Wednesday, September 6th, 2006
CMX Weekly Newsletter
Check the News!
A Belated Welcome To Two New CMX Partners!
Community MX never stops. The gears that move this machine are constantly in motion, which sometimes causes us to forget some very important announcements. Case in point: Paul Davis, founder of KaosWeaver.com, joined our group of CMX authors back in June, and we neglected to mention it in our newsletter. Paul has created many extensions for Kaosweaver, and his written for Macromedia's Devnet. Paul's contribution to CMX has already proven to be an excellent fit, and our subscribers have enjoyed his articles immensely. We're extremely glad to have Paul with us, and we're sure that many of you will benefit from his knowledge. Chaz Chumley has also joined our crew. Chaz is Founder of Enovative Solutions Web Design and Hosting. Chaz has been specializing in dynamic web development and database design since 1995. A ColdFusion convert after Macromedia's own Mike Downey challenged him to write an ASP app in 10 lines of code or less, he has never looked back. We're very excited to have both of these knowledgeable experts joining the Community MX staff. Welcome Paul and Chaz!
InterAkt Acquired By Adobe
InterAkt, the Romanian company responsible for some really great extensions for Dreamweaver, has been acquired by Adobe. The first question most people asked about the acquisition is: Why? InterAkt has posted an FAQ that covers most questions. As to the "why?", InterAkt says "Adobe acquired InterAKT to enhance existing product lines, including Macromedia Dreamweaver and Adobe Flex. The new development center will also provide Adobe with greater access to and expertise in the Eastern European market." InterAkt has immediately discontinued some of their products, but are offering some strong upgrades to existing customers, and are still offering support in their forums. Two of the main players of InterAkt have blogged about the acquision: Bogdan and Alexandru. Scott Fegette from Adobe also has a very informative blog post about the acquisition.
Adobe Releases Captivate 2.0.
Captivate 2.0 has been released, and it looks like a remarkable improvement over the previous version. The first thing we noticed was that we're now able to include Flash Video into our Captivate projects. There are plenty of other improvements here as well, like being able to use content like "symbols" that can be recycled within the project. Check out all the new features at Adobe.com. Our own Tom Green put his two cents in as well.
Google Searches Can Be Fun
If you have an account with Google and use the Google Calendar, remember that there is a setting to make your calendar public or private. Unless you want everyone to know that you take twenty minutes of each day to play Pretty Pretty Princess with your 3-year old, you should probably make your calendar private. You'll still be able to share the calendar with specific folks, and you won't have to worry about DumbLittleMan writing an article about you. Oh- and if your company has a top secret document, for your eyes only, make sure it doesn't get indexed by Google.
Spoken Word Safer Than Written Word For The Moment
An unpatched vulnerability in Microsoft Word 2000 could lead to code being remotely executed on a user's computer. This security flaw is only triggered if you open up a doctored Word file, so don't go opening any Word docs that you don't trust. On the bright side, this may give you a good excuse to get out of some work. "Wow, sorry boss, but I couldn't open that memo you sent me yesterday... I was worried I could infect our network!" Yeah... try that... Or just read about this new exploit at News.com.
Satisfied Customers Speak Out!
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"Brilliant tutorial, thanks... as always extremely useful. I'll be visiting Scotland when I return home to UK next year... maybe I'll track you down and buy you a beer! "
- Stuart L., CMX Subscriber, commenting on Gordon Mackay's Creating Web Icons: Part 1 article.
article.
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:
This week's quote is actually a story. There's a great lesson here about client expectations:
Legend has it that Pablo Picasso was sketching in the park when a bold woman approached him.
“It’s you — Picasso, the great artist! Oh, you must sketch my portrait! I insist.”
So Picasso agreed to sketch her. After studying her for a moment, he used a single pencil stroke to create her portrait. He handed the women his work of art.
“It’s perfect!” she gushed. “You managed to capture my essence with one stroke, in one moment. Thank you! How much do I owe you?”
“Five thousand dollars,” the artist replied.
“B-b-but, what?” the woman sputtered. “How could you want so much money for this picture? It only took you a second to draw it!”
To which Picasso responded, “Madame, it took me my entire life.”
Sweet.
We Caught The HamBurglar Trying To Hack This Website
The National Restaurant Association is working on a new website, HealthyDiningFinder.com, which will help you find healthy eateries in your area. A formal launch won't take place until January, as all of the data is still being gathered. It appears that Southern California users can find a lot on the website right now, since the database was started some time ago by Healthy Dining, a private San Diego-based company. You can read more about it at Chron.com.
Guess These People Never Saw Cocoon
If one of your elderly relatives - meaning someone over 70 years of age in this instance - is looking to get on the internet, you may think twice about recommending Carphone Warehouse's TalkTalk phone and broadband package. It turns out that Carphone Warehouse has an over-70 policy that discourages those folks from signing up for their service. The fear is that people over a certain age will not understand the fine print within the contract, and complaints could follow after signing up. More on this story at DailyMail.co.uk.
MySpace Moves Music for Musical Mavens
Artists wanting to sell their music online to fans, friends or family will soon be able to do it via their MySpace.com page. The folks at MySpace have struck a deal with digital music technology firm SNOCAP. There are probably thousands of aspiring artists who are trying to find an outlet for their music, and this could be just the exposure that some beginners need. Some beginners might just launch their careers through MySpace... Stranger things have been known to happen. Read the story at Yahoo.com.
Bob Dylan Takes a Lesson From Community MX
OK, so Dylan has probably never even heard of Community MX. But looking at his iPod commercial, which you can see at adage.com, you'd think the creators of the commercial had read through Tom Green's tutorial on Creating Your Own iPod Ad. In hindsight, we wish we had thought of having Dylan sit down for us so we could've used him as our subject. Once again, Apple has one-upped us...
To Read This Article, Press "1." To Go To The Next Article, Press "Pi"
Here in the US, the only phone number where you can expect to get a live human being is the 911 emergency line. Even then you might be put on hold... We've come to expect that if you're calling any company, you might have to go through a series of recordings and buttons in order to reach a real person. Two websites are trying to eliminate this problem. The first one is the "GetHuman" database. Here you can look up a company in their database and find out the quickest way to get a human on the phone. The next website is a bit more drastic. At NoPhoneTrees.com, you choose the company you're trying to contact, provide the website with your phone number, and they'll call you back when they get someone on the phone for you. We found this one at Freakonomics.com.
The Polaroidizer for Fireworks 8
- If you had a chance to read my recent article, Create a Polaroid Photograph in Fireworks, you saw how (relatively) easy it is to do this on your own. You can create two simple rectangles, punch the smaller rectangle through a larger rectangle, apply some simple drop-shadows, and Voila! Fairly easy frames that can be applied over the top of a photograph to give the appearance that the picture was snapped with a Polaroid camera like you see in the collage below.
Take a look at this command by CMX Partner Kim Cavanaugh
Fun and Freebies!
At Least They're Not Holding Scissors...
To further prove that you can find just about anything on the internet, BedJump.com displays photos of people of all ages jumping on beds. That's it. Just people. And they're jumping on beds.
It's Fun To See People Have Fun
Cops have stressful jobs, so it's no wonder they need to unwind, sometimes while they're on duty. Here's a great video of a policeman who's got the music in him, from Yahoo Video.
All The Old Video Games Get a Different Spin
Someone put a video on YouTube.com that takes old video games like Frogger, Centipede, Pac-Man and others, and recreates them using real objects. Very clever stuff. I think my favorite is Pac-Man.
Building a Drag-and-Drop Jigsaw Puzzle - Part 1
- Jigsaw puzzles were a mainstay of my youth on rainy afternoons. The earliest puzzles I remember had merely a dozen pieces, but ah, the sense of accomplishment! Piecing together the artwork was always a rewarding experience. One year, my mother found an ad in a magazine for a company that would convert your personal photo into a puzzle — at the time, the notion struck me as incredible! We ordered one and I treasured it for years. After reading this two-part series, you'll be able to do the same thing on your own computer! Over the course of these tutorials, you will write an ActionScript 2.0 class to build a re-usable jigsaw puzzle engine. Here in Part 1, we will deconstruct our endeavor into a handful of bite-sized methods and write one large method, CMXJigsawPuzzle.buildPuzzle(), to call those as necessary. The complete code is already included with this tutorial, but the full explanation will span into Part 2.
This free article by CMX Partner David Stiller can be found here.
Weekly Content Listing
Images and Accessibility
One of the more overlooked items in website design when considering accessibility features is the image. In this article we will look at how we can adapt the image markup to make it accessible to users who perhaps cannot see the image as you intended it to be seen.
Working with Metadata in Adobe Bridge
As a commercial photographer, one of my on-going challenges is to keep my images organized so that I can sort and find images quickly for myself or a clinet. This is a concept that is—in my opinion—important for anyone involved in the professional graphics industry: graphic and web designers, retouchers, artists ... we can all benefit from a little more organization and structure.
This is where Adobe's Bridge comes in very handy. This piece of software comes bundled with Adobe Photoshop® CS2, Illustrator® CS2, InDesign® CS2, and GoLive® CS2 or any of Adobe's Creative Suites. In fact it's one of the few—if not the only—Adobe software product which cannot be purchased as a standalone item.
The Bridge is based on the File Browser that was part of Photoshop 7.0, but goes much further than a simple file searching utility. In this article, we will look at how to work with Metadata to help you sort, organize and, to a degree, protect your imaging work.
Getting Started with Atlas [FREE]
Just about everyone has heard of AJAX, right? The acronym stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. One of the problems with AJAX is that many people found it difficult to use. Microsoft developed Atlas, in part, to address that issue. Atlas is an extension of ASP.NET. You don't have to use ASP.NET to leverage Atlas functionality, but I think you'll find that it's convenient to do so. In addition to the server-side controls, Atlas also comes with sophisticated client script libraries, saving you the labor of writing your own JavaScript.
In this first tutorial we'll download and install Atlas. Later tutorials will explore using Atlas to perform asynchronous postbacks (via the UpdatePanel). This is arguably the best feature of Atlas. You can have a form on your page and when the user hits the submit button, instead of the entire page posting back, just the form does. That means that the page's contents are still visible. The only disruption to the page is the contents of the form. A lot more user-friendly, eh? Atlas boasts other cool features, too, that will be explained in later installments.
Building a Drag-and-Drop Jigsaw Puzzle - Part 2
Jigsaw puzzles were a mainstay of my youth on rainy afternoons. The earliest puzzles I remember had merely a dozen pieces, but ah, the sense of accomplishment! Piecing together the artwork was always a rewarding experience. One year, my mother found an ad in a magazine for a company that would convert your personal photo into a puzzle — at the time, the notion struck me as incredible! We ordered one and I treasured it for years.
After reading this two-part series, you'll be able to do the same thing on your own computer! Over the course of these tutorials, you will write an ActionScript 2.0 class to build a re-usable jigsaw puzzle engine. Here in Part 2, we resume our efforts and step through the helper methods called by the sizable method introduced last time, buildPuzzle().
The Building a Drag-and-Drop Jigsaw Puzzle Series:
Building a Drag-and-Drop Jigsaw Puzzle - Part 1
Building a Drag-and-Drop Jigsaw Puzzle - Part 2
All About CSS Drop Shadows - Part Six
Last time we covered the small details of our new CSS drop shadow method, cleaning up a lot of loose ends. Now we will introduce a fancy trick that will cause our shadowed element to behave like a depressable button when it is hovered. It's a really neat effect, and we feel it will eventually become a common method on the web.
The All About CSS Drop Shadows Series:
All About CSS Drop Shadows - Part One
All About CSS Drop Shadows - Part Two
All About CSS Drop Shadows - Part Three
All About CSS Drop Shadows - Part Four
All About CSS Drop Shadows - Part Five
All About CSS Drop Shadows - Part Six
All About CSS Drop Shadows - Part Seven Coming Soon
Jotforms: Free and Easy Forms for Your Site [FREE]
For some of us, the task of getting even the simplest forms developed and online can be more of a chore than we're prepare rd to face. Perhaps you just don't fully grasp, or want to learn, all the steps required to connect to a database or to tweak free scripts to get an online form prepared for user entry. Maybe you work in an organization where the job of getting databases created and configured and accessible is handled by someone else, and you can't get things done in a timely manner. Or perhaps you just want to toss up a quick online form for casual purposes like a quickie poll or registration page. For example, a form that allows your friends to sign up for the next potluck dinner and indicate what they're going to bring.
Whatever the barrier you may have faced in the past to getting forms online, there's a new service available that can take much of the work out of the job. Best of all, it's free, easy to use, and quite flexible.
Happy Labor Day [FREE]
Community MX is taking the day off to spend with our families and will return with fresh content tomorrow.
Image > Mode > Grayscale Is Out - Part 1
The time has come to forget about using the old standby, Image > Mode > Grayscale, for converting your color images to Grayscale. In this tutorial we're going to look at two methods, which allow you to have even more control over the tonality of your Grayscale images using the Lab Mode in Photoshop as well as the Layer Adjustment functions. In some cases you'll actually be able to select specific colors in the image and automatically adjust their respective, individual tones.
CFEclipse How To: Creating Your First CFC
We explored the CFEclipse interface earlier in our previous How To article on creating a simple ColdFusion page. This time around, we will expand on that project and convert our ColdFusion page to utilize a CFC (ColdFusion Component). This will open up some new CFEclipse panels and wizards for us to take a look at, all of which are very helpful in speeding up our development time. Particularly the CF Component Wizard, Methods View panel, Tasks or TODO Panel and the ability to add Snippets.
The CFEclipse How To Series
CFEclipse How To: Creating a Simple CFML Page
CFEclipse How To: Creating your first CFC
Content Control with .htaccess - Part 2
In the first part of this article we looked at how a rather unique feature of the Apache web server, called the .htaccess file, could be used to grant and deny permission to content based on a variety of conditions (IP address, etc).
In this article we'll see how we can take those access conditions and apply them to specific files and file groups on our site to make things more secure and easier to manage.
The Content Control with .htaccess Series
Content Control with .htaccess - Part 1
Content Control with .htaccess - Part 2
Making the Right Business Choice!
- Selecting the right business type for your business can mean the difference between keeping and losing your house. It can also save you thousands of dollars.
Check out the Article by CMX Partner Paul Davis
Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats!
This week's Tip, Trick or Dirty Cheat is courtesy of Jim Babbage, CMX Partner.
Quick Blend Mode
If you have a scroll mouse, you can quickly scroll through the Blend Modes menu in the Fireworks Layers panel to see the blend mode applied to your selected object or layer. Just click inside the Blend Mode Menu, then click once more to collapse the menu and scroll away!
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!