
Wednesday, September 13th, 2006
CMX Weekly Newsletter News Fun and Freebies Recent CMX Content Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats Check the News! Rich Media Entertainment Festival FITC Hollywood features over 60 presentations focusing on cutting edge Rich Media trends and developments within the Entertainment Industry. Over three days and nights, with expert presentations, demonstrations, informative and educational workshops, lively panels, exciting evening mixers, and a trade show component. Over 60 industry leading speakers including Joshua Davis, Adobe, Grant Skinner, Fox Interactive, Warner Bros, Sony Entertainment Online, Big Spaceship, Lynda.com, the Embassy Visual Effects Inc, EVB, Siamon Chow, Pleix, Metaliq, Schematic, Gmunk, erain, Buck, onesize, Phillip Kerman, Robert Reinhardt, Community MX Author Extraordinaire, Blitz, Keith Peters, and many more. The festival will take place Oct 5-7, 2006 in Hollywood, California. And if you're reading this newsletter, you're eligible for a 10% discount! Just use the following code when signing up: cmx3344 Surprise! Sort of...! Steve Jobs made several announcements at a recent Apple event. Rumors leading up to the official announcements were pretty much correct, but the news is still pretty good. First, Apple plans on selling movies from Pixar, Disney, Touchstone and Miramax through iTunes near the first quarter of 2007. The movies will run from $9.99 to $12.99. Next on the list were several new iPods: An eighty gigabyte iPod, a redesigned Nano and a one gigabyte Shuffle. A new device, code-named iTV, will also be available soon. The iTV will let customers stream music, movies, television shows, podcasts and photos to their home entertainment systems. Read up on the new Apple stuff at CNN.com. You can also watch Steve Jobs give a guided tour of iTV at CNet.com. Twenty Will Get You Seven Actually, selling twenty million dollars worth of pirated software will get you seven years. Just ask Nathan Peterson, who used to run iBackups.com. He was recently given a seven year sentence since the extent of his piracy was nearly double that of previous cases. Peterson also got a 5.4 million dollar fine from the court. Peterson is learning the hard way that crime doesn't pay... well, not for long anyway. Read about it at ChannelRegister.co.uk. Target Hates The Handicapped OK, Target does not hate the handicapped. Probably not. But a couple years back they were slapped with a lawsuit by the National Federation for the Blind, which alleged that Target's website is inaccessible to the blind, which they say is a violation of federal and state laws prohibiting discrimination against people with disabilities. Target tried to get the case dismissed, but a judge ruled recently that the case can now go forward. Should the NFB win their case, they could possibly "target" other websites as well. The article at ComputerWorld.com points out why website owners should be concerned: "When asked if the NFB would file lawsuits against other online retailers and sites, spokesman John Pare said, 'You probably could imagine that we would.'" Hey There, LonelyGirl15 For the past month, LonelyGirl15, also known as "Bree", has been posting a video blog about her home-schooled, 16-year old life on YouTube.com. She's received about 1.5 million hits, and a lot of people got into her story. It turns out that LonelyGirl15 is a media creation. It's still a mystery as to whose creation she is, and why, but you can get an inkling from "The Creators" at LonelyGirl15.com. As far as we know, this is the first viral campaign to use YouTube in this way. Kind of wish we'd thought of it... You can read more about this at MediaPost.com.
Satisfied Customers Speak Out! "Awesome! Thanks so much for this simple, straightforward, useful article :)" - Allette W., CMX Subscriber, commenting on Community MX's User Authentication in Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 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: "It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do." - Jerome K. Jerome Update to The MM_Exporter Available The MM-Exporter is advertised as a "Backup utility to save and restore all important settings and data from Dreamweaver, Contribute, Fireworks and Flash." It's been a lifesaver for many, and a great precautionary tool. The MM-Exporter website suggests that anyone who has it installed should update their version now. Live Search Goes Live If you haven't checked out Microsoft's Live Search, it's out of beta and definitely worth a look. The layout of Live Search is deceptively sparse, like Google, but has some great features. While the web search is said to be more accurate than Google, the image search is our favorite. Every image result comes out on the same page instead of having to rifle through several pages to find what you want. You can also enlarge or shrink the images dynamically. Is it a Google killer? We probably won't know for a couple years, but with its customizable options, it's a strong contender. BetaNews.com sat down with Justin Osmer, senior product manager for Live.com, to get some more insight. eDonkey Gets Its Ass Off The Internet Anyone who uses file sharing services probably recognizes the name eDonkey. They were - emphasis on "were" - one of the more popular file sharing networks. Their network is gone, and their website now only warns of the dangers of downloading copyrighted material. After being pursued by the RIAA, eDonkey has succumbed to the pressure, and has agreed to pay the RIAA $30 million to avoid lawsuits. Of course, we know no one here downloads files illegally... But if you're interested, you can read more on this story at Yahoo.com. Why It Pays To Go To Hacker School Beginner hackers are dangerous... to themselves. This is a story from last year, just recently posted at Digg.com, but it's still hysterical. It's basically a log from a chat between a "hacker" and the intended hackee. The hacker ends up hacking himself. First he crashes his own computer, then deletes his own files, until he goes bye bye. Still makes us laugh. Check out the chat log at the CrissCross.com forums. We Get The Picture ListPic.com takes all of the pictures from Craigslist.org postings and puts them all on one page. You can sort by city and what you're looking for. The results will show the picture and the price, and in the case of housing, the number of bedrooms. One problem we have with ListPic is that it doesn't give you a way to get to the listing attached to the picture, which of course would be a great help once you found something you wanted to respond to. Maybe ListPic 2.0 is in order...
CMX MapLink v1.0 - Server Behavior The CMX MapLink Server Behavior creates a link to Google Maps. You can use static values, or dynamic values from the data sources palette. The behavior creates a link around a selection (text, image, etc...). The only parameters are: Address, City, State, Zip. US Addresses only (sorry international users). ASP Only. Take a look at this extension by CMX Partner Joel Martinez
Fun and Freebies! That Third Year Went By Really Fast Noah took pictures of himself every day for the past 6 years, and threw them all together into a video for the purposes of... ok, we're not sure why. But the effect is pretty cool. Check it out at YouTube.com. For some further fun, check out the video replies made by YouTube visitors. Yep. We're Geeks Alright. Say what you will, but a lot of us at Community MX enjoy us some Star Trek. We also dig Monty Python. Put the two together and you've really got something. This video at YouTube.com has the cast of Star Trek going to Monty Python's Camelot. Works for us. Adding Insult To Injury Has the fun gone out of your relationship with your boyfriend/girlfriend/wife/husband/whatever? Don't give them the tired old "It's not you, it's me speech." They deserve better than that. Instead, go to iBreakUp.net where they'll give you a list of reasons you want to break up. You pick one, give them your insignificant other's email address, and voila... you're broken up! There are some great breakup reasons to choose from like "You freak me out. I'm getting a restraining order", or "I love you and I'm going to miss you... Just kidding." How could he or she possibly stay mad at you?
Control Block Formatting Context In order to become a skilled CSS developer, you need to understand the underlying concepts of CSS that make it work and not just how to produce certain visual effects. The "block formatting context" is one of those concepts that drives how CSS affects your page without you even knowing it. Most of the time, you don't need to worry about it; it's just something that's going on behind the scenes that you don't need to get involved with. Sometimes, however, the lack of a new context can make elements interact in undesirable ways. The primary reason for setting a new context is to keep cleared elements inside a main content div from clearing floated sidebars. We'll use this problem as a case study for how to establish new block formatting contexts and to see what their effect is on the other elements around them. This free article by CMX Partner Zoe Gillenwater can be found here.
Weekly Content Listing Working with ActionScript Externally Using the SE\|PY ActionScript Editor Derrick Ypenburg Working with ActionScript externally has many benefits to working with AS directly within a Flash movie itself. This article will discuss some of the benefits to working with ActionScript externally, and the great features that the SE\|PY Actionscript editor has to offer to make coding easier and more productive. Implementing Gravatars with PHP Gordon Mackay What with all those blogs, forums, galleries and other applications that allow web site users to add their own comments on pages it was little wonder that someone decided to create universal method of graphically identifying users. Gravatars are an adaptation of the good ole' fashioned forum "avatar". The main difference with Gravatars is that they are served from a single place, instead of individual servers. The idea being that no matter where you're posting comments, your avatar will always be the same. Also when you change the image it changes everywhere you have left a comment too! Cool huh? Let's say you have created an application in PHP and you wish to allow your users to take advantage of Gravatars. How would you do this? Let me show you the easiest method. Working with Shared Libraries - Part 2: Sharing Symbols in a Runtime Shared Library Robert Reinhardt In this "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. In the last tutorial of this series, you learned how to create an authortime shared library file and add it to the Common Libraries menu in the Flash 8 authoring environment. In this tutorial, you learn how to create a runtime shared library. The Working with Shared Libraries Series: Working with Shared Libraries - Part 1: Sharing Symbols in Authortime Libraries Working with Shared Libraries - Part 2: Sharing Symbols in a Runtime Shared Library Image > Mode > Grayscale Is Out - Part 2 Knut Kubenz I hope you enjoyed the tutorial in part one of Image > Mode > Grayscale Is Out. In this next part were going to look at a method for changing tonal values in a RGB/Grayscale image by adjusting Adjustment Layers. You'll be able to very easily manipulate the tonal range on a global scale as well as edit specific colors. The results are quick, simple and dramatic. The Image > Mode > Grayscale is Out Series: Image > Mode > Grayscale Is Out - Part 1 Image > Mode > Grayscale Is Out - Part 2 Introduction to Regular Expressions [FREE] Rob Williams One of the most common tasks as a programmer that you'll end up coming across is string manipulation. You can run from it, you can hide from it, but eventually you're going to have to end up doing it (and usually on a fairly frequent basis!). Fortunately, a special set of tools commonly called "regular expressions" can often save you a great deal of time and effort, helping you achieve goals that you never thought possible. The downside, of course, is that you have to learn how to use these "expressions", and they can be quite confusing at times. In this article we'll take a beginner's look at what regular expressions are and see through examples how they can help you in your day to day tasks. Create a Style Sheet in Dreamweaver 8 Zoe Gillenwater Although it's always best to know how to perform web development tasks by hand, the CSS Styles panel of Dreamweaver 8 lets you get away with not having to create, attach, or edit a style sheet by hand ever again if you don't want to. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to use the CSS Styles panel to: attach a style sheet to a page create new rules in a style sheet edit existing rules' properties and add new ones Note: Although this tutorial is aimed at beginner users of CSS and Dreamweaver, you still need to understand CSS syntax and what each property controls in order to know how to set the appropriate values in Dreamweaver. If you're not yet familiar with how CSS works, please read Adrian Senior's introductory series of CSS tutorials first. Getting Organized with Adobe Bridge - Part 2: Working with Metadata Jim Babbage 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. The Getting Organized with Adobe Bridge Series: Getting Organized with Adobe Bridge - Part 1: Batch Renaming Getting Organized with Adobe Bridge - Part 2: Working with Metadata Getting Organized with Adobe Bridge - Part 3: Keywords and Searches and Collections - Oh My! Coming Soon Dynamic Text Formatting Demystified - Part 1: setTextFormat Joseph Balderson Ever tried formatting a text field in flash using ActionScript, only to get all tangled up in a myriad of class properties and methods? In this series we'll look at how to create a textfield and format it completely with code, how to dynamically embed fonts, how to use HTML formatting and how to use CSS stylesheets in Flash. Images and Accessibility Adrian Senior 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. Getting Organized with Adobe Bridge - Part 1: Batch Renaming [FREE] Jim Babbage As a commercial photographer, one of my ongoing challenges is to keep my images organized so that I can sort and find images quickly for myself or a client. 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 Photoshop® CS2, 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 short article, we will look at how to work with work with the Batch rename function to help you organize your imaging work. One of the strengths of Bridge is easy Batch Renaming. This is often one of the first steps I take when tying in a series of images for a specific project or client. Even for my personal work, I find it helpful to batch rename files based on the event or subject matter. This article will detail the process of Batch Renaming and give a few tips on filenaming structure The Getting Organized with Adobe Bridge Series: Getting Organized with Adobe Bridge - Part 1: Batch Renaming Getting Organized with Adobe Bridge - Part 2: Working with Metadata Getting Organized with Adobe Bridge - Part 3: Keywords and Searches and Collections - Oh My! Coming Soon
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. Check out the Article by CMX Partner Knut Kubenz
Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats! This week's Tip, Trick or Dirty Cheat is courtesy of Tom Green , CMX Partner. Getting The Dimensions of Your FLV Let's say you have an FLV that you don't want to use in the FLVPlayback component but in a video object instead. The problem is, you need to know the dimensions of the FLV for the video object. No problem. Place the component on the stage, link the component to the video and the dimensions of the FLV appear in the Flash Property inspector. Note the dimension and delete the component from the stage and the library. 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!

Rich Media Entertainment Festival

FITC Hollywood features over 60 presentations focusing on cutting edge Rich Media trends and developments within the Entertainment Industry. Over three days and nights, with expert presentations, demonstrations, informative and educational workshops, lively panels, exciting evening mixers, and a trade show component.

Over 60 industry leading speakers including Joshua Davis, Adobe, Grant Skinner, Fox Interactive, Warner Bros, Sony Entertainment Online, Big Spaceship, Lynda.com, the Embassy Visual Effects Inc, EVB, Siamon Chow, Pleix, Metaliq, Schematic, Gmunk, erain, Buck, onesize, Phillip Kerman, Robert Reinhardt, Community MX Author Extraordinaire, Blitz, Keith Peters, and many more.

The festival will take place Oct 5-7, 2006 in Hollywood, California. And if you're reading this newsletter, you're eligible for a 10% discount! Just use the following code when signing up: cmx3344

Surprise! Sort of...!

Steve Jobs made several announcements at a recent Apple event. Rumors leading up to the official announcements were pretty much correct, but the news is still pretty good. First, Apple plans on selling movies from Pixar, Disney, Touchstone and Miramax through iTunes near the first quarter of 2007. The movies will run from $9.99 to $12.99. Next on the list were several new iPods: An eighty gigabyte iPod, a redesigned Nano and a one gigabyte Shuffle. A new device, code-named iTV, will also be available soon. The iTV will let customers stream music, movies, television shows, podcasts and photos to their home entertainment systems. Read up on the new Apple stuff at CNN.com. You can also watch Steve Jobs give a guided tour of iTV at CNet.com.

Twenty Will Get You Seven

Actually, selling twenty million dollars worth of pirated software will get you seven years. Just ask Nathan Peterson, who used to run iBackups.com. He was recently given a seven year sentence since the extent of his piracy was nearly double that of previous cases. Peterson also got a 5.4 million dollar fine from the court. Peterson is learning the hard way that crime doesn't pay... well, not for long anyway. Read about it at ChannelRegister.co.uk.

Target Hates The Handicapped

OK, Target does not hate the handicapped. Probably not. But a couple years back they were slapped with a lawsuit by the National Federation for the Blind, which alleged that Target's website is inaccessible to the blind, which they say is a violation of federal and state laws prohibiting discrimination against people with disabilities. Target tried to get the case dismissed, but a judge ruled recently that the case can now go forward. Should the NFB win their case, they could possibly "target" other websites as well. The article at ComputerWorld.com points out why website owners should be concerned: "When asked if the NFB would file lawsuits against other online retailers and sites, spokesman John Pare said, 'You probably could imagine that we would.'"

Hey There, LonelyGirl15

For the past month, LonelyGirl15, also known as "Bree", has been posting a video blog about her home-schooled, 16-year old life on YouTube.com. She's received about 1.5 million hits, and a lot of people got into her story. It turns out that LonelyGirl15 is a media creation. It's still a mystery as to whose creation she is, and why, but you can get an inkling from "The Creators" at LonelyGirl15.com. As far as we know, this is the first viral campaign to use YouTube in this way. Kind of wish we'd thought of it... You can read more about this at MediaPost.com.

Satisfied Customers Speak Out!

"Awesome! Thanks so much for this simple, straightforward, useful article :)"

- Allette W., CMX Subscriber, commenting on Community MX's User Authentication in Macromedia
Dreamweaver MX 2004 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:

"It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do." - Jerome K. Jerome

Update to The MM_Exporter Available

The MM-Exporter is advertised as a "Backup utility to save and restore all important settings and data from Dreamweaver, Contribute, Fireworks and Flash." It's been a lifesaver for many, and a great precautionary tool. The MM-Exporter website suggests that anyone who has it installed should update their version now.

Live Search Goes Live

If you haven't checked out Microsoft's Live Search, it's out of beta and definitely worth a look. The layout of Live Search is deceptively sparse, like Google, but has some great features. While the web search is said to be more accurate than Google, the image search is our favorite. Every image result comes out on the same page instead of having to rifle through several pages to find what you want. You can also enlarge or shrink the images dynamically. Is it a Google killer? We probably won't know for a couple years, but with its customizable options, it's a strong contender. BetaNews.com sat down with Justin Osmer, senior product manager for Live.com, to get some more insight.

eDonkey Gets Its Ass Off The Internet

Anyone who uses file sharing services probably recognizes the name eDonkey. They were - emphasis on "were" - one of the more popular file sharing networks. Their network is gone, and their website now only warns of the dangers of downloading copyrighted material. After being pursued by the RIAA, eDonkey has succumbed to the pressure, and has agreed to pay the RIAA $30 million to avoid lawsuits. Of course, we know no one here downloads files illegally... But if you're interested, you can read more on this story at Yahoo.com.

Why It Pays To Go To Hacker School

Beginner hackers are dangerous... to themselves. This is a story from last year, just recently posted at Digg.com, but it's still hysterical. It's basically a log from a chat between a "hacker" and the intended hackee. The hacker ends up hacking himself. First he crashes his own computer, then deletes his own files, until he goes bye bye. Still makes us laugh. Check out the chat log at the CrissCross.com forums.

We Get The Picture

ListPic.com takes all of the pictures from Craigslist.org postings and puts them all on one page. You can sort by city and what you're looking for. The results will show the picture and the price, and in the case of housing, the number of bedrooms. One problem we have with ListPic is that it doesn't give you a way to get to the listing attached to the picture, which of course would be a great help once you found something you wanted to respond to. Maybe ListPic 2.0 is in order...

CMX MapLink v1.0 - Server Behavior

The CMX MapLink Server Behavior creates a link to Google Maps. You can use static values, or dynamic values from the data sources palette. The behavior creates a link around a selection (text, image, etc...). The only parameters are: Address, City, State, Zip. US Addresses only (sorry international users). ASP Only.

Take a look at this extension by CMX Partner Joel Martinez

Fun and Freebies!

That Third Year Went By Really Fast

Noah took pictures of himself every day for the past 6 years, and threw them all together into a video for the purposes of... ok, we're not sure why. But the effect is pretty cool. Check it out at YouTube.com. For some further fun, check out the video replies made by YouTube visitors.

Yep. We're Geeks Alright.

Say what you will, but a lot of us at Community MX enjoy us some Star Trek. We also dig Monty Python. Put the two together and you've really got something. This video at YouTube.com has the cast of Star Trek going to Monty Python's Camelot. Works for us.

Adding Insult To Injury

Has the fun gone out of your relationship with your boyfriend/girlfriend/wife/husband/whatever? Don't give them the tired old "It's not you, it's me speech." They deserve better than that. Instead, go to iBreakUp.net where they'll give you a list of reasons you want to break up. You pick one, give them your insignificant other's email address, and voila... you're broken up! There are some great breakup reasons to choose from like "You freak me out. I'm getting a restraining order", or "I love you and I'm going to miss you... Just kidding." How could he or she possibly stay mad at you?

Control Block Formatting Context

In order to become a skilled CSS developer, you need to understand the underlying concepts of CSS that make it work and not just how to produce certain visual effects. The "block formatting context" is one of those concepts that drives how CSS affects your page without you even knowing it. Most of the time, you don't need to worry about it; it's just something that's going on behind the scenes that you don't need to get involved with. Sometimes, however, the lack of a new context can make elements interact in undesirable ways. The primary reason for setting a new context is to keep cleared elements inside a main content div from clearing floated sidebars. We'll use this problem as a case study for how to establish new block formatting contexts and to see what their effect is on the other elements around them.

This free article by CMX Partner Zoe Gillenwater can be found here.

Weekly Content Listing

Working with ActionScript Externally Using the SE|PY ActionScript Editor

Derrick Ypenburg

Working with ActionScript externally has many benefits to working with AS directly within a Flash movie itself. This article will discuss some of the benefits to working with ActionScript externally, and the great features that the SE|PY Actionscript editor has to offer to make coding easier and more productive.

Implementing Gravatars with PHP

Gordon Mackay

What with all those blogs, forums, galleries and other applications that allow web site users to add their own comments on pages it was little wonder that someone decided to create universal method of graphically identifying users.

Gravatars are an adaptation of the good ole' fashioned forum "avatar". The main difference with Gravatars is that they are served from a single place, instead of individual servers. The idea being that no matter where you're posting comments, your avatar will always be the same. Also when you change the image it changes everywhere you have left a comment too! Cool huh?

Let's say you have created an application in PHP and you wish to allow your users to take advantage of Gravatars. How would you do this? Let me show you the easiest method.

Working with Shared Libraries - Part 2: Sharing Symbols in a Runtime Shared Library

Robert Reinhardt

In this "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. In the last tutorial of this series, you learned how to create an authortime shared library file and add it to the Common Libraries menu in the Flash 8 authoring environment. In this tutorial, you learn how to create a runtime shared library.

The Working with Shared Libraries Series:
Working with Shared Libraries - Part 1: Sharing Symbols in Authortime Libraries
Working with Shared Libraries - Part 2: Sharing Symbols in a Runtime Shared Library

Image > Mode > Grayscale Is Out - Part 2

Knut Kubenz

I hope you enjoyed the tutorial in part one of Image > Mode > Grayscale Is Out. In this next part were going to look at a method for changing tonal values in a RGB/Grayscale image by adjusting Adjustment Layers. You'll be able to very easily manipulate the tonal range on a global scale as well as edit specific colors. The results are quick, simple and dramatic.

The Image > Mode > Grayscale is Out Series:
Image > Mode > Grayscale Is Out - Part 1
Image > Mode > Grayscale Is Out - Part 2

Introduction to Regular Expressions [FREE]

Rob Williams

One of the most common tasks as a programmer that you'll end up coming across is string manipulation. You can run from it, you can hide from it, but eventually you're going to have to end up doing it (and usually on a fairly frequent basis!). Fortunately, a special set of tools commonly called "regular expressions" can often save you a great deal of time and effort, helping you achieve goals that you never thought possible. The downside, of course, is that you have to learn how to use these "expressions", and they can be quite confusing at times.

In this article we'll take a beginner's look at what regular expressions are and see through examples how they can help you in your day to day tasks.

Create a Style Sheet in Dreamweaver 8

Zoe Gillenwater

Although it's always best to know how to perform web development tasks by hand, the CSS Styles panel of Dreamweaver 8 lets you get away with not having to create, attach, or edit a style sheet by hand ever again if you don't want to. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to use the CSS Styles panel to:

attach a style sheet to a page
create new rules in a style sheet
edit existing rules' properties and add new ones

Note: Although this tutorial is aimed at beginner users of CSS and Dreamweaver, you still need to understand CSS syntax and what each property controls in order to know how to set the appropriate values in Dreamweaver. If you're not yet familiar with how CSS works, please read Adrian Senior's introductory series of CSS tutorials first.

Getting Organized with Adobe Bridge - Part 2: Working with Metadata

Jim Babbage

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.

The Getting Organized with Adobe Bridge Series:
Getting Organized with Adobe Bridge - Part 1: Batch Renaming
Getting Organized with Adobe Bridge - Part 2: Working with Metadata
Getting Organized with Adobe Bridge - Part 3: Keywords and Searches and Collections - Oh My! Coming Soon

Dynamic Text Formatting Demystified - Part 1: setTextFormat

Joseph Balderson

Ever tried formatting a text field in flash using ActionScript, only to get all tangled up in a myriad of class properties and methods? In this series we'll look at how to create a textfield and format it completely with code, how to dynamically embed fonts, how to use HTML formatting and how to use CSS stylesheets in Flash.

Images and Accessibility

Adrian Senior

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.

Getting Organized with Adobe Bridge - Part 1: Batch Renaming [FREE]

Jim Babbage

As a commercial photographer, one of my ongoing challenges is to keep my images organized so that I can sort and find images quickly for myself or a client. 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 Photoshop® CS2, 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 short article, we will look at how to work with work with the Batch rename function to help you organize your imaging work.

One of the strengths of Bridge is easy Batch Renaming. This is often one of the first steps I take when tying in a series of images for a specific project or client. Even for my personal work, I find it helpful to batch rename files based on the event or subject matter.

This article will detail the process of Batch Renaming and give a few tips on filenaming structure

The Getting Organized with Adobe Bridge Series:
Getting Organized with Adobe Bridge - Part 1: Batch Renaming
Getting Organized with Adobe Bridge - Part 2: Working with Metadata
Getting Organized with Adobe Bridge - Part 3: Keywords and Searches and Collections - Oh My! Coming Soon

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.

Check out the Article by CMX Partner Knut Kubenz

Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats!

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

Getting The Dimensions of Your FLV

Let's say you have an FLV that you don't want to use in the FLVPlayback component but in a video object instead. The problem is, you need to know the dimensions of the FLV for the video object. No problem. Place the component on the stage, link the component to the video and the dimensions of the FLV appear in the Flash Property inspector. Note the dimension and delete the component from the stage and the library.

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!