
Wednesday, August 30th, 2006
CMX Weekly Newsletter News Fun and Freebies Recent CMX Content Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats Check the News! Let's Learn ColdFusion Adrian Senior, one of the authors here at Community MX has a steady "Let's Learn Coldfusion" series that he's been steadily adding to. This week covers a subject that we get asked about all the time: "Building a Simple Admin, Part I." Adrian describes the article: "In this series you will build a simple administration area complete with a control panel that will allow you to manage the content of your website. The system you will build is aimed at the small business website where one or two users will have total control of the website's content." If you've wanted to learn how to build a website your clients can update themselves, then you'll want to read up on this part of Adrian's series. ASDoc Available on Adobe Labs The software that Macromedia had been rumoured to use internally since 2004 to create its Language References, has finally been released. As Mike Chambers mentions on his blog, "AsDoc is a tool that generates API documentation from ActionScript 3 classes. It is the tool we use the generate the Flex 2 and AS3 API docs, as well as all of the ActionScript 3 open source library docs." Using a specific commenting syntax (similar to JavaDoc) in your AS 3.0 class files, ASDoc will parse through your entire class file structure and create instant HTML documentation for your class framework. Great for working with large teams or when the client expects accurate and up-to-date API documentation. A much awaited and useful tool. Grab it at Adobe Labs. AOL Can't Cut a Break AOL's been on the receiving end of a lot of grief lately, what with them publishing their user's search histories, trying to survive as a company by giving away their services, and now, officially being called on the carpet for distributing "badware." StopBadware.org is a website that seeks to keep users informed about programs that might behave like a drunk person you invited to your party who wrecks your house and then won't leave. They've just listed the free version of AOL 9.0 as badware due to, well, disorderly conduct. You can read the full report at StopBadware.org. If This Was April 1st, We Never Would've Believed It The Universal Music Group is partnering with an upstart named Spiral Frog to distribute Universal's music catalog on the internet... for free. Considering that Universal has one of the largest music catalogs in the world, that's saying a lot. What's the catch? Well, of course digital-rights management weighs heavily into the equation to squelch redistribution of the media, and advertising will be featured prominently in the user's downloading experience, but beyond that, it seems that Universal is happy to distribute their music in a safe, legal environment that they can still reap benefits from. The service won't launch until later this year, but you can read the press release now at SpiralFrog.com. Keeping Track Of Your Flash Content Mochibot is free - at least for now. It's a service that lets you track your Flash content in a number of ways. For instance, it can see if anyone else is using your Flash material on their website, it will track the popularity of your Flash movies and will let you know if your content is being viewed more than once by the same user. For Flash authors who want to keep track of how well their latest internet campaign is doing, Mochibot might be the ticket.
Satisfied Customers Speak Out! "Thank you, thank you, thank you!!! We're switching to brand new css layouts and have been going crazy trying to match up IE with other browsers. You just saved us days and days of aggravation figuring out why it wasn't working. Bless you!" CMX Subscriber Jan M., commenting on CMX Partners Holly Bergevin and John Gallant's FREE Article "How To Attack An Internet Explorer (Win) Display Bug" 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: "Success is often the result of taking a misstep in the right direction." — Al Bernstein Next On The List: Superman Google CEO Eric Schmidt has just joined Apple's Board of Directors, which is also comprised of Steve Jobs and Al Gore. The addition of Schmidt to the board might have been the inspiration for this page at Google, which allows you to search specifically for Mac-related information. We're not convinced it works. After typing in "midget ballerinas", we were hard-pressed to figure out how any of the results were related to the Mac. More info on Schmidt's election to Apple's Board of Directors can be found at News.com. For You Readers Out There Do you like books? Do you like free books? Do you like free books smothered in a creamy vinaigrette? Google left out the vinaigrette, but they do have a search engine that allows you to search for entire books online that you can download in pdf format and read at your convenience. These books are in the public domain, and include works like Dante's "Inferno" and Sir Isaac Newton's "Principia." Uninspired for something to search for, we decided to look for a Hardy Boys book. Lo and behold, they had one there. Nice freebie! Check out Google Books. Still Not Available, But That Doesn't Stop Amazon From Selling It... Microsoft says they haven't decided on the pricing structure for Windows Vista yet. That doesn't phase Amazon.com though, who have been taking early orders for Vista, charging between $100 to $399 for various versions of the software. Amazon is telling consumers that the software should be available in January of 2007, which is optimistic in the eyes of software analysts. Amazon said they arrived at the date through talks with Microsoft, according to this story at CNN.com. This begs the question "If consumers buy a product that does not yet exist, can they pay for it using money they don't yet have?" Seems only fair. To check out some pictures of Vista, Pre-RC1, go to PCExposure.com. You Know Most Of The Emails Got Caught in Spam Traps. It's not fun being fired. Trust us. We know. The boss sits you down with a glum look on his face, as if to say "this is hurting me more than it hurts you." Meanwhile, you know he's full of it, since he's still got a job and you don't. So it's just one big messy scene most of the time. The fine folks at Radio Shack decided to forego these types of shenanigans by emailing over 400 employees to tell them they no longer have a job. This wasn't an April Fools Day joke. Employees were made aware that Radio Shack was going to have quite a few layoffs after closing their doors on nearly 500 stores, and were told they could ask questions about the layoffs via the company intranet. It's hard to believe that such a feel-good company is not successful... Read more about it at Associated Press. We'll Read This When We Get Some Time... There are many ways to organize your life. Well, there are at least 101, according to ProjectManagementSource.com. The've got some great tips on leadership, communication, stress, planning and other subjects to help you on your way to becoming a more organized worker and person. We also enjoyed the comments from readers at below the article, which ranged from "Great info!" to "Easier said than done."
CMX Insert SWFObject 1.4 SWFObject is an external JavaScript file, created by Geoff Stearns, that enables you to embed Flash movies into web pages using XHTML-compliant code. The CMX Insert SWFObject extension automatically inserts SWFObject code into Dreamweaver documents, and copies swfobject.js into the folder you specify. Now supports major, minor, and revision Flash Player detection. Check Out This Dreamweaver Extension from Paul Newman
Fun and Freebies Who Would Want To Win This Contest? It looks like we found out about this a little too late to be able to submit a photo, but you still have a chance to vote on who looks the most like "Big Boy" at Nicayla.com. The 70s Weren't Good To Everyone What do two men in their 70s - one of them a midget - two dancing girls, a grocery store and disco have in common? We have absolutely no idea... but that didn't stop Albertsons from putting them all into the same video together. See the bizarre result at Yahoo Video. FAQs You Probably Never Thought About At UsedFAQs.com, you'll find an assortment of FAQs taken out of context from various websites. The result is thought-provoking, artistic and confusing all at once. For instance, at what other site will you find the questions "How tall is Bono" and "I’ve heard rumors that Amway is a cult. Is this true?" side by side?
Creating a Blurred Mask In this exercise you will create a video that blurs the edges of a mask to create the effect of a video that is in focus in a "knock out" area while the remainder of the video, under a black bitmap, is blurred using a Threshold effect. The key to this exercise, is to understand that the shapes you draw are composed of colored pixels. These pixels form a shape and that shape, when the movie is displayed on your screen, is seen by the computer as a bitmap. This free article by CMX Partner Tom Green can be found here.
Weekly Content Listing Cool Pie Charts Gordon Mackay While Fireworks has a tool for creating pie charts I find that the resulting two-dimensional chart is more often than not quite dull and boring. In this tutorial I will show you how to spruce up your pie charts and transform them into attractive graphics that will look good on any page. It's really very simple, so let's do it already. :) Fundamental Fusebox: Part 2 - A Fusebox 5 Follow-up Thomas Pletcher This follow-up to my introductory article on Fusebox 5 shows how to adapt a Fusebox 4 application to the Fusebox 5 architecture, and explores Fusebox 5's model-view-controller design pattern in more detail. See how easy it is to use the most popular ColdFusion web application framework! The Fundamental Fusebox Series: Fundamental fusebox: Part 1 - An Overview Fundamental Fusebox: Part 2 - A Fusebox 5 Follow-up Cogs in the Machine [FREE] Paul Davis If you want something done right do it yourself. That may be a cliché, but learn how to change it to "If you want something done right, provide the process to do it" and enjoy the benefit of letting someone else do the work you're not needed to do. Using the <cfsavecontent> Tag Tom Muck There are many ways to build a string in ColdFusion, but one often overlooked method involves using the <cfsavecontent> tag. This article will take a look at the standard ways that a ColdFusion developer might build a string, and compare it to using <cfsavecontent>. Informing the End User: Part 2 - Status Messaging and Error Handling for Video Applications Derrick Ypenburg In Part 1 of this series, we worked on informing the end user by detecting and handling errors in Flash Applications. We will build on that by focusing on informing the user of the status of a video application, as well as errors that can happen duriing video playback. Further, we can use status events of objects used in a video application to manage the playback controls of the player. In this article, we will take a simple video player application and create "status messaging", informing the user of the state of the video in a player, and errors that happen in a video stream. We will also use these status messages to be the "nerve centre" of the player to toggle and disable player controls depending on the playback state of a video. The status messages we will be using come from the event objects of the NetConnection and NetStream classes. The Informing the End User Series: Informing the End User: Part 1 - Handling Errors Informing the End User: Part 2 - Status Messaging and Error Handling for Video Playback Create Columns with Floats [FREE] Zoe Gillenwater Floating is the primary method for laying out pages using CSS. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to create the look of columns using the float, width and margin properties. You'll learn the principles for creating both liquid and fixed-width layouts of as many columns as you like. In order to complete this tutorial, you need to already be familiar with the syntax of CSS and have read Flowing And Positioning: Two Page Models and Float: The Theory. PHP Formmail Spam Prevention Sheri German It used to be that there were clear sides in the junk email battle: the spammers and the spammed. I always considered myself a member of the latter group, and then one day I became a member—inadvertently—of the former. I had become a victim of the email injection attack via a PHP formmail script. In this update to the Dreamweaver Creating and Processing Form series, we'll take a new look at the phpformmail script and demonstrate how to use a key and email value pair to keep your email address out of the html page. ASP.NET Application Folders Heidi Bautista If you've worked with ASP.NET version 2.0 sites, you've probably seen folders like App_Themes and App_Data. But what are they and how are they used? Read on to find out. Create an Old Style Postcard with Fireworks Jim Babbage Let's take a little trip back down memory lane, back before there were computers, back before there was even color film for your camera. A simpler time, rendered in shades of gray or brown. A time when a handwritten letter or postcard was the rule, not the exception. A time when - OK OK, you get the idea, right? We're going to do a little time traveling in this tutorial, taking a photo I shot this past winter and making it look like it was shot in the 1920's. The original image is seen below. And our goal is to end up with something similar to this: The original image is pretty monochromatic to begin with, but it's not the hue we want. You might also notice some overhead wires in the original. The main subject of the photo is also a bit on the dark side which we will fix with some of the bitmap tools. While we will be covering some of these retouching techniques, if you are unfamiliar with the Fireworks interface, I would recommend reading some of the introductory articles on the toolbar and masking. You'll find a list of these at the end of the article. Working with Shared Libraries - Part 1: Sharing Symbols in Authortime Libraries [FREE] Robert Reinhardt In this new "Working with" series, you learn how to create and use shared libraries with your Flash movies. Shared libraries can help you optimize your workflow, making it easier to update assets across several Flash movies used for any type of project. I just finished a large DVD-ROM project for UCLA's Center for International Emergency Medicine, and the use of shared fonts dramatically decreased troubleshooting font issues between Mac and Windows versions of Flash 8.
InDesign - Part 1: Setting up a Document InDesign is a great tool for setting up multiple page layouts or documents that have a combination of text and graphics. InDesign can be used for setting up documents for print or for publishing on the web. If you are not familiar with page layout applications you may be a bit uncertain about diving in to InDesign. This and the following three tutorials will help you get to know InDesign and develop the skills needed to work quickly and efficently in this application.This series of tutorials will follow the process of creating a basic multiple page document. The tutorials will be broken down into four separate parts covering the following topics: * Setting up a new document with master pages * Adding and formatting text * Working with graphics * Publishing the document for print and online The techniques explained in these tutorials can be used to set up any document and are a good starting point for learning InDesign. Check out the Article by CMX partner Kim Dudley
Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats! This week's Tip, Trick or Dirty Cheat is courtesy of CMX Partner Tom Green Simple Import in After Effects If you are constantly using File>Import in After Effects, there is an easier way of doing it. Simply double clicking in the content area of Project panel will open the Import menu. 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!

Let's Learn ColdFusion

Adrian Senior, one of the authors here at Community MX has a steady "Let's Learn Coldfusion" series that he's been steadily adding to. This week covers a subject that we get asked about all the time: "Building a Simple Admin, Part I." Adrian describes the article:

"In this series you will build a simple administration area complete with a control panel that will allow you to manage the content of your website. The system you will build is aimed at the small business website where one or two users will have total control of the website's content."

If you've wanted to learn how to build a website your clients can update themselves, then you'll want to read up on this part of Adrian's series.

ASDoc Available on Adobe Labs

The software that Macromedia had been rumoured to use internally since 2004 to create its Language References, has finally been released. As Mike Chambers mentions on his blog, "AsDoc is a tool that generates API documentation from ActionScript 3 classes. It is the tool we use the generate the Flex 2 and AS3 API docs, as well as all of the ActionScript 3 open source library docs." Using a specific commenting syntax (similar to JavaDoc) in your AS 3.0 class files, ASDoc will parse through your entire class file structure and create instant HTML documentation for your class framework. Great for working with large teams or when the client expects accurate and up-to-date API documentation. A much awaited and useful tool. Grab it at Adobe Labs.

AOL Can't Cut a Break

AOL's been on the receiving end of a lot of grief lately, what with them publishing their user's search histories, trying to survive as a company by giving away their services, and now, officially being called on the carpet for distributing "badware." StopBadware.org is a website that seeks to keep users informed about programs that might behave like a drunk person you invited to your party who wrecks your house and then won't leave. They've just listed the free version of AOL 9.0 as badware due to, well, disorderly conduct. You can read the full report at StopBadware.org.

If This Was April 1st, We Never Would've Believed It

The Universal Music Group is partnering with an upstart named Spiral Frog to distribute Universal's music catalog on the internet... for free. Considering that Universal has one of the largest music catalogs in the world, that's saying a lot. What's the catch? Well, of course digital-rights management weighs heavily into the equation to squelch redistribution of the media, and advertising will be featured prominently in the user's downloading experience, but beyond that, it seems that Universal is happy to distribute their music in a safe, legal environment that they can still reap benefits from. The service won't launch until later this year, but you can read the press release now at SpiralFrog.com.

Keeping Track Of Your Flash Content

Mochibot is free - at least for now. It's a service that lets you track your Flash content in a number of ways. For instance, it can see if anyone else is using your Flash material on their website, it will track the popularity of your Flash movies and will let you know if your content is being viewed more than once by the same user. For Flash authors who want to keep track of how well their latest internet campaign is doing, Mochibot might be the ticket.

Satisfied Customers Speak Out!

"Thank you, thank you, thank you!!! We're switching to brand new css layouts and have been going crazy trying to match up IE with other browsers. You just saved us days and days of aggravation figuring out why it wasn't working. Bless you!"

CMX Subscriber Jan M., commenting on CMX Partners Holly Bergevin and John Gallant's FREE Article "How To Attack An Internet Explorer (Win) Display Bug"

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:

"Success is often the result of taking a misstep in the right direction." — Al Bernstein

Next On The List: Superman

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has just joined Apple's Board of Directors, which is also comprised of Steve Jobs and Al Gore. The addition of Schmidt to the board might have been the inspiration for this page at Google, which allows you to search specifically for Mac-related information. We're not convinced it works. After typing in "midget ballerinas", we were hard-pressed to figure out how any of the results were related to the Mac. More info on Schmidt's election to Apple's Board of Directors can be found at News.com.

For You Readers Out There

Do you like books? Do you like free books? Do you like free books smothered in a creamy vinaigrette? Google left out the vinaigrette, but they do have a search engine that allows you to search for entire books online that you can download in pdf format and read at your convenience. These books are in the public domain, and include works like Dante's "Inferno" and Sir Isaac Newton's "Principia." Uninspired for something to search for, we decided to look for a Hardy Boys book. Lo and behold, they had one there. Nice freebie! Check out Google Books.

Still Not Available, But That Doesn't Stop Amazon From Selling It...

Microsoft says they haven't decided on the pricing structure for Windows Vista yet. That doesn't phase Amazon.com though, who have been taking early orders for Vista, charging between $100 to $399 for various versions of the software. Amazon is telling consumers that the software should be available in January of 2007, which is optimistic in the eyes of software analysts. Amazon said they arrived at the date through talks with Microsoft, according to this story at CNN.com. This begs the question "If consumers buy a product that does not yet exist, can they pay for it using money they don't yet have?" Seems only fair. To check out some pictures of Vista, Pre-RC1, go to PCExposure.com.

You Know Most Of The Emails Got Caught in Spam Traps.

It's not fun being fired. Trust us. We know. The boss sits you down with a glum look on his face, as if to say "this is hurting me more than it hurts you." Meanwhile, you know he's full of it, since he's still got a job and you don't. So it's just one big messy scene most of the time. The fine folks at Radio Shack decided to forego these types of shenanigans by emailing over 400 employees to tell them they no longer have a job. This wasn't an April Fools Day joke. Employees were made aware that Radio Shack was going to have quite a few layoffs after closing their doors on nearly 500 stores, and were told they could ask questions about the layoffs via the company intranet. It's hard to believe that such a feel-good company is not successful... Read more about it at Associated Press.

We'll Read This When We Get Some Time...

There are many ways to organize your life. Well, there are at least 101, according to ProjectManagementSource.com. The've got some great tips on leadership, communication, stress, planning and other subjects to help you on your way to becoming a more organized worker and person. We also enjoyed the comments from readers at below the article, which ranged from "Great info!" to "Easier said than done."

CMX Insert SWFObject 1.4

SWFObject is an external JavaScript file, created by Geoff Stearns, that enables you to embed Flash movies into web pages using XHTML-compliant code. The CMX Insert SWFObject extension automatically inserts SWFObject code into Dreamweaver documents, and copies swfobject.js into the folder you specify. Now supports major, minor, and revision Flash Player detection.

Check Out This Dreamweaver Extension from Paul Newman

Fun and Freebies

Who Would Want To Win This Contest?

It looks like we found out about this a little too late to be able to submit a photo, but you still have a chance to vote on who looks the most like "Big Boy" at Nicayla.com.

The 70s Weren't Good To Everyone

What do two men in their 70s - one of them a midget - two dancing girls, a grocery store and disco have in common? We have absolutely no idea... but that didn't stop Albertsons from putting them all into the same video together. See the bizarre result at Yahoo Video.

FAQs You Probably Never Thought About

At UsedFAQs.com, you'll find an assortment of FAQs taken out of context from various websites. The result is thought-provoking, artistic and confusing all at once. For instance, at what other site will you find the questions "How tall is Bono" and "I’ve heard rumors that Amway is a cult. Is this true?" side by side?

Creating a Blurred Mask

In this exercise you will create a video that blurs the edges of a mask to create the effect of a video that is in focus in a "knock out" area while the remainder of the video, under a black bitmap, is blurred using a Threshold effect. The key to this exercise, is to understand that the shapes you draw are composed of colored pixels. These pixels form a shape and that shape, when the movie is displayed on your screen, is seen by the computer as a bitmap.

This free article by CMX Partner Tom Green can be found here.

Weekly Content Listing

Cool Pie Charts

Gordon Mackay

While Fireworks has a tool for creating pie charts I find that the resulting two-dimensional chart is more often than not quite dull and boring.

In this tutorial I will show you how to spruce up your pie charts and transform them into attractive graphics that will look good on any page. It's really very simple, so let's do it already. :)

Fundamental Fusebox: Part 2 - A Fusebox 5 Follow-up

Thomas Pletcher

This follow-up to my introductory article on Fusebox 5 shows how to adapt a Fusebox 4 application to the Fusebox 5 architecture, and explores Fusebox 5's model-view-controller design pattern in more detail. See how easy it is to use the most popular ColdFusion web application framework!

The Fundamental Fusebox Series:
Fundamental fusebox: Part 1 - An Overview
Fundamental Fusebox: Part 2 - A Fusebox 5 Follow-up

Cogs in the Machine [FREE]

Paul Davis

If you want something done right do it yourself. That may be a cliché, but learn how to change it to "If you want something done right, provide the process to do it" and enjoy the benefit of letting someone else do the work you're not needed to do.

Using the <cfsavecontent> Tag

Tom Muck

There are many ways to build a string in ColdFusion, but one often overlooked method involves using the <cfsavecontent> tag. This article will take a look at the standard ways that a ColdFusion developer might build a string, and compare it to using <cfsavecontent>.

Informing the End User: Part 2 - Status Messaging and Error Handling for Video Applications

Derrick Ypenburg

In Part 1 of this series, we worked on informing the end user by detecting and handling errors in Flash Applications. We will build on that by focusing on informing the user of the status of a video application, as well as errors that can happen duriing video playback. Further, we can use status events of objects used in a video application to manage the playback controls of the player.

In this article, we will take a simple video player application and create "status messaging", informing the user of the state of the video in a player, and errors that happen in a video stream. We will also use these status messages to be the "nerve centre" of the player to toggle and disable player controls depending on the playback state of a video. The status messages we will be using come from the event objects of the NetConnection and NetStream classes.

The Informing the End User Series:
Informing the End User: Part 1 - Handling Errors
Informing the End User: Part 2 - Status Messaging and Error Handling for Video Playback

Create Columns with Floats [FREE]

Zoe Gillenwater

Floating is the primary method for laying out pages using CSS. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to create the look of columns using the float, width and margin properties. You'll learn the principles for creating both liquid and fixed-width layouts of as many columns as you like.

In order to complete this tutorial, you need to already be familiar with the syntax of CSS and have read Flowing And Positioning: Two Page Models and Float: The Theory.

PHP Formmail Spam Prevention

Sheri German

It used to be that there were clear sides in the junk email battle: the spammers and the spammed. I always considered myself a member of the latter group, and then one day I became a member—inadvertently—of the former. I had become a victim of the email injection attack via a PHP formmail script.

In this update to the Dreamweaver Creating and Processing Form series, we'll take a new look at the phpformmail script and demonstrate how to use a key and email value pair to keep your email address out of the html page.

ASP.NET Application Folders

Heidi Bautista

If you've worked with ASP.NET version 2.0 sites, you've probably seen folders like App_Themes and App_Data. But what are they and how are they used? Read on to find out.

Create an Old Style Postcard with Fireworks

Jim Babbage

Let's take a little trip back down memory lane, back before there were computers, back before there was even color film for your camera. A simpler time, rendered in shades of gray or brown. A time when a handwritten letter or postcard was the rule, not the exception. A time when -

OK OK, you get the idea, right?

We're going to do a little time traveling in this tutorial, taking a photo I shot this past winter and making it look like it was shot in the 1920's. The original image is seen below.

And our goal is to end up with something similar to this:

The original image is pretty monochromatic to begin with, but it's not the hue we want. You might also notice some overhead wires in the original. The main subject of the photo is also a bit on the dark side which we will fix with some of the bitmap tools.

While we will be covering some of these retouching techniques, if you are unfamiliar with the Fireworks interface, I would recommend reading some of the introductory articles on the toolbar and masking. You'll find a list of these at the end of the article.

Working with Shared Libraries - Part 1: Sharing Symbols in Authortime Libraries [FREE]

Robert Reinhardt

In this new "Working with" series, you learn how to create and use shared libraries with your Flash movies. Shared libraries can help you optimize your workflow, making it easier to update assets across several Flash movies used for any type of project. I just finished a large DVD-ROM project for UCLA's Center for International Emergency Medicine, and the use of shared fonts dramatically decreased troubleshooting font issues between Mac and Windows versions of Flash 8.

InDesign - Part 1: Setting up a Document

InDesign is a great tool for setting up multiple page layouts or documents that have a combination of text and graphics. InDesign can be used for setting up documents for print or for publishing on the web. If you are not familiar with page layout applications you may be a bit uncertain about diving in to InDesign. This and the following three tutorials will help you get to know InDesign and develop the skills needed to work quickly and efficently in this application.This series of tutorials will follow the process of creating a basic multiple page document. The tutorials will be broken down into four separate parts covering the following topics:
* Setting up a new document with master pages
* Adding and formatting text
* Working with graphics
* Publishing the document for print and online
The techniques explained in these tutorials can be used to set up any document and are a good starting point for learning InDesign.

Check out the Article by CMX partner Kim Dudley

Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats!

This week's Tip, Trick or Dirty Cheat is courtesy of CMX Partner Tom Green

Simple Import in After Effects

If you are constantly using File>Import in After Effects, there is an easier way of doing it. Simply double clicking in the content area of Project panel will open the Import menu.

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!