
Thursday, January 17th, 2008
CMX Weekly Newsletter News Fun and Freebies Recent CMX Content Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats Check the News! Steven Seiller Joins The Community MX Team Steven is an award winning, internationally published photographer. He started computer programming in 1979 on a Bally video game console when not playing Pong. Steven also created an international ecommerce site in 1997 when the banks said, "you're going to do what on the what?!?" He has a habit of finding the features in software which don't work right and is a "go to geek" for how to get things done. Steven is a well-rounded web developer, well-versed in Graphic Design, PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, Search Engine Optimization, Usability, Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. Steven does a lot of 'cross-media' projects which repurposes content and integrates various technologies for various outlets, such as print, web and video. Steven's first CMX article, "Version Clue With Version Cue" is available for free, and if you deal with file revisions at all, you'll want to read it. We're really excited to have Steven on our team, and we look forward to learning a lot from him. If It's OK For E.T., Why Not Adobe? It appears that through CS3, Adobe is indeed "phoning home." Blogger Dan made a post in his blog that is raising quite a furor. He noticed that when Adobe CS3 applications start up, they attempt to connect to an IP address of 192.168.112.2O7.net. It sure doesn't look like a big deal at first, but this is not a typical IP address, since typical IP addresses do not have an "O" or a ".net" attached to them. So where is Adobe sending information to when it starts a CS3 application? It's connecting to Overture, a usage-tracking site. But John Nack, head of Photoshop at Adobe, says it's really not all that nefarious after all. He says it is only to log incoming traffic from the "welcome screens" in some Adobe products. Is this really a big deal? Extreme privacy advocates may think so. You can decide for yourself after reading articles like this one, provided by Guardian.co.uk. Lex Luthor Is To Batman As Malware Is To...? Antivirus vendors such as Symantec, AVG and Mcafee have several enemies. Those companies have always been several steps ahead of any entity that has tried to invade our personal computer space, but lately the good guys are having a tougher time with the "bad guys." It looks like more attacks are coming at your computer than ever before and the antivirus vendors may not be able to keep up with the threats. It's easy to see why; When a virus hits the internet, it can be thwarted pretty quickly, but just as antivirus companies have teams of people working on creating an antidote for each virus that occurs, a team of malicious individuals are trying to make each virus stronger and more pervasive. PCWorld.com has an article that describes this latest battle between good and evil. How Much Will You Pay For Sexy? Apple released the MacBook Air this week, and it's a beautiful, sleek machine. According to Apple, it's the world's thinnest laptop, and we have no reason to doubt it. Mac enthusiasts in the market for a new laptop will want to do two things. OK, they'll only want to do one thing, and that's buy the MacBook Air. The other thing they should be doing is making sure they know what they're getting for their $1,799, or $3,019, depending on whether they want the upgraded processor and hard drive. ComputerWorld.com has a Q&A that covers the basics of the MacBook Air, and only a small portion of it is dedicated to how sexy this laptop is. They also talk about some of the areas where the Air is lacking, like the missing optical drive, small drive space, not being able to add memory or swap out the battery yourself, only one usb port, and other things that make Apple's latest laptop not quite as desirable as the MacBook Pro, unless you simply have to have the thinnest laptop on the market. MacWorld.com has a similar article on the MacBook Air, albeit framed in a more positive light. And Soon, Adobe Will Have A Million Zombie Computers Doing Their Bidding! Bwahahahaha! There have been several alerts issued recently involving several Adobe products. According to this article at GnuCitizen.com, 99% of all home routers are vulnerable to being taken over by hackers if the user visits a site with a malicious swf file embbedded in it. Check that same article to find out how Flash's interepretation of http request headers helps hackers take advantage of UPnP's vulnerability. GnuCitizen has another article, more of an FAQ, regarding the bug. Next up, it appears that Adobe has just posted tech notes that will help you fix potential cross-site scripting issues in Dreamweaver, Contribute and Connect. If you've used the "Insert Flash Video" command in Dreamweaver or Contribute read this tech note. For Connect, check out this tech note, which recommends that you install the Adobe Connect 6 Service Pack 3 Update.
Satisfied Customers Speak Out! "Thank you for this INCREDIBLE work/asset! I got so much from your Part 1 last year and I keep it in my "important references" drawer as I refer to it constantly. It had to have taken hours of painstaking work for you to gift us with this sequel, and it looks better even that the first. Thank You!" - Klaus G, CMX Subscriber, commenting on Sheri German's article, "Design Your Own Custom CMX CSS Course - Part Two". 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: "Intellectual brilliance is no guarantee against being dead wrong." — David Fasold Mac Sweeper Not Quite What It Seems To Be Mac Sweeper seems like a legitimate Mac program that will clean and tune up your computer. It seems that the only thing that Mac Sweeper really does is take money out of your pocket. According to VNUNet.com, once you install the free version of Mac Sweeper, it gives you false positives, telling you that you that your system could be compromised unless you clean up your computer using Mac Sweeper. But not with the free version. No, you have to upgrade to their "Pro" version which will cost you. Mac users should be wary of this rogue piece of software. Kuler Gets Even Cooler! What? We're Not The First Ones To Use That Line? First, Adobe Labs created Kuler, the community-driven color theme tool that provides color inspiration for graphic designers and web developers. Then Ben Pritchard from PixelFumes.com created an extension for Flash that allows developers to use Kuler within the Flash application. Our own Joseph Balderson liked the extension so much he wrote a CMX tutorial on how to get the most out of Ben's Kuler extension. Alan Musselman, from Adobe's Fireworks Developer Relations team, didn't want to be left out and approached Ben about creating an extension for Fireworks that would do the same thing. Ben graciously accepted the challenge, and as a result, we now have a great Kuler extension for Fireworks, which Jim Babbage wrote about for CMX. Now our friends at WebAssist.com have created the "Dreamweaver Tools for Kuler" so that you can now work with Kuler from within Dreamweaver. The extension is free, so do yourself a favor and pick it up. Kuler is a simple and elegant solution to choosing a color theme for the job you're working on. New Tutorial From a New Contributing Author Martin Oliveira, known as "Oli" to those in the Cartweaver support newsgroups, is an extremely knowledgeable ASP programmer. If you own Cartweaver, one of the best Dreamweaver-targeted shopping carts on the market, then you probably know he's always there in the CW forums to answer your questions. He has written his first tutorial for Community MX, entitled "Generic Form Processor Using CDONTS." The article is a real time saver for those who use ASP with CDO mail and are used to having to set up the entire email body bit by bit. We look forward to more great tutorials from Oli. Just One More Reason That Netflix Will Kick Blockbuster's Butt Netflix has allowed their subscribers to watch their videos over the internet for a while now. However, they put a cap on the number of minutes you had available to you each month. They have now lifted the cap, thereby allowing us to watch as many movies we want per month over the internet. While their entire catalog of movie rentals is not included in their streaming video service, you've still got over 60,000 movies to choose from. That list of movies will probably expand once the service catches on and Netflix can kick some of the profit to the movie studios in return for making their movies available over the internet. This is a smart move on the part of Netflix, and Blockbuster will either follow suit or fall behind. More on this at Yahoo News. Oops. Not so fast. I just found this link that mentions Apple's video download service, and how it affects Blockbuster. MySQL Acquired By Sun CMX author Paul Davis has once again found a news item that we overlooked. This time it involves MySQL being acquired by Sun. Check out our CMXtraneous blog to get Paul's unique perspective on this interesting turn of events.
CMX Robots.txt Creator The CMX Robots.txt Creator will create a robots.txt file formatted according to the standards set for this type of file and save it to your local site. Quickly create your robots.txt files with this extension and stop worrying about the syntax! Take a look at this extension by Paul Davis
Fun and Freebies! Maybe They Can Make A Toy That Does This For You Having trouble trying to get your Nintendo Wii to cooperate? Give it a good smack. That's what Nintendo technical support says to do... We Like Us Some Indiana Jones There's a new Indiana Jones Movie being made, and Vanity Fair has interviews with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas that discuss the new film as well as plenty of other things to keep movie fans happy. Reasonable Or BatCrap Crazy? You Decide. This guy decided that it would be a neat idea to get a tattoo of a ruler on his arm so that he could easily measure things. Wouldn't it have been less obtrusive to maybe, oh I don't know, carry a ruler?!
Using The Spry Accordian 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 author Stephanie Sullivan can be found here.
Weekly Content Listing Generic Form Processor Using CDONTS [FREE] Many people spend a lot of time hand-coding forms so that the results of the form submission are emailed. Most of this time is spent on collecting all the form items, and building the email body. For simple forms (i.e., just a few fields), this task is quite easy. However, if you have larger forms, this process can become quite tedious and time consuming. The best solution, is a neat little trick that not many people know of using the request.form properties and methods Martin Oliveira, known as "Oli" to those in the Cartweaver support newsgroups, is an extremely knowledgeable ASP programmer. If you own Cartweaver, one of the best Dreamweaver-targeted shopping carts on the market, then you probably know he's always there in the CW forums to answer your questions. Create a Slideshow in Fireworks CS3 Tom Green Why do we make our lives complicated? Why do we strip our computer down to its electrons before we check to see if it is plugged into the wall? Why to we over think web-based slideshows? Loading and Controlling External SWFs in AS3 Derrick Ypenburg Loading external files into Flash with ActionScript 3.0 has changed quite a bit from ActionScript 1 and 2.The Flash API contains a new Loader class with which to load JPEGs, GIFs, and PNGs, a URLRequest class for making URL requests and a new event model. SWFs are loaded using the same technique, but finding the right way to call methods and properties of a loaded SWF can be challenging. I have been hand-coding ActionScript for years and this task made me feel like a newbie trying to figure it out. If you are struggling with the same problem, then please read on and stop the pain. HD Video and the FLVPlayback Component Tom Green Let me guess, you have seen some of the HD stuff in Flash and thought: "Whoa! Too complex for me." What if I were to tell you that it can be done ... code-free ... using nothing more than a few mouse clicks. Let's go one better... let me show you... Using CFQUERY with Directories Tom Muck The CFQUERY tag is a versitile tag that is not only for database queries. You can run a CFQUERY query of queries on any valid query result. Results from CFFTP, CFPOP, and CFDIRECTORY, among other tags, are returned as query results. This makes it very easy to do filtering and searching on query results from these different tags. This article will show one use of of the query of queries on a local server directory. Cross Fading Audio in ActionScript - Part 2: ActionScript 3.0 David Stiller It's easy enough to cross fade audio in a Flash timeline. Just create a layer for each sound and use the Edit button in the Property inspector to create two custom fades. You'll have to select the keyframe that introduces each sound. Make the one sound fade out and the other in — and position the fades so they overlap. The result is a smooth transition between two audio clips, but it ends up being inflexible in the published SWF. The cross fade happens when it happens, and that's that. If you want to accomplish the same effect in response to user input, you'll have to use ActionScript. But how? The approach is markedly different between ActionScript 2.0 and 3.0. Last time in Part 1, we took a look at the older AS2 approach. Here in Part 2, we'll update the same principles to work in AS3. Approximate download size: 4.6MB The Cross Fading Audio in ActionScript Series: Cross Fading Audio in ActionScript - Part 1: ActionScript 2.0 Cross Fading Audio in ActionScript - Part 2: ActionScript 3.0 Using XML and the ComboBox to Choose Multiple Videos in Flash CS3 [FREE] Tom Green You are about to discover that Flash and XML are an unbeatable combination when it comes to playing a list of videos. It Was a Frosty Friday Knut Kubenz I guess just the fact that I live in Canada (the Great White North) and it's winter, makes me want to come up with new ways to to share our lovely season and bring you effects you can use to create snowy and frosty scenes even in the peak of summer. The effect I'll present today allows you to use Photoshop's Wind Filter, the Hue/Saturation control, the Clouds Filter and Layer Masks to render a frosty look even from images you have created on a much warmer day. The steps are simple and not too extensive and will give you a new creative look to your images quickly and effectively. Let's begin. Highlight a Table Row on Mouseover! Paul Davis Highlighting a row in a table is a commonly seen web feature and is pretty handy for figuring out where you are in a larger table. Highlighting the row also allows the visitor to quickly see what data is connected to the row the mouse cursor happens to be over. While the effect is simple, the JavaScript is a little tricky. This tutorial will go over exactly how to implement this functionality on your tables! Using JQuery - Part 4: DOM Manipulation Rob Williams Developing AJAX applications can often be more complicated than you initially expect. Although working through tutorials and learning about the code involved to do various tasks is beneficial in helping you develop new possibilites, the stark reality these days is that as you begin to develop more and more AJAX-based sites you'll end up becoming less and less enthusiastic about having to hand-write all of the basic AJAX functionality over and over again. This is where JavaScript Libraries come into play. In this series we're going to take a look at one of the more interesting and widely used JavaScript AJAX library: jQuery. In the fourth part of this series we're going to start to take a look at some of the ways that we can manipulate elements with jQuery. The Using JQuery Series: Using JQuery - Part 1: Introduction Using JQuery - Part 2: The Basics Using JQuery - Part 3: Selectors Using JQuery - Part 4: DOM Manipulation
Using FLV Cue Points to Direct Hyperlinks Tom Green likes to mix and match multimedia formats. In From After Effects to Flash: Poetry in Motion Graphics, he and co-author Tiago Dias bounce happily back and forth between video files and SWF files. And why not? Flash has supported true video by way of the FLV format for several versions now. No longer is Flash the exclusive domain of animators and programmers - videographers, too, can join the fun. Taking a cue from Tom and Tiago, this tutorial explores an atypical approach to an otherwise run-of-the-mill Flash presentation, one in which various timeline keyframes present hyperlinks to other web pages. The catch is that the Flash file in this tutorial is only comprised of a single frame. The visuals are determined by a video file, and the hyperlinks are determined by cue points. 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 Tom Muck, CMX Partner. Easy Database Fieldname Entry A database tip: if you have a long list of fieldnames to create a database table, but don't want to spend the time to manually type them in (and reduce the risk of typos), paste the list into a text file twice. Save the text file and use your database import utility to import the "data", making sure to check the box to use the first row as your fieldnames. Your database table will be created with all your fieldnames, and you can then delete the first row of "data" and make any adjustments in data types. 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!

Steven Seiller Joins The Community MX Team

Steven is an award winning, internationally published photographer. He started computer programming in 1979 on a Bally video game console when not playing Pong. Steven also created an international ecommerce site in 1997 when the banks said, "you're going to do what on the what?!?" He has a habit of finding the features in software which don't work right and is a "go to geek" for how to get things done. Steven is a well-rounded web developer, well-versed in Graphic Design, PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, Search Engine Optimization, Usability, Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. Steven does a lot of 'cross-media' projects which repurposes content and integrates various technologies for various outlets, such as print, web and video.

Steven's first CMX article, "Version Clue With Version Cue" is available for free, and if you deal with file revisions at all, you'll want to read it. We're really excited to have Steven on our team, and we look forward to learning a lot from him.

If It's OK For E.T., Why Not Adobe?

It appears that through CS3, Adobe is indeed "phoning home." Blogger Dan made a post in his blog that is raising quite a furor. He noticed that when Adobe CS3 applications start up, they attempt to connect to an IP address of 192.168.112.2O7.net. It sure doesn't look like a big deal at first, but this is not a typical IP address, since typical IP addresses do not have an "O" or a ".net" attached to them. So where is Adobe sending information to when it starts a CS3 application? It's connecting to Overture, a usage-tracking site. But John Nack, head of Photoshop at Adobe, says it's really not all that nefarious after all. He says it is only to log incoming traffic from the "welcome screens" in some Adobe products. Is this really a big deal? Extreme privacy advocates may think so. You can decide for yourself after reading articles like this one, provided by Guardian.co.uk.

Lex Luthor Is To Batman As Malware Is To...?

Antivirus vendors such as Symantec, AVG and Mcafee have several enemies. Those companies have always been several steps ahead of any entity that has tried to invade our personal computer space, but lately the good guys are having a tougher time with the "bad guys." It looks like more attacks are coming at your computer than ever before and the antivirus vendors may not be able to keep up with the threats. It's easy to see why; When a virus hits the internet, it can be thwarted pretty quickly, but just as antivirus companies have teams of people working on creating an antidote for each virus that occurs, a team of malicious individuals are trying to make each virus stronger and more pervasive. PCWorld.com has an article that describes this latest battle between good and evil.

How Much Will You Pay For Sexy?

Apple released the MacBook Air this week, and it's a beautiful, sleek machine. According to Apple, it's the world's thinnest laptop, and we have no reason to doubt it. Mac enthusiasts in the market for a new laptop will want to do two things. OK, they'll only want to do one thing, and that's buy the MacBook Air. The other thing they should be doing is making sure they know what they're getting for their $1,799, or $3,019, depending on whether they want the upgraded processor and hard drive. ComputerWorld.com has a Q&A that covers the basics of the MacBook Air, and only a small portion of it is dedicated to how sexy this laptop is. They also talk about some of the areas where the Air is lacking, like the missing optical drive, small drive space, not being able to add memory or swap out the battery yourself, only one usb port, and other things that make Apple's latest laptop not quite as desirable as the MacBook Pro, unless you simply have to have the thinnest laptop on the market. MacWorld.com has a similar article on the MacBook Air, albeit framed in a more positive light.

And Soon, Adobe Will Have A Million Zombie Computers Doing Their Bidding! Bwahahahaha!

There have been several alerts issued recently involving several Adobe products. According to this article at GnuCitizen.com, 99% of all home routers are vulnerable to being taken over by hackers if the user visits a site with a malicious swf file embbedded in it. Check that same article to find out how Flash's interepretation of http request headers helps hackers take advantage of UPnP's vulnerability. GnuCitizen has another article, more of an FAQ, regarding the bug. Next up, it appears that Adobe has just posted tech notes that will help you fix potential cross-site scripting issues in Dreamweaver, Contribute and Connect. If you've used the "Insert Flash Video" command in Dreamweaver or Contribute read this tech note. For Connect, check out this tech note, which recommends that you install the Adobe Connect 6 Service Pack 3 Update.

Satisfied Customers Speak Out!

"Thank you for this INCREDIBLE work/asset! I got so much from your Part 1 last year and I keep it in my "important references" drawer as I refer to it constantly. It had to have taken hours of painstaking work for you to gift us with this sequel, and it looks better even that the first. Thank You!"

- Klaus G, CMX Subscriber, commenting on Sheri German's article, "Design Your Own Custom CMX CSS Course - Part Two".

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:

"Intellectual brilliance is no guarantee against being dead wrong." — David Fasold

Mac Sweeper Not Quite What It Seems To Be

Mac Sweeper seems like a legitimate Mac program that will clean and tune up your computer. It seems that the only thing that Mac Sweeper really does is take money out of your pocket. According to VNUNet.com, once you install the free version of Mac Sweeper, it gives you false positives, telling you that you that your system could be compromised unless you clean up your computer using Mac Sweeper. But not with the free version. No, you have to upgrade to their "Pro" version which will cost you. Mac users should be wary of this rogue piece of software.

Kuler Gets Even Cooler! What? We're Not The First Ones To Use That Line?

First, Adobe Labs created Kuler, the community-driven color theme tool that provides color inspiration for graphic designers and web developers. Then Ben Pritchard from PixelFumes.com created an extension for Flash that allows developers to use Kuler within the Flash application. Our own Joseph Balderson liked the extension so much he wrote a CMX tutorial on how to get the most out of Ben's Kuler extension. Alan Musselman, from Adobe's Fireworks Developer Relations team, didn't want to be left out and approached Ben about creating an extension for Fireworks that would do the same thing. Ben graciously accepted the challenge, and as a result, we now have a great Kuler extension for Fireworks, which Jim Babbage wrote about for CMX. Now our friends at WebAssist.com have created the "Dreamweaver Tools for Kuler" so that you can now work with Kuler from within Dreamweaver. The extension is free, so do yourself a favor and pick it up. Kuler is a simple and elegant solution to choosing a color theme for the job you're working on.

New Tutorial From a New Contributing Author

Martin Oliveira, known as "Oli" to those in the Cartweaver support newsgroups, is an extremely knowledgeable ASP programmer. If you own Cartweaver, one of the best Dreamweaver-targeted shopping carts on the market, then you probably know he's always there in the CW forums to answer your questions. He has written his first tutorial for Community MX, entitled "Generic Form Processor Using CDONTS." The article is a real time saver for those who use ASP with CDO mail and are used to having to set up the entire email body bit by bit. We look forward to more great tutorials from Oli.

Just One More Reason That Netflix Will Kick Blockbuster's Butt

Netflix has allowed their subscribers to watch their videos over the internet for a while now. However, they put a cap on the number of minutes you had available to you each month. They have now lifted the cap, thereby allowing us to watch as many movies we want per month over the internet. While their entire catalog of movie rentals is not included in their streaming video service, you've still got over 60,000 movies to choose from. That list of movies will probably expand once the service catches on and Netflix can kick some of the profit to the movie studios in return for making their movies available over the internet. This is a smart move on the part of Netflix, and Blockbuster will either follow suit or fall behind. More on this at Yahoo News. Oops. Not so fast. I just found this link that mentions Apple's video download service, and how it affects Blockbuster.

MySQL Acquired By Sun

CMX author Paul Davis has once again found a news item that we overlooked. This time it involves MySQL being acquired by Sun. Check out our CMXtraneous blog to get Paul's unique perspective on this interesting turn of events.

CMX Robots.txt Creator

The CMX Robots.txt Creator will create a robots.txt file formatted according to the standards set for this type of file and save it to your local site. Quickly create your robots.txt files with this extension and stop worrying about the syntax!

Take a look at this extension by Paul Davis

Fun and Freebies!

Maybe They Can Make A Toy That Does This For You

Having trouble trying to get your Nintendo Wii to cooperate? Give it a good smack. That's what Nintendo technical support says to do...

We Like Us Some Indiana Jones

There's a new Indiana Jones Movie being made, and Vanity Fair has interviews with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas that discuss the new film as well as plenty of other things to keep movie fans happy.

Reasonable Or BatCrap Crazy? You Decide.

This guy decided that it would be a neat idea to get a tattoo of a ruler on his arm so that he could easily measure things. Wouldn't it have been less obtrusive to maybe, oh I don't know, carry a ruler?!

Using The Spry Accordian 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 author Stephanie Sullivan can be found here.

Weekly Content Listing

Generic Form Processor Using CDONTS [FREE]

Many people spend a lot of time hand-coding forms so that the results of the form submission are emailed. Most of this time is spent on collecting all the form items, and building the email body. For simple forms (i.e., just a few fields), this task is quite easy. However, if you have larger forms, this process can become quite tedious and time consuming. The best solution, is a neat little trick that not many people know of using the request.form properties and methods

Martin Oliveira, known as "Oli" to those in the Cartweaver support newsgroups, is an extremely knowledgeable ASP programmer. If you own Cartweaver, one of the best Dreamweaver-targeted shopping carts on the market, then you probably know he's always there in the CW forums to answer your questions.

Create a Slideshow in Fireworks CS3

Tom Green

Why do we make our lives complicated? Why do we strip our computer down to its electrons before we check to see if it is plugged into the wall? Why to we over think web-based slideshows?

Loading and Controlling External SWFs in AS3

Derrick Ypenburg

Loading external files into Flash with ActionScript 3.0 has changed quite a bit from ActionScript 1 and 2.The Flash API contains a new Loader class with which to load JPEGs, GIFs, and PNGs, a URLRequest class for making URL requests and a new event model. SWFs are loaded using the same technique, but finding the right way to call methods and properties of a loaded SWF can be challenging. I have been hand-coding ActionScript for years and this task made me feel like a newbie trying to figure it out.

If you are struggling with the same problem, then please read on and stop the pain.

HD Video and the FLVPlayback Component

Tom Green

Let me guess, you have seen some of the HD stuff in Flash and thought: "Whoa! Too complex for me." What if I were to tell you that it can be done ... code-free ... using nothing more than a few mouse clicks. Let's go one better... let me show you...

Using CFQUERY with Directories

Tom Muck

The CFQUERY tag is a versitile tag that is not only for database queries. You can run a CFQUERY query of queries on any valid query result. Results from CFFTP, CFPOP, and CFDIRECTORY, among other tags, are returned as query results. This makes it very easy to do filtering and searching on query results from these different tags. This article will show one use of of the query of queries on a local server directory.

Cross Fading Audio in ActionScript - Part 2: ActionScript 3.0

David Stiller

It's easy enough to cross fade audio in a Flash timeline. Just create a layer for each sound and use the Edit button in the Property inspector to create two custom fades. You'll have to select the keyframe that introduces each sound. Make the one sound fade out and the other in — and position the fades so they overlap. The result is a smooth transition between two audio clips, but it ends up being inflexible in the published SWF. The cross fade happens when it happens, and that's that.

If you want to accomplish the same effect in response to user input, you'll have to use ActionScript. But how? The approach is markedly different between ActionScript 2.0 and 3.0. Last time in Part 1, we took a look at the older AS2 approach. Here in Part 2, we'll update the same principles to work in AS3.

Approximate download size: 4.6MB

The Cross Fading Audio in ActionScript Series:
Cross Fading Audio in ActionScript - Part 1: ActionScript 2.0
Cross Fading Audio in ActionScript - Part 2: ActionScript 3.0

Using XML and the ComboBox to Choose Multiple Videos in Flash CS3 [FREE]

Tom Green

You are about to discover that Flash and XML are an unbeatable combination when it comes to playing a list of videos.

It Was a Frosty Friday

Knut Kubenz

I guess just the fact that I live in Canada (the Great White North) and it's winter, makes me want to come up with new ways to to share our lovely season and bring you effects you can use to create snowy and frosty scenes even in the peak of summer.

The effect I'll present today allows you to use Photoshop's Wind Filter, the Hue/Saturation control, the Clouds Filter and Layer Masks to render a frosty look even from images you have created on a much warmer day. The steps are simple and not too extensive and will give you a new creative look to your images quickly and effectively. Let's begin.

Highlight a Table Row on Mouseover!

Paul Davis

Highlighting a row in a table is a commonly seen web feature and is pretty handy for figuring out where you are in a larger table. Highlighting the row also allows the visitor to quickly see what data is connected to the row the mouse cursor happens to be over. While the effect is simple, the JavaScript is a little tricky. This tutorial will go over exactly how to implement this functionality on your tables!

Using JQuery - Part 4: DOM Manipulation

Rob Williams

Developing AJAX applications can often be more complicated than you initially expect. Although working through tutorials and learning about the code involved to do various tasks is beneficial in helping you develop new possibilites, the stark reality these days is that as you begin to develop more and more AJAX-based sites you'll end up becoming less and less enthusiastic about having to hand-write all of the basic AJAX functionality over and over again. This is where JavaScript Libraries come into play. In this series we're going to take a look at one of the more interesting and widely used JavaScript AJAX library: jQuery.

In the fourth part of this series we're going to start to take a look at some of the ways that we can manipulate elements with jQuery.

The Using JQuery Series:
Using JQuery - Part 1: Introduction
Using JQuery - Part 2: The Basics
Using JQuery - Part 3: Selectors
Using JQuery - Part 4: DOM Manipulation

Using FLV Cue Points to Direct Hyperlinks

Tom Green likes to mix and match multimedia formats. In From After Effects to Flash: Poetry in Motion Graphics, he and co-author Tiago Dias bounce happily back and forth between video files and SWF files. And why not? Flash has supported true video by way of the FLV format for several versions now. No longer is Flash the exclusive domain of animators and programmers - videographers, too, can join the fun. Taking a cue from Tom and Tiago, this tutorial explores an atypical approach to an otherwise run-of-the-mill Flash presentation, one in which various timeline keyframes present hyperlinks to other web pages. The catch is that the Flash file in this tutorial is only comprised of a single frame. The visuals are determined by a video file, and the hyperlinks are determined by cue points.

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 Tom Muck, CMX Partner.

Easy Database Fieldname Entry

A database tip: if you have a long list of fieldnames to create a database table, but don't want to spend the time to manually type them in (and reduce the risk of typos), paste the list into a text file twice. Save the text file and use your database import utility to import the "data", making sure to check the box to use the first row as your fieldnames. Your database table will be created with all your fieldnames, and you can then delete the first row of "data" and make any adjustments in data types.

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!