it moves the center of the map. It just seems natural to me that when you hover on a marker, the name of the location should appear. Besides, it was a good exercise in extending the Google Maps API.
Continue reading 'Custom Tooltips for the Google Maps API'