
Wednesday, May 9th, 2007
CMX Weekly Newsletter News Fun and Freebies Recent CMX Content Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats Check the News! Get Your Tickets For TODCon! TODCon is an annual event known for its informal, personal feel and for the tremendous amount of information and camaraderie one can find there. If you've ever bought a book on an Adobe or Macromedia product, chances are you'll meet the author of the book at TODCon. Glance over the list of speakers and you'll likely see some familiar names from the Adobe community. There are a huge number of learning tracks available to attendees, and the personal way in which you interact with the instructors is unmatched at events such as this. People who attend TODCon usually come back year after year when they see how unique it really is, and it's great watching everyone evolve together. You're invited to register for this fantastic, one of a kind event. Will Silverlight Survive The Light? Silverlight is seen by many as Microsoft's response to Adobe's Flash and Apollo applications. Microsoft naturally wants to get a part of the Rich Internet Application pie, and Silverlight may get their foot in the door. But is it too late to start competing in an arena where Adobe got such a headstart and has the market all but cornered? We think it probably is. Competition is a great thing, and we support anything that drives Adobe to make their applications even better, but Microsoft is going to have to have to come up with something more original than "Hey, it's got .NET support" to get people interested in delivering their applications through Silverlight. Here's an interesting article on this subject from The Register. Another Microsoft Acquisition? Yahoo! Microsoft is reportedly attempting to acquire Yahoo! for the poultry sum of fifty BILLION (we capitalized that, because it's a whole lot) dollars. Microsoft stands to gain a more solid hold in the search engine field should the acquisition take place. It's no big secret that their own MSN search - while among the top ten - still trails Google and Yahoo in terms of popularity and effectiveness. Forbes.com has a short article on the possible acquisition, but fails to mention another reason why Microsoft stands to gain from the deal: Yahoo, with its wildly popular chat application, can provide Microsoft with more demographic information about users than they currently have, which is money in the bank. Hopefully fifty BILLION dollars worth. IBM Loses Its Mind. Actually, About 150,000 Minds... Although this article at PBS.com draws its facts loosely, if it's correct, it would mean that IBM could be laying off about 150,000 of its employees in the near future. That would be roughly one third of IBM's workforce that receives it's walking papers. My first thought was "Is IBM doing so poorly that they'd need to lay off that many people?" The answer, if this story has any basis in reality, is no, they're not. But, a corporation does what it can to make money, and laying people off - if it doesn't wreck the company - is hugely profitable, especially to stockholders. Oh, and if you work for IBM and this is the first you've heard of this, uh... forget we said anything. It's Like I Don't Even Know You As a profession, web design is still a relatively new profession. What do we really know about the folks who call themselves web designers? I've seen monetary statistics regarding their pay, but not much with regard to age, geographic locations, or personal things like values. AListApart.com is trying to gather a bunch of data on web designers by asking the people who know them the best: The designers themselves. Go take their survey and help them figure out what these web designer folks are all about.
Satisfied Customers Speak Out! "Brilliant tutorial, many thanks. I can already work out many ways in which to adapt this tutorial." - Stuart L., CMX Subscriber, commenting on Joey Lott's Creating a Subscribe / Unsubscribe Feature Using PHP and MySQL. Whether you're just starting out or need advanced support, Community MX will give you answers and ideas to work through your tough issues. Don't miss out. Learn more about CMX or sign up for a free trial today!
Great Quotes: "Enthusiasm is the inspiration of everything great. Without it no man is to be feared, and with it none despised." - Christian Nevell Bovee Get That Web 2.0 Look For Free Frankly, we're tired about hearing about Web 2.0. Just call it what it is: The natural evolution of the internet. Some folks like to define Web 2.0, as a particular "thing", while others like to talk about the "look" of it. The latter is not necessarily a bad thing. There are so many poor looking websites out there, that if it takes a catchphrase to get people to start designing something that looks a little better, so be it. That brings us to DezinerFolio.com, where they're offering 131 free Photoshop styles that were created with (do we have to say it again?) Web 2.0 in mind. PC World's Love/Hate Relationship With Apple When it comes to Apple, many critics will either slant their opinion in a positive or negative direction. Not PC World. They're smart enough to know that when it comes to a company like Apple, there's plenty to love even though it's not perfect. So this past week they came up with two articles: One dealing with the reasons they love Apple (Example: The Mac OS rules!), and the other dealing with the reasons they hate Apple (Example: iHate iAnything). OH, So You Work On Computers, Eh? If you work in the computer industry at all, even as a designer, chances are you've been the center of attention when a group of people find out that you work on a computer for a living. Not because they're interested in your profession, but because they assume that if you work on computers, you'll know what's wrong with theirs. It's not unlike an optometrist who goes to a party and ends up explaining to your Uncle Bernie that he cannot help him with his glandular problems. LifeReboot.com has a funny list of reasons why it's not fun to be the "computer guy." How Much is Too Much? Value is tough thing to measure, but if you want to survive as a developer, or just as an owner of any business, you need to make sure that you're getting the money your services or goods are worth. But how do you know if you're charging enough? Check out FreelanceSwitch.com and see if any of the warning signs apply to you. For instance, you know you're not charging enough if "New clients are always asking what 'the catch' is." If you really want to make sure you're getting what you should for the work you do, just ask yourself this very important question: How much does that [insert whatever cool thing it is you want to buy here] cost? PC World's Integrity Just Increased a Whole Lot Last week we linked to a story at Wired.com about PC World's editor-in-chief, Harry McCracken, who quit his job when the new CEO, Colin Crawford, told McCracken that a story that cast a negative light on Steve Jobs wasn't going to run. Since then, Crawford has been removed from his position as CEO, which in turn opened the door for McCracken to rejoin PC World. We're confident that McCracken and Crawford's offices have been moved far apart from one another... You can see the staff change memo at Wired.com.
CMX Text Field Auto Complete Extension The CMX Auto Complete Behavior for Dreamweaver and Dreamweaver MX 2004 allows you to quickly and easily add fully customizable "auto complete" functionality (think Google Suggest) to any text or textarea input field on a web page. The "auto complete suggestions" box can easily be customized using CSS to integrate seamlessly into your page design and automatically sizes and positions itself for each input/textarea; no knowledge of JavaScript of the complexities of AJAX required! Take a look at this Extension by CMX Partner Rob Williams
Fun and Freebies! Have a Coke And a Smile And Get Some Handy Tips Coca Cola tastes great. But did you know it could be used for more than just drinking? Oh yeah... Coke apparently has more uses than we'd ever taken the time to think about. Don't believe us? Check out this page at TriPod.com. Who Doesn't Need a Trunk Monkey? Although some people think the term "Trunk Monkey" is dirty (you know who you are - get your minds out of the gutter), it's actually part of The Suburban Auto Store's ad campaign, and it's hysterical. Uh-oh... We've Got Some Of These... TecheBlog.com has a list of the top twenty strangest gadgets. We hadn't seen the big electric lips that mimic your online chat session before, but we're sure to have nightmares about it now.
Turning a Tile Image into a Fireworks Pattern There are lots of tile images available on the web for free, or you may be keen on creating your own. But once you've got the image, how do you set it up so that it displays in the Property Inspector's patterns menu to use for filling vector shapes? You could do a lot of copying and pasting to manually repeat the image, but that is way too much work. And there is a much easier way; Fireworks Patterns. You can apply patterns to fill any vector shape, thus giving the shape a more textured, organic or photo-realistic appearance. This brief tutorial will show you how to take a seamless tile image and add it to the Fireworks Patterns menu. This free article by CMX Partner Jim Babbage can be found here.
Weekly Content Listing Create a Teaser Thumbnail List Using CSS: Part 4 - Updated Zoe Gillenwater This tutorial is the fourth part in a series on creating "teaser thumbnail lists" with CSS. Teaser thumbnail lists are those lists of items made up of a title, short description, and thumbnail. They're often used to provide short teasers that link to more information about the products, articles, or sections of the site being listed. In Parts 1, 2, and 3, you've learned how to build teaser thumbnail lists from both definition lists and unordered lists and learned a couple different ways to style them. However, so far all of the lists created have been fixed to a specific pixel-based width. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to create a teaser thumbnail list that can expand and contract in width so that it can be used in fluid or liquid sites. As with the other lists, we'll use floats to accomplish the layout. This is an updated version of the original tutorial published in June 2006. The CSS used to create the teaser thumbnail list was slightly modified in earlier parts of this series to allow the list to accept text that is very short or images that are very tall without overlaps occuring. This tutorial reflects that updated CSS carried over from the earlier parts, although the basic techniques for this tutorial have not changed. The Updated Create a Teaser Thumbnail List Using CSS Series: Create a Teaser Thumbnail List Using CSS: Part 1 - Updated Create a Teaser Thumbnail List Using CSS: Part 2 - Updated Create a Teaser Thumbnail List Using CSS: Part 3 - Updated Create a Teaser Thumbnail List Using CSS: Part 4 - Updated From Illustrator CS3 to Fireworks CS3 Tom Green Every now and then, life gets easier for us. The latest iteration of Fireworks CS3 reduces the import of multi-layered Illustrator CS3 documents into Fireworks CS3 to nothing more than a couple of mouse clicks. Approximate download size: 4.6MB Chat4Support: Real Time Support Direct From Your Web Site [FREE] Adrian Senior I'm sure you have all seen them, the click here for live support buttons that are becoming more and more popular on today's web sites. I've often looked at them and wondered how effective they might be, would people actually use them enough to make the outlay worthwhile? I recently had a request from a client to research this functionality on their behalf with a view to setting up a system on one of their web sites. If it proved a success then it would be added to their other web sites. I was pleased to have the assignment, it was something I had intended to look at for my own site for a while but as ever, due to time constraints, I had never quite got around to doing the research on the different software available. Random Backgrounds Paul Davis Ever need to create a random background for your web site? Perhaps a slideshow for your background? Well, this script will do just that for you and it is super easy to install! Animation: The Fireworks CS3 to Flash CS3 Connection [FREE] Tom Green Who says you can't create Flash CS3 animations using Fireworks CS3? Cleaning Email Addresses in SQL Server Tom Muck So you have an email list that has everything from valid, well-formed email addresses to useless gibberish that someone thought would get them through the form without hassle. Obviously, the best way to maintain an email list is to catch the badly formed email addresses before they occur -- through JavaScript or server-side validation. That does not always catch the culprits though. Most of these scripts use regular expressions, which catch the badly formed addresses but do nothing with bad addresses. Also, you may have inherited a list or maintained a list that did not validate addresses. This article will show a couple of SQL Server user-defined functions that you can use to manually go through your list and find/fix/delete the bad addresses. Quick Select Tool - Quick Use and Tips for Photoshop CS3 Knut Kubenz Adobe's new Photoshop CS3 package has a lot of great new features and the Quick Select Tool makes life just a little easier when it comes to making selections. It's packaged with Refine Selection Edge in the Select menu, which allows you to further modify the selection you've made to the image, as well as any Layer Mask you may be using at the time. In this session I'd like to give you a quick look at the tool as well as give you a few tips and Hot Keys which will altogether speed up the process the process of making selections. Spry XML Data Set Chaz Chumley With all the development buzz around AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) to provide a rich interface to your web sites, Adobe has injected its Spry Framework into the next version of Dreamweaver CS3. In fact Spry now has an actual toolbar that allows you to drag, drop and wire up Spry widgets into your next web project with little knowledge of what is actually going on behind the scenes. Since XML (Extensible Markup Language) makes up one of the functional pieces of the Spry framework we will start off by taking a look at how to use the Spry XML Data Set. Swap Image DOM Replacement! Paul Davis Swap image behavior is a standard effect seen on web sites worldwide. Each script that controls the image swap, image restore and the events on the link or image are repeated on every page and the events on every image. When a new page is made, all of this has to be put on the page again. How about a script that is external to the page, which, of course, is included via the script tag link, but, has no other code in the page at all and automatically does the swap image effect for your menu? Want to see it? Read on! Running Windows on a Mac Bevi Chagnon You've heard that others are doing it ... running Windows and other operating systems on their Macs. And you're envious. It's not as difficult as you'd expect. In fact, it's quite painless and much of the drudgery has been taken out of the process. Here's a look at how you can set up Windows to run on an Intel Mac using either Parallels or Apple's Bootcamp. This article compares the pros and cons of Parallels vs. Bootcamp, gives you insider advice and how-to's, and provides resources for further information.
Fundamental Fusebox: Part 1 - An Overview Fusebox has long been the leading ColdFusion web application framework, noted for its use of the model-view-controller (MVC) architecture. Now Fusebox 5 has been released, and this introductory article provides an overview, including a review of changes from the previous version. The article also takes a look at the new "skeleton" application provided for Fusebox 5. Check out the Article by CMX Partner Thomas Pletcher
Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats! This week's Tip, Trick or Dirty Cheat is courtesy of John Gallant, CMX Partner. Disabling Rules Quickly When writing CSS code by hand, a quick and dirty method of disabling an existing rule is to remove one character from the selector. You can also disable a single declaration within a rule by removing a character from the property name, rendering that declaration invalid and causing all browsers to ignore it completely. Just be sure you clean up such tests before delivering the code to avoid embarrassment! Would you like your tip published? Submit it to tips@communitymx.com. That's it for this week. Stay tuned for the next CMX newsletter!

CMX Weekly Newsletter

News
Fun and Freebies
Recent CMX Content
Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats

Check the News!

Get Your Tickets For TODCon!

TODCon is an annual event known for its informal, personal feel and for the tremendous amount of information and camaraderie one can find there. If you've ever bought a book on an Adobe or Macromedia product, chances are you'll meet the author of the book at TODCon. Glance over the list of speakers and you'll likely see some familiar names from the Adobe community. There are a huge number of learning tracks available to attendees, and the personal way in which you interact with the instructors is unmatched at events such as this. People who attend TODCon usually come back year after year when they see how unique it really is, and it's great watching everyone evolve together.

You're invited to register for this fantastic, one of a kind event.

Will Silverlight Survive The Light?

Silverlight is seen by many as Microsoft's response to Adobe's Flash and Apollo applications. Microsoft naturally wants to get a part of the Rich Internet Application pie, and Silverlight may get their foot in the door. But is it too late to start competing in an arena where Adobe got such a headstart and has the market all but cornered? We think it probably is. Competition is a great thing, and we support anything that drives Adobe to make their applications even better, but Microsoft is going to have to have to come up with something more original than "Hey, it's got .NET support" to get people interested in delivering their applications through Silverlight. Here's an interesting article on this subject from The Register.

Another Microsoft Acquisition? Yahoo!

Microsoft is reportedly attempting to acquire Yahoo! for the poultry sum of fifty BILLION (we capitalized that, because it's a whole lot) dollars. Microsoft stands to gain a more solid hold in the search engine field should the acquisition take place. It's no big secret that their own MSN search - while among the top ten - still trails Google and Yahoo in terms of popularity and effectiveness. Forbes.com has a short article on the possible acquisition, but fails to mention another reason why Microsoft stands to gain from the deal: Yahoo, with its wildly popular chat application, can provide Microsoft with more demographic information about users than they currently have, which is money in the bank. Hopefully fifty BILLION dollars worth.

IBM Loses Its Mind. Actually, About 150,000 Minds...

Although this article at PBS.com draws its facts loosely, if it's correct, it would mean that IBM could be laying off about 150,000 of its employees in the near future. That would be roughly one third of IBM's workforce that receives it's walking papers. My first thought was "Is IBM doing so poorly that they'd need to lay off that many people?" The answer, if this story has any basis in reality, is no, they're not. But, a corporation does what it can to make money, and laying people off - if it doesn't wreck the company - is hugely profitable, especially to stockholders. Oh, and if you work for IBM and this is the first you've heard of this, uh... forget we said anything.

It's Like I Don't Even Know You

As a profession, web design is still a relatively new profession. What do we really know about the folks who call themselves web designers? I've seen monetary statistics regarding their pay, but not much with regard to age, geographic locations, or personal things like values. AListApart.com is trying to gather a bunch of data on web designers by asking the people who know them the best: The designers themselves. Go take their survey and help them figure out what these web designer folks are all about.

Satisfied Customers Speak Out!

"Brilliant tutorial, many thanks. I can already work out many ways in which to adapt this tutorial."

- Stuart L., CMX Subscriber, commenting on Joey Lott's Creating a Subscribe / Unsubscribe Feature Using PHP and MySQL.

Whether you're just starting out or need advanced support, Community MX will give you answers and ideas to work through your tough issues. Don't miss out. Learn more about CMX or sign up for a free trial today!

Great Quotes:

"Enthusiasm is the inspiration of everything great. Without it no man is to be feared, and with it none despised." - Christian Nevell Bovee

Get That Web 2.0 Look For Free

Frankly, we're tired about hearing about Web 2.0. Just call it what it is: The natural evolution of the internet. Some folks like to define Web 2.0, as a particular "thing", while others like to talk about the "look" of it. The latter is not necessarily a bad thing. There are so many poor looking websites out there, that if it takes a catchphrase to get people to start designing something that looks a little better, so be it. That brings us to DezinerFolio.com, where they're offering 131 free Photoshop styles that were created with (do we have to say it again?) Web 2.0 in mind.

PC World's Love/Hate Relationship With Apple

When it comes to Apple, many critics will either slant their opinion in a positive or negative direction. Not PC World. They're smart enough to know that when it comes to a company like Apple, there's plenty to love even though it's not perfect. So this past week they came up with two articles: One dealing with the reasons they love Apple (Example: The Mac OS rules!), and the other dealing with the reasons they hate Apple (Example: iHate iAnything).

OH, So You Work On Computers, Eh?

If you work in the computer industry at all, even as a designer, chances are you've been the center of attention when a group of people find out that you work on a computer for a living. Not because they're interested in your profession, but because they assume that if you work on computers, you'll know what's wrong with theirs. It's not unlike an optometrist who goes to a party and ends up explaining to your Uncle Bernie that he cannot help him with his glandular problems. LifeReboot.com has a funny list of reasons why it's not fun to be the "computer guy."

How Much is Too Much?

Value is tough thing to measure, but if you want to survive as a developer, or just as an owner of any business, you need to make sure that you're getting the money your services or goods are worth. But how do you know if you're charging enough? Check out FreelanceSwitch.com and see if any of the warning signs apply to you. For instance, you know you're not charging enough if "New clients are always asking what 'the catch' is." If you really want to make sure you're getting what you should for the work you do, just ask yourself this very important question: How much does that [insert whatever cool thing it is you want to buy here] cost?

PC World's Integrity Just Increased a Whole Lot

Last week we linked to a story at Wired.com about PC World's editor-in-chief, Harry McCracken, who quit his job when the new CEO, Colin Crawford, told McCracken that a story that cast a negative light on Steve Jobs wasn't going to run. Since then, Crawford has been removed from his position as CEO, which in turn opened the door for McCracken to rejoin PC World. We're confident that McCracken and Crawford's offices have been moved far apart from one another... You can see the staff change memo at Wired.com.

CMX Text Field Auto Complete Extension

The CMX Auto Complete Behavior for Dreamweaver and Dreamweaver MX 2004 allows you to quickly and easily add fully customizable "auto complete" functionality (think Google Suggest) to any text or textarea input field on a web page. The "auto complete suggestions" box can easily be customized using CSS to integrate seamlessly into your page design and automatically sizes and positions itself for each input/textarea; no knowledge of JavaScript of the complexities of AJAX required!

Take a look at this Extension by CMX Partner Rob Williams

Fun and Freebies!

Have a Coke And a Smile And Get Some Handy Tips

Coca Cola tastes great. But did you know it could be used for more than just drinking? Oh yeah... Coke apparently has more uses than we'd ever taken the time to think about. Don't believe us? Check out this page at TriPod.com.

Who Doesn't Need a Trunk Monkey?

Although some people think the term "Trunk Monkey" is dirty (you know who you are - get your minds out of the gutter), it's actually part of The Suburban Auto Store's ad campaign, and it's hysterical.

Uh-oh... We've Got Some Of These...

TecheBlog.com has a list of the top twenty strangest gadgets. We hadn't seen the big electric lips that mimic your online chat session before, but we're sure to have nightmares about it now.

Turning a Tile Image into a Fireworks Pattern

There are lots of tile images available on the web for free, or you may be keen on creating your own. But once you've got the image, how do you set it up so that it displays in the Property Inspector's patterns menu to use for filling vector shapes? You could do a lot of copying and pasting to manually repeat the image, but that is way too much work. And there is a much easier way; Fireworks Patterns. You can apply patterns to fill any vector shape, thus giving the shape a more textured, organic or photo-realistic appearance. This brief tutorial will show you how to take a seamless tile image and add it to the Fireworks Patterns menu.

This free article by CMX Partner Jim Babbage can be found here.

Weekly Content Listing

Create a Teaser Thumbnail List Using CSS: Part 4 - Updated

Zoe Gillenwater

This tutorial is the fourth part in a series on creating "teaser thumbnail lists" with CSS. Teaser thumbnail lists are those lists of items made up of a title, short description, and thumbnail. They're often used to provide short teasers that link to more information about the products, articles, or sections of the site being listed.

In Parts 1, 2, and 3, you've learned how to build teaser thumbnail lists from both definition lists and unordered lists and learned a couple different ways to style them. However, so far all of the lists created have been fixed to a specific pixel-based width.

In this tutorial, you'll learn how to create a teaser thumbnail list that can expand and contract in width so that it can be used in fluid or liquid sites. As with the other lists, we'll use floats to accomplish the layout.

This is an updated version of the original tutorial published in June 2006. The CSS used to create the teaser thumbnail list was slightly modified in earlier parts of this series to allow the list to accept text that is very short or images that are very tall without overlaps occuring. This tutorial reflects that updated CSS carried over from the earlier parts, although the basic techniques for this tutorial have not changed.

The Updated Create a Teaser Thumbnail List Using CSS Series:
Create a Teaser Thumbnail List Using CSS: Part 1 - **Updated**
Create a Teaser Thumbnail List Using CSS: Part 2 - **Updated**
Create a Teaser Thumbnail List Using CSS: Part 3 - **Updated**
Create a Teaser Thumbnail List Using CSS: Part 4 - **Updated**

From Illustrator CS3 to Fireworks CS3

Tom Green

Every now and then, life gets easier for us. The latest iteration of Fireworks CS3 reduces the import of multi-layered Illustrator CS3 documents into Fireworks CS3 to nothing more than a couple of mouse clicks.

Approximate download size: 4.6MB

Chat4Support: Real Time Support Direct From Your Web Site [FREE]

Adrian Senior

I'm sure you have all seen them, the click here for live support buttons that are becoming more and more popular on today's web sites. I've often looked at them and wondered how effective they might be, would people actually use them enough to make the outlay worthwhile?

I recently had a request from a client to research this functionality on their behalf with a view to setting up a system on one of their web sites. If it proved a success then it would be added to their other web sites.

I was pleased to have the assignment, it was something I had intended to look at for my own site for a while but as ever, due to time constraints, I had never quite got around to doing the research on the different software available.

Random Backgrounds

Paul Davis

Ever need to create a random background for your web site? Perhaps a slideshow for your background? Well, this script will do just that for you and it is super easy to install!

Animation: The Fireworks CS3 to Flash CS3 Connection [FREE]

Tom Green

Who says you can't create Flash CS3 animations using Fireworks CS3?

Cleaning Email Addresses in SQL Server

Tom Muck

So you have an email list that has everything from valid, well-formed email addresses to useless gibberish that someone thought would get them through the form without hassle. Obviously, the best way to maintain an email list is to catch the badly formed email addresses before they occur -- through JavaScript or server-side validation. That does not always catch the culprits though. Most of these scripts use regular expressions, which catch the badly formed addresses but do nothing with bad addresses. Also, you may have inherited a list or maintained a list that did not validate addresses.

This article will show a couple of SQL Server user-defined functions that you can use to manually go through your list and find/fix/delete the bad addresses.

Quick Select Tool - Quick Use and Tips for Photoshop CS3

Knut Kubenz

Adobe's new Photoshop CS3 package has a lot of great new features and the Quick Select Tool makes life just a little easier when it comes to making selections. It's packaged with Refine Selection Edge in the Select menu, which allows you to further modify the selection you've made to the image, as well as any Layer Mask you may be using at the time.

In this session I'd like to give you a quick look at the tool as well as give you a few tips and Hot Keys which will altogether speed up the process the process of making selections.

Spry XML Data Set

Chaz Chumley

With all the development buzz around AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) to provide a rich interface to your web sites, Adobe has injected its Spry Framework into the next version of Dreamweaver CS3. In fact Spry now has an actual toolbar that allows you to drag, drop and wire up Spry widgets into your next web project with little knowledge of what is actually going on behind the scenes. Since XML (Extensible Markup Language) makes up one of the functional pieces of the Spry framework we will start off by taking a look at how to use the Spry XML Data Set.

Swap Image DOM Replacement!

Paul Davis

Swap image behavior is a standard effect seen on web sites worldwide. Each script that controls the image swap, image restore and the events on the link or image are repeated on every page and the events on every image. When a new page is made, all of this has to be put on the page again. How about a script that is external to the page, which, of course, is included via the script tag link, but, has no other code in the page at all and automatically does the swap image effect for your menu? Want to see it? Read on!

Running Windows on a Mac

Bevi Chagnon

You've heard that others are doing it ... running Windows and other operating systems on their Macs. And you're envious. It's not as difficult as you'd expect. In fact, it's quite painless and much of the drudgery has been taken out of the process. Here's a look at how you can set up Windows to run on an Intel Mac using either Parallels or Apple's Bootcamp. This article compares the pros and cons of Parallels vs. Bootcamp, gives you insider advice and how-to's, and provides resources for further information.

Fundamental Fusebox: Part 1 - An Overview

Fusebox has long been the leading ColdFusion web application framework, noted for its use of the model-view-controller (MVC) architecture. Now Fusebox 5 has been released, and this introductory article provides an overview, including a review of changes from the previous version. The article also takes a look at the new "skeleton" application provided for Fusebox 5.

Check out the Article by CMX Partner Thomas Pletcher

Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats!

This week's Tip, Trick or Dirty Cheat is courtesy of John Gallant, CMX Partner.

Disabling Rules Quickly

When writing CSS code by hand, a quick and dirty method of disabling an existing rule is to remove one character from the selector. You can also disable a single declaration within a rule by removing a character from the property name, rendering that declaration invalid and causing all browsers to ignore it completely. Just be sure you clean up such tests before delivering the code to avoid embarrassment!

Would you like your tip published? Submit it to tips@communitymx.com.

That's it for this week. Stay tuned for the next CMX newsletter!