
Wednesday, June 7th, 2006
CMX Weekly Newsletter News Fun and Freebies Recent CMX Content Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats Check the News! Adobe Online Conference June 12-June 16 The location and the price are right: At home, and free. It looks like the majority of the sessions will involve Flex and using Flex in different development applications. The sessions will be presented via Breeze, online, and attendees will be able to ask questions of the presenters in real time, right there. To read more about the conference agenda and sign up, just go to Adobe.com. A Level Playing Field First came Levels of CSS Knowledge at FriendlyBit.com. Then came Levels of HTML Knowledge from 456BereaStreet.com. Not to be left out, The Fawny Blog at Fawny.org followed up with the Levels of Accessibility Knowledge(Or, if you went to TODCon this year, "Levels of Accessibility Crap"). All three are aimed at helping you figure out which level you might be on with regard to CSS, HTML or Accessibility. Whether or not they're accurate, we can't say. We're too busy following up with an article on Level Knowledge for Level-Headed People. And The First Round in the Web Apps Battle Goes To... Google is nowhere near the same level as corporate giant Microsoft in terms of how its applications impact our computing experience, but that doesn't stop them from trying. According to this blog post at RemoteSynthesis.com, Google plans on releasing a web-based spreadsheet application that will read Excel and csv files. It will also be able to recreate the same formulas that Excel can create. This may not throw Microsoft into a full-blown panic, but you can be sure there is a coniption fit in the works. Microsoft is not too impressed, according to an article at InternetNews.com. For a closer look at Google's spreadsheets, check out the blog at Outer-Court.com. Feeling Spry But Not Sure What To Do About It? You may remember reading about Spry in our newsletter a couple of weeks ago. For those of you who are looking to start taking advantage of AJAX, but don't know where or how to start, Spry is a good kick in the right direction. How will Spry help you with AJAX applications, you ask? That's a little more involved than we can get into here, but thankfully, there are websites like TechTarget.com that make it a little clearer for you. Whatever Happened To Door To Door Polls? In this article at Bi-Tech.net, Wil Harris ponders the motives of websites like Flickr, YouTube and MySpace. Harris points out, and rightly so, that none of these websites are in it for the cash, since their business models are certainly not going to be generating any revenue. What these websites have in common though, is the remarkable amount of information they retrieve from people every single day. This information is hugely valuable to folks who need to know what people of every walk of life are buying, sharing, saying, etc., so they can market to those people in very specific ways. Whether or not any of the aforementioned websites started off with good intentions or not doesn't really matter. When a website like MySpace gets bought by a biggy like Rupert Murdoch, you can be sure there is value in there somewhere, and it isn't in banner ads. Is that a bad thing? Maybe, maybe not. Discuss.
Satisfied Customers Speak Out! "Thank you SO MUCH. WOW! You saved me a lot of frustration. Now, keep in mind I do NOT understand PHP properly, thus the reason I'm trying to learn this stuff. Thank you again. You are really helpful. And I like it simple so I can understand it and you did a good job!" CMX Subscriber PJ, thanking us for help on our Community MX forums. 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: "Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence." — Abigail Adams For The Firefox Extension Junkies One of the really cool things about using Firefox is finding extensions that add to the functionality of your browser. There are extensions meant specifically for web devolopers, extensions to change the look of your browser and many others. Probably hundreds. Squidoo.com has an article listing many of their favorites, with links to each one. At least a few of us here at Community MX are jazzed when we find new extensions for FF, and finding out what others' favorites are can be fun too. As a matter of fact, Holly Bergevin and John Gallant have written two articles at Community MX on some great FF extensions. This first one, a freebie can be found here, and the second is here. Don't Have a Magnetic Personality? Want One? We're not sure what to make of this story from Wired.com. The author ponders the benefits of a magnet being implanted under one's skin, and then has it done to himself. Jesse Jarrell and Steve Haworth have experimented with magnets being implanted under the skin of people's fingertips, and found that the implantee develops a type of sixth sense which allows them to feel electromagnetic waves, such as the ones coming off of electical motors, cables, stovetops and other objects that project an electromagnetic field. Of course, no one would take one of these implants if there wasn't an immediate and positive benefit involved, right? Actually, there doesn't seem to be any benefit other than fooling friends at parties by picking up magnets with the tip of your finger.... Check it out at Wired.com. Windows Vista Looks Nice, But Their Flash Presentation Is Even Better At SeeWindowsVista.com, you can check out some of the new features of Microsoft's upcoming update to the Windows family, Windows Vista. But the main reason we wanted to provide this link was to pay tribute to the fantastic use of Flash that takes place on the website. It's imaginative, well-organized, and easy to navigate and look at. This is the type of thing Flash Video was made for. Speaking of Vista, the second public beta is out. Check out the Microsoft Blog. Flash Developers Will Be Watching The Progress On This... It's a few paragraphs down, but this article at Microsoft-Watch.com mentions some concessions that Microsoft is willing to make to Adobe in order to get Adobe off their backs. One of the concessions is bundling Flash Player, Acrobat Reader and/or Shockwave into Windows Vista. The idea of the Flash Player being built directly into Windows would drive the number of flash-enabled machines up... well, tons. Enough to get a lot of developers excited, for sure. We'll be keeping an eye on Adobe's response. It's Like The Pied Piper of Cockroach-ville We're still not at the stage where robots can do our housework or homework, but increasingly, we're seeing a lot of promise in the robot world. For instance, scientists have created a small robot that can interact with cockroaches. The cockroaches react to the pheremone-laced robot, and the robot can in turn react to the cockroaches, thanks to the pheremones that come off of the bugs. The robot can then lead the bugs wherever it's programmed to lead them - presumably, a puddle of Raid. Read more about it at Discovery.com.
CMX Find a File Extension For Dreamweaver Ever need to find that one file, but weren't really sure which of the seemingly 100's of folders in your site it was located in? Well you could have jumped into your file manager, navigated to the site folder, specified a search, and hope you picked the correct file name, but with Dreamweaver you're always looking to save a little time, right? Well, here's where CMX Find A File comes into play. You can perform a search within any one of your sites, include folder names in your search, search based upon case sensitivity, as well as perform regular expression searches, all from within CMX Find A File. Check out this Extension by CMX Partner Danilo Celic
Fun and Freebies Creation Versus Creator Take a look at this very imaginative Flash project at Album.com. See a stick figure get created in Flash that decides to wage war with his creator within the Flash application. This Is B-a-a-a-a-d Here's the object of the game at bbc.co.uk: Put five sheep to sleep with your tranquilizer as quickly as you can. This is supposed to test your reflexes, but I just kept falling asleep. If You're Going To Dream, Dream Big Alex Tew, the kid genius behind the Million Dollar Home Page, was threatened with a second Denial Of Service attack by hackers who were trying to blackmail him out of $50,000. Their first DOS attack was the warning. Since he's a kid genius and all, Alex got an internet security company to trade him security for advertising on his website. His site got back up, he contacted the Feds, who are now investigating, and since this story broke, the hits have gone up on his website. Man, we love stories like this. Read more about it at Wired.com.
Persistent Page Indicator When developing Web sites using good principles of usability, it is good practice to use an indicator showing what page the person is on as they surf through your site. Some people use bread crumbs as well as a persistent page indicator (many times like the down state of the button) indicating that "you are here." This page indication can be acheived by simply placing a class on the proper navigation item (and changing the item it's placed on from page to page). However, when using server-side includes, templates or library items in Dreamweaver, since the same menu is used on each instance of the page, it can be a more challenging process. Don't worry though -- CSS and the descendant selector handle the challenge quite nicely. Come along as we walk through the steps needed to create this effect. This free article by CMX Partner Stephanie Sullivan can be found here.
Weekly Content Listing Creating a Registration Page: Part 2 Tom Muck Dreamweaver contains many built-in tools to aid in quickly building dynamic sites. Part 1 of this series showed how to use the Record Insertion Form Wizard to set up a simple user registration form on a web site. The registration form allows a user to register for a site. Part 2 will show validation and the user agreement, using more built-in tools of Dreamweaver and a little rudimentary JavaScript. The tutorial will apply equally to PHP, ASP, ColdFusion, and JSP using built in tools. Part 3 will show how to pass registration details to PayPal or other payment processor for a paid membership-type of site. The Creating a Registration Page Series: Creating a Registration Page: Part 1 Creating a Registration Page: Part 2 Creating a Registration Page: Part 3 Coming Soon IE, Minimum Width, and Ems: Overcoming a CSS Disaster Rob Williams Internet Explorer has a lot of CSS bugs and problems. Fortunately, with a bit of help from some friendly JavaScript coders there are ways to get around most of those limitations, sometimes without even having to invalidate your CSS! In this article we'll explore one of these scenarios: using a minimum-width on elements that are based on em's. Build Seamless Background Image Tiles out of Shapes in Fireworks Zoe Gillenwater Tiled background images where a small shape repeats across the web page have come back into style. There are web sites devoted to providing free patterns for you to download and apply to your sites, but what if you want to create your own pattern? You can create any shape you like, using your favorite graphics program, and then set it as a tiling background image using CSS. However, creating a pattern out of your shape that tiles well—without any seams or gutters—takes some work. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to create seamless background patterns using Fireworks (but the principles can just as easily be used in Photoshop or any other graphics program). Note: This tutorial doesn't cover how to draw a shape or apply it to your page as a background. Rather, it shows how to take a shape that you want to turn into a seamless pattern and use Fireworks to do just that. Creating Web Icons: Part 3 Gordon Mackay Once again we don our magnifying glass and set about creating another three commonly used web icons using Fireworks. In previous tutorials of this series we created mail icons, shopping cart icons and a few other nice little additions to a good web design. This time we will make a tiny site map icon, an alarm clock icon and an image icon. So let's open Fireworks and get pushin' some pixels! The Creating Web Icons Series: Creating Web Icons: Part 1 Creating Web Icons: Part 2 Creating Web Icons: Part 3 Flash Printing Tasks - Part 5: Building a Preview for the Certificate Robert Reinhardt In the last installment of this series, you built a Flash form that passed information to a dynamically created certificate you could print. In this tutorial, you learn how to create a preview window for the certificate. During the process, you learn how to use the Window component. You can preview the finished version of the Flash movie here. The Flash Printing Task Series: Flash Printing Tasks - Part 1: Building a Certificate Template in Illustrator and Flash Flash Printing Tasks - Part 2: Basic Printing of the Certificate Flash Printing Tasks - Part 3: Adding Dynamic Text to the Certificate Flash Printing Tasks - Part 4: Creating a Form for Certificate Information Flash Printing Tasks - Part 5: Building a Preview for the Certificate Flash Printing Tasks - Part 6: Creating a Color/Grayscale Toggle for the Certificate Preview Window Coming Soon Converting from C# to VB Heidi Bautista Face it. All programmers have a favorite language. And, we're usually pretty vehement about why it's the best choice, too! But it can be a real problem when you're searching for examples and all you find is code written in the other language! This article introduces you to a free online (and downloadable) tool that does a pretty good job of converting C# code into VB. The article also includes general and DW-specific tips to keep in mind when converting code by hand. Create a Teaser Thumbnail List Using CSS: Part 4 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 in 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. The Create a Teaser Thumbnail List Series: Create a Teaser Thumbnail List Using CSS: Part 1 Create a Teaser Thumbnail List Using CSS: Part 2 Create a Teaser Thumbnail List Using CSS: Part 3 Create a Teaser Thumbnail List Using CSS: Part 4 Blends and Masks - A Fireworks Project: Part 2 Jim Babbage In Part One of this two-part series, we worked with several of Fireworks's tools (new and old) to produce a corporate style cover page in a vertical format. In Part Two we'll look at how we can take a design and re-purpose it for another use. Most print work is created in a portrait—or vertical—orientation. Most work destined for the screen is designed to fit a landscape—or horizontal—orientation. We will take the image we created in Part 1 and create a horizontal image, which could be used in a kiosk, on a homepage or a PowerPoint Presentation. The Blends and Masks Series: Blends and Masks - A Fireworks Project: Part 1 Blends and Masks - A Fireworks Project: Part 2 Approximate download size: 6.3MB Introducing CMX Jumpstart San Francisco [FREE] Sheri German We are pleased to introduce CMX JumpStart San Francisco, a great first CSS layout for students and experienced developers alike. Structured to be as hack free and straightforward as possible, this may be just the JumpStart for you if you have been holding back on CSS layouts so far. Like all JumpStarts, it uses valid XHTML and CSS as its foundation and is 508 and WAI compliant. This two-column, fixed-width layout, described rule by rule in the documentation article, makes a great learning tool. CMX JumpStart San Francisco for Students (and Anyone) Sheri German, John Gallant We are pleased to introduce CMX JumpStart San Francisco, a great first CSS layout for students and experienced developers alike. Structured to be as hack free and straightforward as possible, this may be just the JumpStart for you if you have been holding back on CSS layouts so far. Like all JumpStarts, it uses valid XHTML and CSS as its foundation and is 508 and WAI compliant. This two-column, fixed-width layout, described rule by rule in the documentation article, makes a great learning tool. Approximate download size: 4MB
Automating An Image Gallery with PHP and Your Local Server: Part 1 Many developers have local testing servers running on their development machines to allow for quick offline tests of materials before they are sent to the live server. If you happen to be running a local server on your development machine though there's no reason that it's functionality should be limited to mere page testing. In this article we'll take a look at how you can utilize your local server as a scripting engine to increase your efficiency and perform common tasks more quickly then ever before. Check out the Article by CMX partner Rob Williams
Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats! This week's Tip, Trick or Dirty Cheat is courtesy of CMX partner Joseph Balderson Deleting Authortime Movie Clips Dynamically created Movie Clips have a positive depth number, and can be removed from the stage dynamically at runtime using the removeMovieClip() method. Unfortunately, you cannot dynamically delete a Movie Clip on the stage at runtime if it was originally placed on the stage in the authoring environment. Such "authortime" Movie Clips have a negative depth number. So to delete an authortime clip from the stage at runtime, simply change its depth to a positive number by using myMovieClip.swapDepths(X), where X is a positive integer. You will then be free to use myMovieClip.removeMovieClip(), and the clip will be successfully deleted from the stage. 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!

Adobe Online Conference June 12-June 16

The location and the price are right: At home, and free. It looks like the majority of the sessions will involve Flex and using Flex in different development applications. The sessions will be presented via Breeze, online, and attendees will be able to ask questions of the presenters in real time, right there. To read more about the conference agenda and sign up, just go to Adobe.com.

A Level Playing Field

First came Levels of CSS Knowledge at FriendlyBit.com. Then came Levels of HTML Knowledge from 456BereaStreet.com. Not to be left out, The Fawny Blog at Fawny.org followed up with the Levels of Accessibility Knowledge(Or, if you went to TODCon this year, "Levels of Accessibility Crap"). All three are aimed at helping you figure out which level you might be on with regard to CSS, HTML or Accessibility. Whether or not they're accurate, we can't say. We're too busy following up with an article on Level Knowledge for Level-Headed People.

And The First Round in the Web Apps Battle Goes To...

Google is nowhere near the same level as corporate giant Microsoft in terms of how its applications impact our computing experience, but that doesn't stop them from trying. According to this blog post at RemoteSynthesis.com, Google plans on releasing a web-based spreadsheet application that will read Excel and csv files. It will also be able to recreate the same formulas that Excel can create. This may not throw Microsoft into a full-blown panic, but you can be sure there is a coniption fit in the works. Microsoft is not too impressed, according to an article at InternetNews.com. For a closer look at Google's spreadsheets, check out the blog at Outer-Court.com.

Feeling Spry But Not Sure What To Do About It?

You may remember reading about Spry in our newsletter a couple of weeks ago. For those of you who are looking to start taking advantage of AJAX, but don't know where or how to start, Spry is a good kick in the right direction. How will Spry help you with AJAX applications, you ask? That's a little more involved than we can get into here, but thankfully, there are websites like TechTarget.com that make it a little clearer for you.

Whatever Happened To Door To Door Polls?

In this article at Bi-Tech.net, Wil Harris ponders the motives of websites like Flickr, YouTube and MySpace. Harris points out, and rightly so, that none of these websites are in it for the cash, since their business models are certainly not going to be generating any revenue. What these websites have in common though, is the remarkable amount of information they retrieve from people every single day. This information is hugely valuable to folks who need to know what people of every walk of life are buying, sharing, saying, etc., so they can market to those people in very specific ways. Whether or not any of the aforementioned websites started off with good intentions or not doesn't really matter. When a website like MySpace gets bought by a biggy like Rupert Murdoch, you can be sure there is value in there somewhere, and it isn't in banner ads. Is that a bad thing? Maybe, maybe not. Discuss.

Satisfied Customers Speak Out!

"Thank you SO MUCH. WOW! You saved me a lot of frustration. Now, keep in mind I do NOT understand PHP properly, thus the reason I'm trying to learn this stuff. Thank you again. You are really helpful. And I like it simple so I can understand it and you did a good job!"

CMX Subscriber PJ, thanking us for help on our Community MX forums.

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:

"Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence." — Abigail Adams

For The Firefox Extension Junkies

One of the really cool things about using Firefox is finding extensions that add to the functionality of your browser. There are extensions meant specifically for web devolopers, extensions to change the look of your browser and many others. Probably hundreds. Squidoo.com has an article listing many of their favorites, with links to each one. At least a few of us here at Community MX are jazzed when we find new extensions for FF, and finding out what others' favorites are can be fun too. As a matter of fact, Holly Bergevin and John Gallant have written two articles at Community MX on some great FF extensions. This first one, a freebie can be found here, and the second is here.

Don't Have a Magnetic Personality? Want One?

We're not sure what to make of this story from Wired.com. The author ponders the benefits of a magnet being implanted under one's skin, and then has it done to himself. Jesse Jarrell and Steve Haworth have experimented with magnets being implanted under the skin of people's fingertips, and found that the implantee develops a type of sixth sense which allows them to feel electromagnetic waves, such as the ones coming off of electical motors, cables, stovetops and other objects that project an electromagnetic field. Of course, no one would take one of these implants if there wasn't an immediate and positive benefit involved, right? Actually, there doesn't seem to be any benefit other than fooling friends at parties by picking up magnets with the tip of your finger.... Check it out at Wired.com.

Windows Vista Looks Nice, But Their Flash Presentation Is Even Better

At SeeWindowsVista.com, you can check out some of the new features of Microsoft's upcoming update to the Windows family, Windows Vista. But the main reason we wanted to provide this link was to pay tribute to the fantastic use of Flash that takes place on the website. It's imaginative, well-organized, and easy to navigate and look at. This is the type of thing Flash Video was made for. Speaking of Vista, the second public beta is out. Check out the Microsoft Blog.

Flash Developers Will Be Watching The Progress On This...

It's a few paragraphs down, but this article at Microsoft-Watch.com mentions some concessions that Microsoft is willing to make to Adobe in order to get Adobe off their backs. One of the concessions is bundling Flash Player, Acrobat Reader and/or Shockwave into Windows Vista. The idea of the Flash Player being built directly into Windows would drive the number of flash-enabled machines up... well, tons. Enough to get a lot of developers excited, for sure. We'll be keeping an eye on Adobe's response.

It's Like The Pied Piper of Cockroach-ville

We're still not at the stage where robots can do our housework or homework, but increasingly, we're seeing a lot of promise in the robot world. For instance, scientists have created a small robot that can interact with cockroaches. The cockroaches react to the pheremone-laced robot, and the robot can in turn react to the cockroaches, thanks to the pheremones that come off of the bugs. The robot can then lead the bugs wherever it's programmed to lead them - presumably, a puddle of Raid. Read more about it at Discovery.com.

CMX Find a File Extension For Dreamweaver

Ever need to find that one file, but weren't really sure which of the seemingly 100's of folders in your site it was located in? Well you could have jumped into your file manager, navigated to the site folder, specified a search, and hope you picked the correct file name, but with Dreamweaver you're always looking to save a little time, right? Well, here's where CMX Find A File comes into play. You can perform a search within any one of your sites, include folder names in your search, search based upon case sensitivity, as well as perform regular expression searches, all from within CMX Find A File.

Check out this Extension by CMX Partner Danilo Celic

Fun and Freebies

Creation Versus Creator

Take a look at this very imaginative Flash project at Album.com. See a stick figure get created in Flash that decides to wage war with his creator within the Flash application.

This Is B-a-a-a-a-d

Here's the object of the game at bbc.co.uk: Put five sheep to sleep with your tranquilizer as quickly as you can. This is supposed to test your reflexes, but I just kept falling asleep.

If You're Going To Dream, Dream Big

Alex Tew, the kid genius behind the Million Dollar Home Page, was threatened with a second Denial Of Service attack by hackers who were trying to blackmail him out of $50,000. Their first DOS attack was the warning. Since he's a kid genius and all, Alex got an internet security company to trade him security for advertising on his website. His site got back up, he contacted the Feds, who are now investigating, and since this story broke, the hits have gone up on his website. Man, we love stories like this. Read more about it at Wired.com.

Persistent Page Indicator

When developing Web sites using good principles of usability, it is good practice to use an indicator showing what page the person is on as they surf through your site. Some people use bread crumbs as well as a persistent page indicator (many times like the down state of the button) indicating that "you are here." This page indication can be acheived by simply placing a class on the proper navigation item (and changing the item it's placed on from page to page). However, when using server-side includes, templates or library items in Dreamweaver, since the same menu is used on each instance of the page, it can be a more challenging process. Don't worry though -- CSS and the descendant selector handle the challenge quite nicely. Come along as we walk through the steps needed to create this effect.

This free article by CMX Partner Stephanie Sullivan can be found here.

Weekly Content Listing

Creating a Registration Page: Part 2

Tom Muck

Dreamweaver contains many built-in tools to aid in quickly building dynamic sites. Part 1 of this series showed how to use the Record Insertion Form Wizard to set up a simple user registration form on a web site. The registration form allows a user to register for a site.

Part 2 will show validation and the user agreement, using more built-in tools of Dreamweaver and a little rudimentary JavaScript. The tutorial will apply equally to PHP, ASP, ColdFusion, and JSP using built in tools.

Part 3 will show how to pass registration details to PayPal or other payment processor for a paid membership-type of site.

The Creating a Registration Page Series:
Creating a Registration Page: Part 1
Creating a Registration Page: Part 2
Creating a Registration Page: Part 3 Coming Soon

IE, Minimum Width, and Ems: Overcoming a CSS Disaster

Rob Williams

Internet Explorer has a lot of CSS bugs and problems. Fortunately, with a bit of help from some friendly JavaScript coders there are ways to get around most of those limitations, sometimes without even having to invalidate your CSS! In this article we'll explore one of these scenarios: using a minimum-width on elements that are based on em's.

Build Seamless Background Image Tiles out of Shapes in Fireworks

Zoe Gillenwater

Tiled background images where a small shape repeats across the web page have come back into style. There are web sites devoted to providing free patterns for you to download and apply to your sites, but what if you want to create your own pattern? You can create any shape you like, using your favorite graphics program, and then set it as a tiling background image using CSS. However, creating a pattern out of your shape that tiles well—without any seams or gutters—takes some work.

In this tutorial, you'll learn how to create seamless background patterns using Fireworks (but the principles can just as easily be used in Photoshop or any other graphics program).

Note: This tutorial doesn't cover how to draw a shape or apply it to your page as a background. Rather, it shows how to take a shape that you want to turn into a seamless pattern and use Fireworks to do just that.

Creating Web Icons: Part 3

Gordon Mackay

Once again we don our magnifying glass and set about creating another three commonly used web icons using Fireworks.

In previous tutorials of this series we created mail icons, shopping cart icons and a few other nice little additions to a good web design. This time we will make a tiny site map icon, an alarm clock icon and an image icon.

So let's open Fireworks and get pushin' some pixels!

The Creating Web Icons Series:
Creating Web Icons: Part 1
Creating Web Icons: Part 2
Creating Web Icons: Part 3

Flash Printing Tasks - Part 5: Building a Preview for the Certificate

Robert Reinhardt

In the last installment of this series, you built a Flash form that passed information to a dynamically created certificate you could print. In this tutorial, you learn how to create a preview window for the certificate. During the process, you learn how to use the Window component. You can preview the finished version of the Flash movie here.

The Flash Printing Task Series:
Flash Printing Tasks - Part 1: Building a Certificate Template in Illustrator and Flash
Flash Printing Tasks - Part 2: Basic Printing of the Certificate
Flash Printing Tasks - Part 3: Adding Dynamic Text to the Certificate
Flash Printing Tasks - Part 4: Creating a Form for Certificate Information
Flash Printing Tasks - Part 5: Building a Preview for the Certificate
Flash Printing Tasks - Part 6: Creating a Color/Grayscale Toggle for the Certificate Preview Window Coming Soon

Converting from C# to VB

Heidi Bautista

Face it. All programmers have a favorite language. And, we're usually pretty vehement about why it's the best choice, too! But it can be a real problem when you're searching for examples and all you find is code written in the other language! This article introduces you to a free online (and downloadable) tool that does a pretty good job of converting C# code into VB. The article also includes general and DW-specific tips to keep in mind when converting code by hand.

Create a Teaser Thumbnail List Using CSS: Part 4

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 in 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.

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

Blends and Masks - A Fireworks Project: Part 2

Jim Babbage

In Part One of this two-part series, we worked with several of Fireworks's tools (new and old) to produce a corporate style cover page in a vertical format.

In Part Two we'll look at how we can take a design and re-purpose it for another use. Most print work is created in a portrait—or vertical—orientation. Most work destined for the screen is designed to fit a landscape—or horizontal—orientation. We will take the image we created in Part 1 and create a horizontal image, which could be used in a kiosk, on a homepage or a PowerPoint Presentation.

The Blends and Masks Series:
Blends and Masks - A Fireworks Project: Part 1
Blends and Masks - A Fireworks Project: Part 2

Approximate download size: 6.3MB

Introducing CMX Jumpstart San Francisco [FREE]

Sheri German

We are pleased to introduce CMX JumpStart San Francisco, a great first CSS layout for students and experienced developers alike. Structured to be as hack free and straightforward as possible, this may be just the JumpStart for you if you have been holding back on CSS layouts so far. Like all JumpStarts, it uses valid XHTML and CSS as its foundation and is 508 and WAI compliant. This two-column, fixed-width layout, described rule by rule in the documentation article, makes a great learning tool.

CMX JumpStart San Francisco for Students (and Anyone)

Sheri German, John Gallant

Automating An Image Gallery with PHP and Your Local Server: Part 1

Many developers have local testing servers running on their development machines to allow for quick offline tests of materials before they are sent to the live server. If you happen to be running a local server on your development machine though there's no reason that it's functionality should be limited to mere page testing. In this article we'll take a look at how you can utilize your local server as a scripting engine to increase your efficiency and perform common tasks more quickly then ever before.

Check out the Article by CMX partner Rob Williams

Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats!

This week's Tip, Trick or Dirty Cheat is courtesy of CMX partner Joseph Balderson

Deleting Authortime Movie Clips

Dynamically created Movie Clips have a positive depth number, and can be removed from the stage dynamically at runtime using the removeMovieClip() method. Unfortunately, you cannot dynamically delete a Movie Clip on the stage at runtime if it was originally placed on the stage in the authoring environment. Such "authortime" Movie Clips have a negative depth number. So to delete an authortime clip from the stage at runtime, simply change its depth to a positive number by using myMovieClip.swapDepths(X), where X is a positive integer. You will then be free to use myMovieClip.removeMovieClip(), and the clip will be successfully deleted from the stage.

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