
Wednesday, July 18th, 2007
CMX Weekly Newsletter News Fun and Freebies Recent CMX Content Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats Check the News! Thanks, Ray! Ray Camden has created a ColdFusion blog aggregator so that all of ColdFusion fanatics can easily monitor all of the latest ColdFusion happenings easily. Incidentally, Ray created the aggregator using two custom CFC's and ColdFusion 8, demonstrating the power that we'll be seeing in the latest version of ColdFusion. The blog is a direct link to a wealth of ColdFusion information, from tips to news to some fantastic Flex and XML information. Just to show he's not showing off, Ray has made the source code for this CF aggregator available to you. Is The Jig Up For Facebook? While attending Harvard a few years back, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg helped build the "Harvard Connection" which turned out to be the beginning of social networking site ConnectU. Zuckerberg is now being taken to court for stealing the idea and some of the code behind ConnectU, and using it as the foundation for Facebook.com. Zuckerberg maintains that Harvard Connection was little more than a personals page and not a viable company. Is Zuckerberg going to use the Bill Gates defense? The Harvard Crimson has their own take on their alumni. Open Up To Open Source We wanted to share this list of one hundred open source downloads from Datamation. As they say, it's not the top one hundred, the most popular one hundred, or anything like that. It's just a list of one hundred really good open source applications, ranging from audio/video tools to developer and file sharing tools. One that I like is MediaEncoder, which lets you convert many different file types. Is He Saying That Spry Is Fat? Rey Bango's concern over the weight of some of his Spry javascript triggered him to run it through the javascript packer created by Dean Edwards. Unfortunately, the Spry component would no longer run after that. However, ShrinkSafe, another javascript compressor, did the job and got Rey's Spry javascript down from 129k to about 72k. Quite a difference, and now his js should run a bit more efficiently. Sure, it's not going to make a huge difference on page load, but every little bit helps. Thanks for posting that tip, Rey. Veoh's New Motto: "We Really Don't Care What You Think" Veoh.com has hosted video on their website for several years now. Their business model isn't much different than YouTube's except for one important distinction: Veoh doesn't seem to care whether or not they're violating any copyright laws. At least YouTube would reply to a lawsuit with an obligatory "Oh dang... yeah, we'll fix that." Veoh on the other hand, believe that because they are only streaming videos that are being streamed elsewhere already, nothing is being stolen. Veoh also says that any advertising that was streamed with the original video is kept in the Veoh stream, so advertisers don't lose out either. So far, Veoh has pretty much slid under the radar, but that may change once Veoh makes VeohTV available to the public. Financed by some pretty big players like Time Warner, VeohTV will stream whole television shows, presumably without the permission of the original copyright holder. NYTimes.com has an article about Veoh's latest move.
Satisfied Customers Speak Out! "Something else I didn't know you could do in Dreamweaver. Very cool! I actually got this working!" CMX Subscriber Jan M., commenting on Tom Muck's FREE article "Feed Tools in Dreamweaver 8 and CS3: RSS and XSL" 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: "My mother drew a distinction between achievement and success. She said that achievement is the knowledge that you have studied and worked hard and done the best that is in you. Success is being praised by others. That is nice but not as important or satisfying. Always aim for achievement and forget about success." — Helen Hayes ColdFusion Dead? Nuh-uh... Ever since ColdFusion came out in May of 1995, people have reported on its demise. Even with the release of ColdFusion 8, which is nothing short of a complete revitalization of the CF language, SoftwareDeveloper.com put out a list of programming languages that never made it, and included ColdFusion on the list. I saw that article when it came out, but didn't put it in the newsletter because it was nonsensical at best, and certainly didn't make any kind of factual case against Coldfusion. AdamFortuna.com felt the same way, but defends CF much better than I could. Silverlight At The End Of The Tunnel The buzz surrounding Microsoft's Silverlight has died down recently. No one's really touting it as the Flash-killer anymore. That doesn't mean that it won't be widely used at some point though, and there has been talk about Silverlight being a practical and viable alternative to Flash. But still, not many folks know exactly what the heck it is. PlentyOfCode.com has a great list of resources available to folks who are either already working with Silverlight or just want to find out more about it. Don't Come 'Round Here No More Just when you thought all of the meta tags had been created that would ever be created, Google decides to release another one. The "Unavailable after" meta tag will tell Google's web crawler to stop indexing this page after a specified date. Like the article at SearchEngineLand.com says, this would be great if you want to make promotions last to a certain date and want to make sure that Google no longer shows them in their results when the promotion is over. Where Have Wii Seen This Before? The folks at Logitech just came out with a pretty cool mouse. While it's not too proud to act as a traditional laser mouse, it's too cool to be chained down to your desktop. The MX Air mouse can be used like a remote control that reacts to motion, not unlike the Nintendo Wii. The MX Air will set you back $150 or so. Is it worth it? Check out this review at ExtremeTech.com. But What About Bugs Bunny Cartoons? imeem.com is a social networking website aimed at folks who like to share all types of media with one another. At one point, Warner Music Group accused imeem of copyright infringement due to much of the WMG content that was being streamed there without permission. After a meeting between the two companies, WMG has agreed to allow imeem to share the entire Warner music and video catalog with their members. In exchange, WMG gets some of imeem's advertising revenue. We're going to see more and more of this as record exec's realize that their industry is changing.
CMX Font Size Changer Extension Change the font size on your webpage with the JavaScript code from this handy extension. Enter the font sizes you want and then click OK, everything else is done for you ... it really is that easy! Check out this Dreamweaver Extension by CMX Partner Paul Davis
Fun and Freebies Me Like Internet When the internet first came along, you can imagine that it was tough for reporters to fully grasp the complexity of it, or where it was going. This news report posted at YouTube.com talks about the growing phenomenon of "Internet." The Internet Has Crashed The Onion seems to find all the stories everyone else misses. We're not sure how everyone else glossed over the recent story of Eric Tipton, who had way too many programs open on his computer and crashed the internet, causing everyone using the internet to see the same error message. Hypnotic... What happens if you take a ton of screen sirens from the 20s up to present day and morphed them from one to the next, in chronological order? Not much really. It sounded pretty dorky, and it is. But we couldn't look away. See it at BoreMe.com.
Using the Spry Accordion Widget One of the new features in Dreamweaver CS3 is the integration of the Spry javascript library. In this series, we'll look at using Dreamweaver CS3 to insert, integrate and modify the Spry Accordion widget. Give your pages the pizzazz they deserve! This free article by Community MX Author Stephanie Sullivan can be found here.
Weekly Content Listing Creating Custom UIComponents in Flex 2: Lesson 1 - Overview [FREE] Steve Schelter When working in the Flex 2 environment, there are many times where you might find yourself in need of a component that does not exist. The Flex SDK offers plenty of extensibility for building custom UI components that can plug seamlessly into the existing framework. In the first lesson of this series, we will cover a brief overview of the life-cycle of a custom UI component. Yahoo! Pipes: Create a Persistent News Search with Web Services Kim Cavanaugh Yahoo Pipes has been on my personal radar since it was announced in February of this year. At the time of its rollout there was a great deal of interest in Pipes around the web design world. Yahoo provided what appeared to be an easy way for anyone (even non-developers like myself) to mash-up RSS feeds into new web services. While that may seem like no big deal, my own experiences and research into current trends indicates that there is a growing demand for data that has been customized and repurposed to fit particular audiences. If you're developing web sites for customers, the ability to provide them with live data that can be displayed on their site will be a valuable service that just may set you apart from your competition. You don't even have to tell anyone how easy Yahoo makes this. In this series of articles we'll be looking at the world of Yahoo Pipes from both exploratory and practical viewpoints. We'll start out by looking at the Pipes design environment and previewing feeds developed and shared by others in the Pipes community. From there you'll build your first customized feed and finish things up with a look at how feeds published using the Pipes service can be consumed in different ways on your own sites. In this article you'll learn a little how persistent searches can be created in both Google News and Yahoo News services. Since both of these giants of web indexing also provide the capacity to output a feed as structured RSS you can pull the results into Yahoo Pipes and mash them together into one, deep-searching, consolidated feed. You'll also find out how individual feeds are created and how some simple modules in the Yahoo Pipes environment are used to combine, aggregate, filter, and limit the results that are returned. This is an incredibly powerful piece of technology that you can use to your advantage, or provide as a service to your clients. The Yahoo! Pipes Series: Yahoo! Pipes: An Introduction Yahoo! Pipes: Mash-up a Customized News Feed Yahoo! Pipes: Create a Persistent News Search with Web Services Yahoo! Pipes: Options for Publishing a Customized RSS Feed Coming Soon The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part Ten Sheri German In part ten of the Dreamweaver web Standards Lesson Plan series, you will complete the bug squashing work you started in part nine, as well as learn some "best practices" for feeding Internet Explorer the unique styles it needs. Here is what you will do in this tutorial: Identify the 3-pixel text jog bug Use the CSS Advisor to find solutions to fix the bug Create an Internet Explorer specific style sheet for all IE bugs from lessons nine and ten Use Conditional Comments to feed the style sheet to Internet Explorer only The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series: The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 1 The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 2 The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 3 The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 4 The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 5 The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 6 The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 7 The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 8 The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 9 The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 10 XML Captions for Video [FREE] Tom Green, David Stiller Embed an XML document into an FLV and you too can add closed captions to your FLV files. Find out how in this, the fourth of our excerpts, from Foundation Flash CS3 for Designers by friendsofED written by Community MX partners David Stiller and Tom Green. Adding Audio to Flash CS3 [FREE] Tom Green, David Stiller In this, the third of eight excerpts from the soon-to-be released Foundation Flash CS3 for Designers (friendsofED) book, Community MX partners Tom Green and David Stiller walk you through the basics of audio in Flash. Must-Have Extensions for Fireworks CS3 [FREE] Jim Babbage A new software release is always kind of exciting, but with the release of products like Fireworks and Dreamweaver, it's even better. Not only can you expect new goodies in the application itself, but you can expect extension developers to create other cool commands and tools for the applications. Fireworks CS3 has only been out for a short time, and already there is already an impressive list of new extensions we can make use of. This article will outline some of those extensions and point you to where you can find them. And did I mention that all these extensions and commands are FREE? Draw a Lightbulb in Illustrator CS2 or CS3 Kim Dudley Recently many devoted Freehand users have been forced to move to Illustrator, and with the inclusion of Illustrator in the CS3 web premium bundle, many web designers are discovering Illustrator's assets. Fireworks, Illustrator and Freehand are all great applications for creating graphic elements. Although Fireworks is a bitmapped based application and Freehand and Illustrator are vector drawing applications, all three programs can achieve very similar results. In this tutorial we will recreate a graphic drawn in a previous article called Creating a Light bulb in Freehand MX. In that tutorial I recreated a light bulb using Freehand. The original image was created using Fireworks in a tutorial by Jim Babbage titled A Bright Idea. This time, instead of using Fireworks or Freehand, we will use Illustrator's drawing tools to create the following light bulb. Some of the tools we will use include the: Ellipse tool Rectangle tool Align palette Pathfinder panel Gradient Mesh Pen tools Move tool Gradient panel Inner and Outer Glow Effects This tutorial will be beneficial to those learning Illustrator or if you are a Fireworks or Freehand user looking to discover how similar things are done in Illustrator. I will also point out any changes between CS2 and CS3 so if you have recently upgraded or are considering upgrading, you will see some of the recent changes. Flex Community MX RSS Reader - Part 2 Chaz Chumley XML (eXtensible Markup Language) has been around for quite awhile and is used from anything as common as RSS feeds to sharing data with web services. Working with XML is actually not that difficult. Consuming XML within Flex is even easier with the use of the HTTPService object. Building upon our last article, we will add some interactivity to our Flex CommunityMX RSS Reader by actually looking at how to retrieve an use an XML feed with a DataGrid, as well as explore using bindings to bind a TextArea to the columns of the DataGrid so that we can display all the results from our XML DataSet and filter on a selection to preview the contents of an article. The Flex Community MX RSS Reader Series: Flex Community MX RSS Reader - Part 1 Flex Community MX RSS Reader - Part 2 Sharing Fonts in ActionScript 3.0 - Part 1: Creating a Font SWF [FREE] Robert Reinhardt In this tutorial series, you learn how to use the new Font class in ActionScript 3.0 and Flash Player 9. The Font class enables you to embed one or more fonts in a Flash movie (SWF file), and reuse the font with other SWF files. In this tutorial, you learn how to create a font SWF file and load it into another Flash movie. Making Positioned Elements Obey the Flow - Part Two John Gallant, Holly Bergevin Auto-positioning is very interesting, but is it any good for real web pages? Follow along as we employ auto-positioning to achieve at least one useful design goal, fixed column headings. Put on your thinking cap because this stuff is tricky!
Navigating to Flash Video Cue Points by Name The FLVPlayback component that shipped with Flash 8 ushered in a tidy mechanism for seeking to video cue points. All you have to do is reference the FLVPlayback instance by its instance name and invoke the seekToNavCuePoint() method. This method lets you pass in a specific time, cue point name, or cue point object as the parameter, and boom — you're in. The video jumps to that point in the FLV file. FLVPlayback is a boon, because it makes things easy, but there are times when, for various reasons, you may want to avoid the 33KB penalty for using a component (the ActionScript 2.0 version is 33KB; the ActionScript 3.0 version, available in Flash CS3, weighs 49KB). The NetConnection and NetStream classes provide an easy way to display video at a svelte 3KB, but neither of them supports a seek-related method that accepts cue point names. If you know the cue point's time value, you're fine — but names sure are convenient! What to do? If this is your predicament, ActionScript 3.0 provides an escape hatch via the onMetaData event. Check out the Article by CMX partner David Stiller
Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats! This week's Tip, Trick or Dirty Cheat is courtesy of CMX Partner Joseph Balderson Opening Images From The Web If you cut and paste a URL to an image file in the Open dialog in Photoshop, Fireworks or Illustrator CS3, it will download the image and open it up for editing. This applies to SVG, PNG, JPG, or any file format that Photoshop, Fireworks or Illustrator can open. A quick and easy way to edit web images on the fly. 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!

Thanks, Ray!

Ray Camden has created a ColdFusion blog aggregator so that all of ColdFusion fanatics can easily monitor all of the latest ColdFusion happenings easily. Incidentally, Ray created the aggregator using two custom CFC's and ColdFusion 8, demonstrating the power that we'll be seeing in the latest version of ColdFusion. The blog is a direct link to a wealth of ColdFusion information, from tips to news to some fantastic Flex and XML information. Just to show he's not showing off, Ray has made the source code for this CF aggregator available to you.

Is The Jig Up For Facebook?

While attending Harvard a few years back, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg helped build the "Harvard Connection" which turned out to be the beginning of social networking site ConnectU. Zuckerberg is now being taken to court for stealing the idea and some of the code behind ConnectU, and using it as the foundation for Facebook.com. Zuckerberg maintains that Harvard Connection was little more than a personals page and not a viable company. Is Zuckerberg going to use the Bill Gates defense? The Harvard Crimson has their own take on their alumni.

Open Up To Open Source

We wanted to share this list of one hundred open source downloads from Datamation. As they say, it's not the top one hundred, the most popular one hundred, or anything like that. It's just a list of one hundred really good open source applications, ranging from audio/video tools to developer and file sharing tools. One that I like is MediaEncoder, which lets you convert many different file types.

Is He Saying That Spry Is Fat?

Rey Bango's concern over the weight of some of his Spry javascript triggered him to run it through the javascript packer created by Dean Edwards. Unfortunately, the Spry component would no longer run after that. However, ShrinkSafe, another javascript compressor, did the job and got Rey's Spry javascript down from 129k to about 72k. Quite a difference, and now his js should run a bit more efficiently. Sure, it's not going to make a huge difference on page load, but every little bit helps. Thanks for posting that tip, Rey.

Veoh's New Motto: "We Really Don't Care What You Think"

Veoh.com has hosted video on their website for several years now. Their business model isn't much different than YouTube's except for one important distinction: Veoh doesn't seem to care whether or not they're violating any copyright laws. At least YouTube would reply to a lawsuit with an obligatory "Oh dang... yeah, we'll fix that." Veoh on the other hand, believe that because they are only streaming videos that are being streamed elsewhere already, nothing is being stolen. Veoh also says that any advertising that was streamed with the original video is kept in the Veoh stream, so advertisers don't lose out either. So far, Veoh has pretty much slid under the radar, but that may change once Veoh makes VeohTV available to the public. Financed by some pretty big players like Time Warner, VeohTV will stream whole television shows, presumably without the permission of the original copyright holder. NYTimes.com has an article about Veoh's latest move.

Satisfied Customers Speak Out!

"Something else I didn't know you could do in Dreamweaver. Very cool! I actually got this working!"

CMX Subscriber Jan M., commenting on Tom Muck's FREE article "Feed Tools in Dreamweaver 8 and CS3: RSS and XSL"

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:

"My mother drew a distinction between achievement and success. She said that achievement is the knowledge that you have studied and worked hard and done the best that is in you. Success is being praised by others. That is nice but not as important or satisfying. Always aim for achievement and forget about success." — Helen Hayes

ColdFusion Dead? Nuh-uh...

Ever since ColdFusion came out in May of 1995, people have reported on its demise. Even with the release of ColdFusion 8, which is nothing short of a complete revitalization of the CF language, SoftwareDeveloper.com put out a list of programming languages that never made it, and included ColdFusion on the list. I saw that article when it came out, but didn't put it in the newsletter because it was nonsensical at best, and certainly didn't make any kind of factual case against Coldfusion. AdamFortuna.com felt the same way, but defends CF much better than I could.

Silverlight At The End Of The Tunnel

The buzz surrounding Microsoft's Silverlight has died down recently. No one's really touting it as the Flash-killer anymore. That doesn't mean that it won't be widely used at some point though, and there has been talk about Silverlight being a practical and viable alternative to Flash. But still, not many folks know exactly what the heck it is. PlentyOfCode.com has a great list of resources available to folks who are either already working with Silverlight or just want to find out more about it.

Don't Come 'Round Here No More

Just when you thought all of the meta tags had been created that would ever be created, Google decides to release another one. The "Unavailable after" meta tag will tell Google's web crawler to stop indexing this page after a specified date. Like the article at SearchEngineLand.com says, this would be great if you want to make promotions last to a certain date and want to make sure that Google no longer shows them in their results when the promotion is over.

Where Have Wii Seen This Before?

The folks at Logitech just came out with a pretty cool mouse. While it's not too proud to act as a traditional laser mouse, it's too cool to be chained down to your desktop. The MX Air mouse can be used like a remote control that reacts to motion, not unlike the Nintendo Wii. The MX Air will set you back $150 or so. Is it worth it? Check out this review at ExtremeTech.com.

But What About Bugs Bunny Cartoons?

imeem.com is a social networking website aimed at folks who like to share all types of media with one another. At one point, Warner Music Group accused imeem of copyright infringement due to much of the WMG content that was being streamed there without permission. After a meeting between the two companies, WMG has agreed to allow imeem to share the entire Warner music and video catalog with their members. In exchange, WMG gets some of imeem's advertising revenue. We're going to see more and more of this as record exec's realize that their industry is changing.

CMX Font Size Changer Extension

Change the font size on your webpage with the JavaScript code from this handy extension. Enter the font sizes you want and then click OK, everything else is done for you ... it really is that easy!

Check out this Dreamweaver Extension by CMX Partner Paul Davis

Fun and Freebies

Me Like Internet

When the internet first came along, you can imagine that it was tough for reporters to fully grasp the complexity of it, or where it was going. This news report posted at YouTube.com talks about the growing phenomenon of "Internet."

The Internet Has Crashed

The Onion seems to find all the stories everyone else misses. We're not sure how everyone else glossed over the recent story of Eric Tipton, who had way too many programs open on his computer and crashed the internet, causing everyone using the internet to see the same error message.

Hypnotic...

What happens if you take a ton of screen sirens from the 20s up to present day and morphed them from one to the next, in chronological order? Not much really. It sounded pretty dorky, and it is. But we couldn't look away. See it at BoreMe.com.

Using the Spry Accordion Widget

One of the new features in Dreamweaver CS3 is the integration of the Spry javascript library. In this series, we'll look at using Dreamweaver CS3 to insert, integrate and modify the Spry Accordion widget. Give your pages the pizzazz they deserve!

This free article by Community MX Author Stephanie Sullivan can be found here.

Weekly Content Listing

Creating Custom UIComponents in Flex 2: Lesson 1 - Overview [FREE]

Steve Schelter

When working in the Flex 2 environment, there are many times where you might find yourself in need of a component that does not exist. The Flex SDK offers plenty of extensibility for building custom UI components that can plug seamlessly into the existing framework. In the first lesson of this series, we will cover a brief overview of the life-cycle of a custom UI component.

Yahoo! Pipes: Create a Persistent News Search with Web Services

Kim Cavanaugh

Yahoo Pipes has been on my personal radar since it was announced in February of this year. At the time of its rollout there was a great deal of interest in Pipes around the web design world. Yahoo provided what appeared to be an easy way for anyone (even non-developers like myself) to mash-up RSS feeds into new web services. While that may seem like no big deal, my own experiences and research into current trends indicates that there is a growing demand for data that has been customized and repurposed to fit particular audiences. If you're developing web sites for customers, the ability to provide them with live data that can be displayed on their site will be a valuable service that just may set you apart from your competition. You don't even have to tell anyone how easy Yahoo makes this.

In this series of articles we'll be looking at the world of Yahoo Pipes from both exploratory and practical viewpoints. We'll start out by looking at the Pipes design environment and previewing feeds developed and shared by others in the Pipes community. From there you'll build your first customized feed and finish things up with a look at how feeds published using the Pipes service can be consumed in different ways on your own sites.

In this article you'll learn a little how persistent searches can be created in both Google News and Yahoo News services. Since both of these giants of web indexing also provide the capacity to output a feed as structured RSS you can pull the results into Yahoo Pipes and mash them together into one, deep-searching, consolidated feed. You'll also find out how individual feeds are created and how some simple modules in the Yahoo Pipes environment are used to combine, aggregate, filter, and limit the results that are returned. This is an incredibly powerful piece of technology that you can use to your advantage, or provide as a service to your clients.

The Yahoo! Pipes Series:
Yahoo! Pipes: An Introduction
Yahoo! Pipes: Mash-up a Customized News Feed
Yahoo! Pipes: Create a Persistent News Search with Web Services
Yahoo! Pipes: Options for Publishing a Customized RSS Feed Coming Soon

The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part Ten

Sheri German

In part ten of the Dreamweaver web Standards Lesson Plan series, you will complete the bug squashing work you started in part nine, as well as learn some "best practices" for feeding Internet Explorer the unique styles it needs. Here is what you will do in this tutorial:

Identify the 3-pixel text jog bug
Use the CSS Advisor to find solutions to fix the bug
Create an Internet Explorer specific style sheet for all IE bugs from lessons nine and ten
Use Conditional Comments to feed the style sheet to Internet Explorer only

XML Captions for Video [FREE]

Tom Green, David Stiller

Embed an XML document into an FLV and you too can add closed captions to your FLV files. Find out how in this, the fourth of our excerpts, from Foundation Flash CS3 for Designers by friendsofED written by Community MX partners David Stiller and Tom Green.

Adding Audio to Flash CS3 [FREE]

Tom Green, David Stiller

In this, the third of eight excerpts from the soon-to-be released Foundation Flash CS3 for Designers (friendsofED) book, Community MX partners Tom Green and David Stiller walk you through the basics of audio in Flash.

Must-Have Extensions for Fireworks CS3 [FREE]

Jim Babbage

A new software release is always kind of exciting, but with the release of products like Fireworks and Dreamweaver, it's even better. Not only can you expect new goodies in the application itself, but you can expect extension developers to create other cool commands and tools for the applications.

Fireworks CS3 has only been out for a short time, and already there is already an impressive list of new extensions we can make use of. This article will outline some of those extensions and point you to where you can find them.

And did I mention that all these extensions and commands are FREE?

Draw a Lightbulb in Illustrator CS2 or CS3

Kim Dudley

Recently many devoted Freehand users have been forced to move to Illustrator, and with the inclusion of Illustrator in the CS3 web premium bundle, many web designers are discovering Illustrator's assets. Fireworks, Illustrator and Freehand are all great applications for creating graphic elements. Although Fireworks is a bitmapped based application and Freehand and Illustrator are vector drawing applications, all three programs can achieve very similar results.

In this tutorial we will recreate a graphic drawn in a previous article called Creating a Light bulb in Freehand MX. In that tutorial I recreated a light bulb using Freehand. The original image was created using Fireworks in a tutorial by Jim Babbage titled A Bright Idea. This time, instead of using Fireworks or Freehand, we will use Illustrator's drawing tools to create the following light bulb.

The final lightbulb image

Some of the tools we will use include the:

Ellipse tool
Rectangle tool
Align palette
Pathfinder panel
Gradient Mesh
Pen tools
Move tool
Gradient panel
Inner and Outer Glow Effects

This tutorial will be beneficial to those learning Illustrator or if you are a Fireworks or Freehand user looking to discover how similar things are done in Illustrator. I will also point out any changes between CS2 and CS3 so if you have recently upgraded or are considering upgrading, you will see some of the recent changes.

Flex Community MX RSS Reader - Part 2

Chaz Chumley

XML (eXtensible Markup Language) has been around for quite awhile and is used from anything as common as RSS feeds to sharing data with web services. Working with XML is actually not that difficult. Consuming XML within Flex is even easier with the use of the HTTPService object.

Building upon our last article, we will add some interactivity to our Flex CommunityMX RSS Reader by actually looking at how to retrieve an use an XML feed with a DataGrid, as well as explore using bindings to bind a TextArea to the columns of the DataGrid so that we can display all the results from our XML DataSet and filter on a selection to preview the contents of an article.

The Flex Community MX RSS Reader Series:
Flex Community MX RSS Reader - Part 1
Flex Community MX RSS Reader - Part 2

Sharing Fonts in ActionScript 3.0 - Part 1: Creating a Font SWF [FREE]

Robert Reinhardt

In this tutorial series, you learn how to use the new Font class in ActionScript 3.0 and Flash Player 9. The Font class enables you to embed one or more fonts in a Flash movie (SWF file), and reuse the font with other SWF files. In this tutorial, you learn how to create a font SWF file and load it into another Flash movie.

Making Positioned Elements Obey the Flow - Part Two

John Gallant, Holly Bergevin

Auto-positioning is very interesting, but is it any good for real web pages? Follow along as we employ auto-positioning to achieve at least one useful design goal, fixed column headings. Put on your thinking cap because this stuff is tricky!

Navigating to Flash Video Cue Points by Name

The FLVPlayback component that shipped with Flash 8 ushered in a tidy mechanism for seeking to video cue points. All you have to do is reference the FLVPlayback instance by its instance name and invoke the seekToNavCuePoint() method. This method lets you pass in a specific time, cue point name, or cue point object as the parameter, and boom — you're in. The video jumps to that point in the FLV file. FLVPlayback is a boon, because it makes things easy, but there are times when, for various reasons, you may want to avoid the 33KB penalty for using a component (the ActionScript 2.0 version is 33KB; the ActionScript 3.0 version, available in Flash CS3, weighs 49KB). The NetConnection and NetStream classes provide an easy way to display video at a svelte 3KB, but neither of them supports a seek-related method that accepts cue point names. If you know the cue point's time value, you're fine — but names sure are convenient! What to do? If this is your predicament, ActionScript 3.0 provides an escape hatch via the onMetaData event.

Check out the Article by CMX partner David Stiller

Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats!

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

Opening Images From The Web

If you cut and paste a URL to an image file in the Open dialog in Photoshop, Fireworks or Illustrator CS3, it will download the image and open it up for editing. This applies to SVG, PNG, JPG, or any file format that Photoshop, Fireworks or Illustrator can open. A quick and easy way to edit web images on the fly.

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!