
Wednesday, June 22nd, 2005
CMX Weekly Newsletter News Fun and Freebies Recent CMX Content Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats Check the News! This Much is Certain: Paypal Might Have Some Competition, But Maybe Not According to insiders (don't insiders seem to know everything?), Google is getting prepared to start their own online payment system which is said to have much in common with Paypal. According to this Wall Street Journal article, 71% of Paypal's revenue came from its use on eBay auctions last year, and accounted for about 23% of eBay's gross for the year. A service like Paypal's, especially if ended up being less expensive or more feature-rich than Paypal's, could affect eBay in a big way. However, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, quoted in this Yahoo! story, says that Google has no intention of "directly competing" with Paypal. That of course is slang for "Paypal will eat our shorts." MAX 2005: Coming to a City Near Someone Macromedia's annual MAX conference is being held in Anaheim, California this year, October 16th through October 19th. As Macromedia says, "Ideas must move to grow." While we don't know what that means, we do know that MAX is one of the best places to go learn more about Macromedia products, and find out what's on the horizon for Macromedia. It will be interesting to see how much the A-word comes up... Jack Kilby Goes To The Great Semiconductor In The Sky Jack Kilby, along with one-time rival Robert Noyce, brought us the first integrated circuit board back in the 50s. His hard work at Texas Instruments earned him several managerial positions. In 2000, Kilby received the Nobel Prize for Physics because of his innovations in the development of the integrated circuit. Jack Kilby was 81 years old when he passed away, but led an interesting life. Here's a great interview with Kilby from TI.Com, and a good summary of his achievements from ZDNet.com. With Features Like This Who Needs Bugs? Even the latest patched-to-the-gills versions of the most popular browsers are susceptible to a particular javascript exploit, according to this article at TechWeb.com. To find out if your browser might be vulnerable, you can run this test at Secunia.com. Oh- and Mac users should run this test as well, since their browsers are vulnerable to the same exploit. Another article at TechWeb.com explains how Microsoft's Advisory points out the flaw, but have not made any moves to make a patch to prevent it. Can It Everyone knows that Pringles potato chips are packed with flavor, but true geeks know that a Pringles tin packs even more of a whollop than what's inside. You can use a Pringles can - or a soup can for that matter - as a "cantenna" to boost your wireless network signal. Check out this article at SignOnSanDiego.com to find out how you can make your own cantenna. Be advised that the FCC says that boosting your wireless signal too much may cause interference with other networks.
Satisfied Customers Speak Out! "Big John and Holly write great stuff and are one of the few out there (both on PIE and on Community MX) actually writing about the real world issues encountered with CSS coding... the practical, real world lessons that you're not likely to find in a beginners book on CSS. This is where I think there is quite a noticeable gap, between the beginners stuff and the really out there bleeding edge CSS. Between the newbies and the Zen Gardeners, there is a significant layer of designers and developers dealing with such issues as covered by BJ and Holly." - Andrew F., commenting on several of many CSS articles written by John Gallant and Holly Bergevin of Community MX 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: "It's a well known fact that computing devices such as the abacus were invented thousands of years ago. But it's not well known that the first use of a common computer protocol occured in the Old Testament. This, of course, was when Moses aborted the Egyptians' process with a control-sea..." — Tom Galloway Need a Cure? Ask Your Mamma! People run searches on health issues quite a bit. So much in fact, that Mamma.com decided to devote a whole search engine to it. At MammaHealth.com, you can run a search on an ailment or condition and the results will come out sorted into four main categories: About, causes, symptoms and treatment. Although the number of links returned for any given ailment is not as great as if you simply typed it into Google or another major search engine, it's pretty handy having the results sorted in such a way that you can pinpoint what you're looking for in an easy and efficient manner. If They Branded It With That Picture Of Liberace, It Would Be a Huge Hit Is Apple's iTunes interface original, or was it inspired by Contois? What is Contois, you ask? It seems to be mostly a patented interface from Contois Music & Technology, and now Contois is suing Apple for infringing on their patent. Contois says that the idea for the interface was probably stolen from them at a 1995 Comdex show by an Apple employee. Read more on this at News.com. We Smell a Rat According to the New Zealand Herald, a rat may have been responsible for taking down New Zealand's stock exchange and some payment machines. Telecom officials are saying that they think a rat may have chewed through some of their fiber optic cable, effectively crippling their network. Retailers Association Auckland regional manager Russell Sinclair actually said "It certainly bites" when asked about the situation. No, we did not make that up. The Mobile Plate Hunter 900 - A Cop's New Best Friend The Police force in Los Angeles have been testing the Mobile Plate Hunter 900, a device that can read about 500 license plate numbers per hour. The MPH 900 compares those license plate numbers to a database of stolen vehicles and alerts the police when it finds a match. In the course of one night, the MPH 900 resulted in the recovery of seven stolen vehicles and several arrests. Its being tested in other parts of the U.S. as well, and if it's successful - and so far it is - quite a few more stolen vehicles could be recovered than ever before. More on this at Wired.com. Now if the MPH 900 could just tell us where we put our car keys... In a Related Story, Scientists Say The Sky is Blue In an ode to the obvious, U.S. researchers say that talking on a cell phone while driving can be a distraction. In this article from Reuters, Steven Yantis, a professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, said "Our research helps explain why talking on a cell phone can impair driving performance." But that's just common sense, isn't it? I mean, it's not brain sci... oops.
CMX Table Sorter Extension for Dreamweaver The ability for users to re-organize tabular data to better suit their individual requirements has become an almost expected attribute of digital data. Many web sites currently provide this ability by relying on server-side coding and database queries to constantly re-sort the data before it's transferred to the client. This causes both increased server load and inconvenient delays for users as they wait for the data to be reloaded. The CMX Table Sorter behavior allows you to provide those same sorting abilities for your HTML table without having to waste time and resources on server-side sorting methods. This extension has been updated 4/18/05. Please download the zipfile and replace the old extension with the newer one. Take a look at this extension by CMX Partner Rob Williams
Fun and Freebies! Does Rock and Roll Cloud Your Judgement? You Decide... Promoting your music can be tough. Why make it even tougher by having an album cover that is so completely awful it lands on a joke page? Here are a couple dozen really awful album covers from DamnFunnyPictures.com. Some People Should Get a Hobby. But Not This Hobby! Do you like Star Wars? Do you like Origami? Now take both of them and put them together, and what do you have? Star Wars Origami, of course! Another Addicting Game The idea is to protect your castle, but I just had fun dropping people out of the air. Check it out at 2FlashGames.com.
Form Processing: Post and Get - What Are They? (Free) When we process forms we have a choice of methods from which we can utilise to pass our data from the form page to the response. The response is the page that does all the work and it need not even be a separate page, it can be the same page that looks for a variable before deciding how it will react to the incoming information. We do not want to busy ourselves with that at the moment though, we are going to look fairly and squarely at the methods that are used for passing data from the form page to the response page. This free article by CMX Partner Adrian Senior can be found here.
Weekly Content Listing Data Binding in Flash MX 2004 - Part 4: Styling Label and TextArea Components Robert Reinhardt Using the data binding features of Flash MX 2004 UI components doesn't mean you have to sacrifice a unique look-and-feel for your Flash movies. In this next tutorial of the data binding series, you learn how to use the setStyle() method of the UI components to control text formatting in a variety of scopes, from document-wide to individual instances. About Background Images Linda Rathgeber When they are well thought out, background images can add a lot of pizzazz to your web site at a very low cost in bandwidth. They are a simple and effective way to maintain visual consistency throughout the site, plus introduce color, pattern, and texture. Laszlo: Part 4 - Laszlo Widgets and Elements Arman Danesh In this installment of the our introductory series about Laszlo, we learn about a wide range of elements you can include in your Laszlo applications including text, images and form widgets. Drawing on Nature: Converting a Photo to a Vector Design Kim Cavanaugh I'll be the first to admit that my drawing skills are not the most advanced. Oh, I can draw a little bit, but for really complicated drawings or those that I want to make available for paying clients, I need some help. That's where a simple photograph and the tools in Fireworks can come into play. In this series of 4 video lessons, you'll see the techniques I used to create a logo featuring a drawing of a banana tree leaf. The banana leaf was drawn using the Pen tool by working directly on top of a photo I took of a banana tree in my front yard. By following the shape of something from nature, I was able to get just the look I wanted for this particular logo. Something not too photo realistic, but which evokes the tropical feel of a big leaf on a banana tree. This video tutorial series will show you how it was done. Dynamic CSAs - Part 2: Client/Server Communication Rob Williams In the articles leading up to this point we've looked at and explored all of the various client-side technologies and methods that make Dynamic Client-Side Applications so appealing and revolutionary from a user's point of view. We've seen how JavaScript can be used to manipulate CSS and the DOM, and as a result, give the user the ability to change and interact with web sites in entirely new and different ways; all in real time without having to wait for page reloads and server responses. As important as all of that has been though, it's only the first aspect of an effective Dynamic CSA. In this article we'll begin to explore how we can take all of that client-side interactivity and tie it back into server-side functionality; after all, there's no point in having a fantastic user interface that only presents a single piece of information and then has to be reloaded. The Dynamic CSAs Series: Dynamic CSAs - Part 1: Interactivity Events Dynamic CSAs - Part 2: Client/Server communication Dynamic CSAs - Part 3: Bringing it All Together Coming Soon Dynamic CSAs - Part 4: Completing the Notepad Coming Soon Styling Skip Nav Links Zoe Gillenwater In Using Skip Nav Links, you learned why skip navigation links are important for the accessibility of your web pages, as well as how to implement them. In this followup tutorial, you'll learn how to style your skip nav links using CSS to hide them from visual users. Before reading this article, please keep in mind that hiding skip nav links is not recommended because it renders them useless to some of the users they are supposed to benefit. If you can, leave your skip nav link visible to help as many people as possible with it. However, I know that some clients may insist that the link be hidden, so I will show you how to hide your skip nav links in a variety of ways. I'll start out with the worst methods and move to the best, finishing with a method that can return the usefulness of your hidden skip nav links to keyboard users. Organizing Data: Part 1 [FREE] Joel Martinez Ever since I began my career as a programmer, I have been asked time and time again to create applications to organize data, provide workflows, execute business processes. Only through the magic of time have I come to realize that I implement the same code over and over. Approximately 99% of business applications written are variations on the same structure and navigation. Once you realize this, several things are accomplished. Less time deciding "how the app is going to look". After collecting and analyzing the requirements, you already have a template of sorts you can use for the various screens. The ability to more easily estimate how long a screen will take. Usability ... once users have been trained on how a certain screen works, they will be able to intuitively figure out the next app if it looks and feels the same. Now, I'm not talking about visual design here ... I'm referring to things such as navigation, workflow, instructions. Effectively organizing data and information is an important skill which will give you a lot of bang for your development buck. I will touch on a few of these topics in detail and give some examples of what you can do to build up a repertoire of "app design templates" in this, the first of a series on organizing data and information. Digital Video: What Happens Before the FLV? Tom Green You are handed a QuickTime movie and told, "Get it ready for web playback." Here's what you have to know about that video, how it was created, and why, sometimes, video simply doesn't work. Learning PHP - Part 3: Basic Content Management Thomas Pletcher In Part 3 of the Learning PHP series, you'll learn how to use PHP and MySQL to build a basic, working content management system that you can customize for any site. The Learning PHP Series: Learning PHP - Part 1 Learning PHP - Part 2 Learning PHP - Part 3: Basic Content Management Using the Macromedia Flash / JavaScript Integration Kit [FREE] Danny Patterson The Flash/JavaScript Integration Kit was developed by Christian Cantrell and Mike Chambers at Macromedia. It was developed to make the communication between Flash and JavaScript easier to implement. This isn't a new technology, but it's a straightforward way to implement this type of communication between these different pieces of your application. This article discusses the benefits of the Integration Kit and gives a simple demonstration of how it can be used.
Sending Email From Your ASP.NET Application - Part 1 This is one of the most common tasks for an ASP.NET developer. Fortunately, it's quick and easy. In this series of tutorials, we'll walk through the process of creating and sending email messages for a variety of scenarios. Part 1 introduces you to the two ASP.NET classes used (MailMessage and SmtpMail) and demonstrates how to create a simple feedback form for your site. Later on we'll explore how to create nice-looking HTML messages that include images, links, and attachments. Sample code written in both C# and VB is included. Check out the Article by CMX Partner Heidi Bautista
Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats! This week's Tip, Trick or Dirty Cheat is courtesy of Harlene, CMX Newsletter Subscriber. Shortcut For Increasing the Canvas Size in Fireworks, Part II In last week's newsletter, we gave you a shortcut for increasing the canvas size in Fireworks. One of our newsletter subscribers emailed us to say the following: "Regarding the cool tip from Tom Green in this week's newsletter, it appears that on a Mac you can't drag a crop area larger than the actual image. However, you can resize the crop area by dragging on the size boxes, then press Return and the canvas will resize. You can treat the sides independently and resize the canvas on whichever side you wish." 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!

This Much is Certain: Paypal Might Have Some Competition, But Maybe Not

According to insiders (don't insiders seem to know everything?), Google is getting prepared to start their own online payment system which is said to have much in common with Paypal. According to this Wall Street Journal article, 71% of Paypal's revenue came from its use on eBay auctions last year, and accounted for about 23% of eBay's gross for the year. A service like Paypal's, especially if ended up being less expensive or more feature-rich than Paypal's, could affect eBay in a big way. However, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, quoted in this Yahoo! story, says that Google has no intention of "directly competing" with Paypal. That of course is slang for "Paypal will eat our shorts."

MAX 2005: Coming to a City Near Someone

Macromedia's annual MAX conference is being held in Anaheim, California this year, October 16th through October 19th. As Macromedia says, "Ideas must move to grow." While we don't know what that means, we do know that MAX is one of the best places to go learn more about Macromedia products, and find out what's on the horizon for Macromedia. It will be interesting to see how much the A-word comes up...

Jack Kilby Goes To The Great Semiconductor In The Sky

Jack Kilby, along with one-time rival Robert Noyce, brought us the first integrated circuit board back in the 50s. His hard work at Texas Instruments earned him several managerial positions. In 2000, Kilby received the Nobel Prize for Physics because of his innovations in the development of the integrated circuit. Jack Kilby was 81 years old when he passed away, but led an interesting life. Here's a great interview with Kilby from TI.Com, and a good summary of his achievements from ZDNet.com.

With Features Like This Who Needs Bugs?

Even the latest patched-to-the-gills versions of the most popular browsers are susceptible to a particular javascript exploit, according to this article at TechWeb.com. To find out if your browser might be vulnerable, you can run this test at Secunia.com. Oh- and Mac users should run this test as well, since their browsers are vulnerable to the same exploit. Another article at TechWeb.com explains how Microsoft's Advisory points out the flaw, but have not made any moves to make a patch to prevent it.

Can It

Everyone knows that Pringles potato chips are packed with flavor, but true geeks know that a Pringles tin packs even more of a whollop than what's inside. You can use a Pringles can - or a soup can for that matter - as a "cantenna" to boost your wireless network signal. Check out this article at SignOnSanDiego.com to find out how you can make your own cantenna. Be advised that the FCC says that boosting your wireless signal too much may cause interference with other networks.

Satisfied Customers Speak Out!

"Big John and Holly write great stuff and are one of the few out there (both on PIE and on Community MX) actually writing about the real world issues encountered with CSS coding... the practical, real world lessons that you're not likely to find in a beginners book on CSS. This is where I think there is quite a noticeable gap, between the beginners stuff and the really out there bleeding edge CSS. Between the newbies and the Zen Gardeners, there is a significant layer of designers and developers dealing with such issues as covered by BJ and Holly."

- Andrew F., commenting on several of many CSS articles written by John Gallant and Holly Bergevin of Community MX

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:

"It's a well known fact that computing devices such as the abacus were invented thousands of years ago. But it's not well known that the first use of a common computer protocol occured in the Old Testament. This, of course, was when Moses aborted the Egyptians' process with a control-sea..." — Tom Galloway

Need a Cure? Ask Your Mamma!

People run searches on health issues quite a bit. So much in fact, that Mamma.com decided to devote a whole search engine to it. At MammaHealth.com, you can run a search on an ailment or condition and the results will come out sorted into four main categories: About, causes, symptoms and treatment. Although the number of links returned for any given ailment is not as great as if you simply typed it into Google or another major search engine, it's pretty handy having the results sorted in such a way that you can pinpoint what you're looking for in an easy and efficient manner.

If They Branded It With That Picture Of Liberace, It Would Be a Huge Hit

Is Apple's iTunes interface original, or was it inspired by Contois? What is Contois, you ask? It seems to be mostly a patented interface from Contois Music & Technology, and now Contois is suing Apple for infringing on their patent. Contois says that the idea for the interface was probably stolen from them at a 1995 Comdex show by an Apple employee. Read more on this at News.com.

We Smell a Rat

According to the New Zealand Herald, a rat may have been responsible for taking down New Zealand's stock exchange and some payment machines. Telecom officials are saying that they think a rat may have chewed through some of their fiber optic cable, effectively crippling their network. Retailers Association Auckland regional manager Russell Sinclair actually said "It certainly bites" when asked about the situation. No, we did not make that up.

The Mobile Plate Hunter 900 - A Cop's New Best Friend

The Police force in Los Angeles have been testing the Mobile Plate Hunter 900, a device that can read about 500 license plate numbers per hour. The MPH 900 compares those license plate numbers to a database of stolen vehicles and alerts the police when it finds a match. In the course of one night, the MPH 900 resulted in the recovery of seven stolen vehicles and several arrests. Its being tested in other parts of the U.S. as well, and if it's successful - and so far it is - quite a few more stolen vehicles could be recovered than ever before. More on this at Wired.com. Now if the MPH 900 could just tell us where we put our car keys...

In a Related Story, Scientists Say The Sky is Blue

In an ode to the obvious, U.S. researchers say that talking on a cell phone while driving can be a distraction. In this article from Reuters, Steven Yantis, a professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, said "Our research helps explain why talking on a cell phone can impair driving performance." But that's just common sense, isn't it? I mean, it's not brain sci... oops.

CMX Table Sorter Extension for Dreamweaver

The ability for users to re-organize tabular data to better suit their individual requirements has become an almost expected attribute of digital data. Many web sites currently provide this ability by relying on server-side coding and database queries to constantly re-sort the data before it's transferred to the client. This causes both increased server load and inconvenient delays for users as they wait for the data to be reloaded.
The CMX Table Sorter behavior allows you to provide those same sorting abilities for your HTML table without having to waste time and resources on server-side sorting methods.

This extension has been updated 4/18/05. Please download the zipfile and replace the old extension with the newer one.

Take a look at this extension by CMX Partner Rob Williams

Fun and Freebies!

Does Rock and Roll Cloud Your Judgement? You Decide...

Promoting your music can be tough. Why make it even tougher by having an album cover that is so completely awful it lands on a joke page? Here are a couple dozen really awful album covers from DamnFunnyPictures.com.

Some People Should Get a Hobby. But Not This Hobby!

Do you like Star Wars? Do you like Origami? Now take both of them and put them together, and what do you have? Star Wars Origami, of course!

Another Addicting Game

The idea is to protect your castle, but I just had fun dropping people out of the air. Check it out at 2FlashGames.com.

Form Processing: Post and Get - What Are They? (Free)

When we process forms we have a choice of methods from which we can utilise to pass our data from the form page to the response. The response is the page that does all the work and it need not even be a separate page, it can be the same page that looks for a variable before deciding how it will react to the incoming information.
We do not want to busy ourselves with that at the moment though, we are going to look fairly and squarely at the methods that are used for passing data from the form page to the response page.

This free article by CMX Partner Adrian Senior can be found here.

Weekly Content Listing

Data Binding in Flash MX 2004 - Part 4: Styling Label and TextArea Components

Robert Reinhardt

Using the data binding features of Flash MX 2004 UI components doesn't mean you have to sacrifice a unique look-and-feel for your Flash movies. In this next tutorial of the data binding series, you learn how to use the setStyle() method of the UI components to control text formatting in a variety of scopes, from document-wide to individual instances.

About Background Images

Linda Rathgeber

When they are well thought out, background images can add a lot of pizzazz to your web site at a very low cost in bandwidth. They are a simple and effective way to maintain visual consistency throughout the site, plus introduce color, pattern, and texture.

Laszlo: Part 4 - Laszlo Widgets and Elements

Arman Danesh

In this installment of the our introductory series about Laszlo, we learn about a wide range of elements you can include in your Laszlo applications including text, images and form widgets.

Drawing on Nature: Converting a Photo to a Vector Design

Kim Cavanaugh

I'll be the first to admit that my drawing skills are not the most advanced. Oh, I can draw a little bit, but for really complicated drawings or those that I want to make available for paying clients, I need some help. That's where a simple photograph and the tools in Fireworks can come into play.

In this series of 4 video lessons, you'll see the techniques I used to create a logo featuring a drawing of a banana tree leaf. The banana leaf was drawn using the Pen tool by working directly on top of a photo I took of a banana tree in my front yard. By following the shape of something from nature, I was able to get just the look I wanted for this particular logo. Something not too photo realistic, but which evokes the tropical feel of a big leaf on a banana tree. This video tutorial series will show you how it was done.

Dynamic CSAs - Part 2: Client/Server Communication

Rob Williams

In the articles leading up to this point we've looked at and explored all of the various client-side technologies and methods that make Dynamic Client-Side Applications so appealing and revolutionary from a user's point of view. We've seen how JavaScript can be used to manipulate CSS and the DOM, and as a result, give the user the ability to change and interact with web sites in entirely new and different ways; all in real time without having to wait for page reloads and server responses. As important as all of that has been though, it's only the first aspect of an effective Dynamic CSA.

In this article we'll begin to explore how we can take all of that client-side interactivity and tie it back into server-side functionality; after all, there's no point in having a fantastic user interface that only presents a single piece of information and then has to be reloaded.

The Dynamic CSAs Series:
Dynamic CSAs - Part 1: Interactivity Events
Dynamic CSAs - Part 2: Client/Server communication
Dynamic CSAs - Part 3: Bringing it All Together Coming Soon
Dynamic CSAs - Part 4: Completing the Notepad Coming Soon

Styling Skip Nav Links

Zoe Gillenwater

In Using Skip Nav Links, you learned why skip navigation links are important for the accessibility of your web pages, as well as how to implement them. In this followup tutorial, you'll learn how to style your skip nav links using CSS to hide them from visual users.

Before reading this article, please keep in mind that hiding skip nav links is not recommended because it renders them useless to some of the users they are supposed to benefit. If you can, leave your skip nav link visible to help as many people as possible with it. However, I know that some clients may insist that the link be hidden, so I will show you how to hide your skip nav links in a variety of ways. I'll start out with the worst methods and move to the best, finishing with a method that can return the usefulness of your hidden skip nav links to keyboard users.

Organizing Data: Part 1 [FREE]

Joel Martinez

Ever since I began my career as a programmer, I have been asked time and time again to create applications to organize data, provide workflows, execute business processes. Only through the magic of time have I come to realize that I implement the same code over and over. Approximately 99% of business applications written are variations on the same structure and navigation. Once you realize this, several things are accomplished.

Less time deciding "how the app is going to look". After collecting and analyzing the requirements, you already have a template of sorts you can use for the various screens.
The ability to more easily estimate how long a screen will take.
Usability ... once users have been trained on how a certain screen works, they will be able to intuitively figure out the next app if it looks and feels the same.

Now, I'm not talking about visual design here ... I'm referring to things such as navigation, workflow, instructions. Effectively organizing data and information is an important skill which will give you a lot of bang for your development buck. I will touch on a few of these topics in detail and give some examples of what you can do to build up a repertoire of "app design templates" in this, the first of a series on organizing data and information.

Digital Video: What Happens Before the FLV?

Tom Green

You are handed a QuickTime movie and told, "Get it ready for web playback." Here's what you have to know about that video, how it was created, and why, sometimes, video simply doesn't work.

Learning PHP - Part 3: Basic Content Management

Thomas Pletcher

In Part 3 of the Learning PHP series, you'll learn how to use PHP and MySQL to build a basic, working content management system that you can customize for any site.

The Learning PHP Series:
Learning PHP - Part 1
Learning PHP - Part 2
Learning PHP - Part 3: Basic Content Management

Using the Macromedia Flash / JavaScript Integration Kit [FREE]

Danny Patterson

The Flash/JavaScript Integration Kit was developed by Christian Cantrell and Mike Chambers at Macromedia. It was developed to make the communication between Flash and JavaScript easier to implement. This isn't a new technology, but it's a straightforward way to implement this type of communication between these different pieces of your application. This article discusses the benefits of the Integration Kit and gives a simple demonstration of how it can be used.

Sending Email From Your ASP.NET Application - Part 1

This is one of the most common tasks for an ASP.NET developer. Fortunately, it's quick and easy. In this series of tutorials, we'll walk through the process of creating and sending email messages for a variety of scenarios.
Part 1 introduces you to the two ASP.NET classes used (MailMessage and SmtpMail) and demonstrates how to create a simple feedback form for your site. Later on we'll explore how to create nice-looking HTML messages that include images, links, and attachments. Sample code written in both C# and VB is included.

Check out the Article by CMX Partner Heidi Bautista

Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats!

This week's Tip, Trick or Dirty Cheat is courtesy of Harlene, CMX Newsletter Subscriber.

Shortcut For Increasing the Canvas Size in Fireworks, Part II

In last week's newsletter, we gave you a shortcut for increasing the canvas size in Fireworks. One of our newsletter subscribers emailed us to say the following:

"Regarding the cool tip from Tom Green in this week's newsletter, it appears that on a Mac you can't drag a crop area larger than the actual image. However, you can resize the crop area by dragging on the size boxes, then press Return and the canvas will resize. You can treat the sides independently and resize the canvas on whichever side you wish."

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!