
Wednesday, February 7th, 2007
CMX Weekly Newsletter News Fun and Freebies Recent CMX Content Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats Check the News! TODcon 2007 in VEGAS - Come To Learn and Meet Friends For the few who haven't experienced it yet, TODCon is the most informative yet informal Macromedia-related event you're ever going to find. Whether you're a seasoned veteran of Macromedia products or just starting out, you will have a great time learning a great deal from many knowledgeable speakers about CSS, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, ColdFusion, Flash, and even about running your business properly. Those who attend usually end up coming back every year because of the unique and informal atmosphere. You don't want to miss out on this event. This year, TODCon will take place in Las Vegas, Nevada. We predict that this year's turnout will be even bigger than last year's. You're invited to register for this fantastic, one of a kind event. Hurry, so you can take advantage of the early bird registration discount. Free ColdFusion Server Smith is a lightweight, fairly capable and free server to run your ColdFusion pages on. It does not support every kind of CF code you can throw at it, but for those who need a CF server and don't want to pay for Adobe's CF server, it might be a good alternative. It looks like Smith might become open source soon, which could have some positive impact for the ColdFusion language in general. ColdFusion is one of the simplest server languages available, and a free server option could make it more popular, and more widely used. You can learn more about Smith at SmithProject.org. Who Needs Midis When You Have ActionScript 3? Hard-core Flash coders know you can generate sound purely by using the right ActionScript in Flash. But until now, we hadn't heard of anyone creating whole songs that way. 8bitboy is "an amiga modplayer for the flash9 player" that you can download at PopForge.de. The creators of 8bitboy are Andre Michelle and Joa Ebert. You can read Andre's and Joa's blogs to get more information on how it all came about. Our own David Stiller and Joseph Balderson flipped over 8bitboy, and wanted to make sure it was passed on to the Flash users out there. WalMart... On The Cutting Edge? Getting the permission from all of the major movie studios to distribute their movies online in digital format is impossible - unless you're WalMart, who has Disney, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Sony, 20th Century Fox and Universal , on board and ready to go. You can go to Walmart.com and start downloading as soon as you've come to grips that WalMart actually arranged this coup. Movies are the same price you'll find in their store, and you can also purchase any number of television shows. Now that WalMart has scored, it will be interesting to see if anyone else is going to step up to the plate. NYTimes.com has the full story. Parallels RC2 If you want to run Windows on your Mac, the main choices for making it happen are Apple's Bootcamp or Parallels. The choice just got tougher with the release of Parallels Release Candidate 2. This release has quite a few improvements over previous versions that include a new look and support for CD and DVD burning within each OS you run. If you aren't already running Bootcamp, or even if you are, it might be worth checking out. More information on this at enGadget.com.
Satisfied Customers Speak Out! "Excellent piece of work! The presentation was so basic that even I could follow these examples and instructions! Please hurry and keep these coming as I really need to unscramble all the CSS info floating around here on CMX that I've read and get these basics down first! Each year that goes by, CMX gradually becomes the text book in all the various areas of web design and programming, making my dollar have more and more value with this subscription! Please hurry with the next installment of this series! " CMX Subscriber Dale C., commenting on Sheri German's FREE tutorial "The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part One" 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's no use saying, ''We are doing our best.'' You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary." — Winston Churchill A List of Reasons We Love Lists Our newsletter can be a bit "list heavy" at times. We love lists. Lists organize things in an easily readable and digestible format. David Letterman has had a Top 10 list for years, and of course each year we have lists of the best or worst "whatever" of the year. NetBusinessBlog really gest into the list spirit by making a list of the reasons we all love lists. Number eight is because "people like counting." Huh... We hadn't considered that one, but we'll add it to our list. Uh, Speaking of Lists... Connected Internet has a list (ok, they call it a "guide") of ways you can optimise Windows XP. It's sorted for beginning, intermediate and advanced users, and includes items for helping you improve boot time, optimising your display settings, making programs load faster and other handy tips. If you're not upgrading to Vista anytime soon, some of these may help make XP a more robust application. Fireworks and Firefox Make a Good Team Jon Hicks is on the branding team for Mozilla's Firefox. He took a sketch and recreated it using Fireworks MX, and the result is the Firefox logo you've come to love. Or hate. Depends on who you are, I suppose. On his blog, Jon illustrates (nyuck nyuck) the process he and others had to go through to get the logo looking as snazzy as it is. Steven Garrity, another person responsible for shaping the Firefox brand, has more information on the process too. Check out his blog. Because We're Soooooo Smart It doesn't matter who you are or what you do. Seeing otherwise smart people do really dopey things probably cracks you up. RinkWorks.com has a treasure chest of computer-related dopey things that people have done. Like the user who held the mouse in the air and pointed it at the screen like a TV remote, all the while clicking madly. There are plenty more where that came from. Kind of reminds us of ClientCopia.com. Pull Up a Seat. And Then Pull It Apart, Then Wind It Around, And... It's difficult to get excited about a chair, but in this newsletter, we've got two that you might want to look at. See the Fun and Freebies section for one of them, and check out Glumbert.com for the other. We've never seen a chair like this. You can take it frome being a chair to a couch to a piece of art just by... well, we're not sure what you'd call the process. You just kind of twist it into the shape you need it to be. It's not the most pleasant thing to look at, but the functionality is amazing. Plus, transforming it would be an entertaining party trick.
Dynamic Letter Anchors Extension Frequently on a dynamic page that displays a long list of content, such as a list of names, you want to allow a user to jump down to a specific letter of the alphabet. On a static list, this is easy -- just insert anchor links at key places on your page where the first letter of a word changes. On a dynamic page, it is not as easy. Using this extension, you can create a list of links for your data AND create the dynamic anchors to go along with them. Check out the Extension by CMX Partner Tom Muck
Fun and Freebies Oh, Poop We don't typically put links to toilets in our newsletter, but this pimped-out toilet from Roto-Rooter is an exception. In the Roto Rooter Sweepstakes, you can win a toilet unlike any toilet you've ever seen before. It's got a DVD player, a Gateway eMachine, a flat panel TV, a fridge with a beer tap, and plenty of other stuff, including a megaphone so you can easily ask for more toilet paper from the safety of your warm seat. Want it? Enter to win it at RotoRooter.com. If He Loves Apple So Much, Why Doesn't He Marry It? Bill Gates is not the biggest proponent of Apple. But that doesn't mean he's always looked at them as a rival. As you can see in this YouTube video, Gates held Apple in very high esteem at one point. Great Spoofs of The "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" Ads Apple's "Get a Mac" campaign has been copied quite a bit. There are probably hundreds of copycat and spoofs of the ads on the internet. TecheBlog.com got all of the best ones together for you.
Flash Video Deployment: A Case Study with TEACHnow.org, Part 1: Video Requirements Since the release of Flash Player 8, a lot of buzz has been generating about the new and improved quality of Flash Video, thanks to the On2 VP6 codec that is part of the Flash Player 8 plug-in. In Part 1 of this series, the process of deploying a 35-minute documentary with Flash Video is examined. This free article by CMX Partner Robert Reinhardt can be found here.
Weekly Content Listing Dealing with the Dreaded IRS Audit… Paul Davis The dreaded IRS audit, learn about preparing before you get an audit and how to make the audit process livable. This article is about USA tax laws only. The author is not a tax attorney or accountant, take all of the advice to your tax attorney and accountant before utilizing any of the information. Server-Side Includes in PHP Rob Williams Server-side includes are one of the most important concepts for web developers today. They not only save you time but also make sites easier to update and maintain while reducing redundancy and duplicate pieces of code. The cavet that most new developers run into is that although the idea of server-side includes in general seems quite simple, often the implementation can be quite frustrating if not planned out correctly. In this article we'll talk about not only the theory, but also some practical examples, of how to properly implement server-side includes using PHP. Fixed Position in IE7 - Part Six - Tricky Popups! John Gallant, Holly Bergevin Our series so far has covered fixed positioning for main elements on a web page, and we've also shown some tricks with hovered popups and fixed positioning. This installment takes a look at usability and accessibility issues that the previous hovered popups create, and uses JavaScript to replace the hovering, and overcome the problems. We also take a look at how to make the popup content available if JavaScript is disabled. The Fixed Position in IE7 Series: Fixed Position in IE7 - Part One Fixed Position in IE7 - Part Two Fixed Position in IE7 - Part Three: Fixed Position and Older IE Versions Fixed Position in IE7 - Part Four: Fixed Popups! Fixed Position in IE7 - Part Five: Fixed Popups from Flowed Elements Fixed Position in IE7 - Part Six: Tricky Popups! Using Kerning for Better Headlines [FREE] Kim Dudley The success of a promotional piece is often dependent upon the setup of the text. If the spacing between the lines in a paragraph is too tight, causing the text to be hard to read, it is likely a potential client will skip over much of the content. On the other hand, if the text is set up well it not only effectively delivers the information but it can also portray a specific image or style for the company. The choice of fonts and the spacing of that font's characters goes a long way in the legibility of the text. In this article we will look at how different applications work with a font's kerning information and how you can manually kern your titles and headlines for a more professional look. Expression Web [FREE] Heidi Bautista Microsoft is seriously pursuing web designers these days, not just web developers. They already provide some pretty great authoring tools for developers. Visual Studio has been around forever but many designers find the design surface too ... minimal, shall we say. Visual Web Developer (VWD) Express Edition, the lighter-weight authoring tool introduced in 2005 is free, which is nice, but it's also targeted towards the developer audience. Recently Microsoft launched a new initiative aimed at capturing the designer audience. Introducing Expression Studio: a suite of four products expressly designed for the web designer. Expression Web - web authoring design tool Expression Blend - user interface design tool that can incorporate multiple media types (vector and pixel art, video, audio, etc.) Expression Design - illustration and graphic design tool Expression Media - asset management tool, visually catalogues and organizes dozens of different media formats, based on the iView MediaPro product acquired by Microsoft in June, 2006. This article reviews Expression Web - the web authoring tool included in Expression Studio. The Displacement Map Filter Demystified: Part 2 - Skewing and Magnification David Stiller Flash Professional 8 introduced a number of exciting new visual filters — such as drop shadow, blur, glow, and bevel — which reproduce many of the corresponding filters of Photoshop and Fireworks. Of these, most are available via the Property inspector's Filters tab. All filters are accessible to ActionScript, but a few actually require programming. One of these is the DisplacementMapFilter class, which distorts images based on the colors or transparency in a special reference map. Here in Part 2 of this series, you will learn how a gradient fill can be used to skew and magnify pixels in an imported graphic file. In future installments, you will learn how to add curvature and even ripples. The Displacement Map Filter Demystified Series The Displacement Map Filter Demystified: Part 1 - How it Ticks The Displacement Map Filter Demystified: Part 2 - Skewing and Magnification ColdFusion Report Builder - Part 3c: Input Parameters Chaz Chumley This is the last article in our three part series on using input parameters with ColdFusion Report Builder. If you have been following along we have created a simple report that took an input parameter to change the title of the report and to modify or filter the data being retrieved from our query. Finally we will be discussing showing or hiding a region of a report based on an input parameter. The ColdFusion Report Builder Series: ColdFusion Report Builder - Part 1: Exploring the IDE ColdFusion Report Builder - Part 2: Building a Simple Report ColdFusion Report Builder - Part 3a: Input Parameters ColdFusion Report Builder - Part 3b: Input Parameters ColdFusion Report Builder - Part 3c: Input Parameters Photos to Art Knut Kubenz So you've always wanted to be a painter but you never had the money for oils, acrylics or water colors and were always worried about getting your clothes and hands dirty. Here's a method which allows you all of the creative freedom you want as a painter without the expense or the mess. Photoshop provides such tools as Layer Blends and Filters which can take a fairly ordinary looking image and turn it into something very painterly. Although there are many filters available in Photoshop, we're not going to just plug one in and leave it. This method allows you to go beyond this to manipulate color, saturation, brightness, contrast and texture. Creating a Printable Photo Poster - A Fireworks Project Jim Babbage A friend of mine was checking out my flickr site recently, and she found a few photos that she felt would be perfect for her office. Three images, set in a single frame. Well to save a little money (and to exercise my FW skills again) I thought it would be cool to make a collage of those three images, set to the largest size that my local online photo lab can reproduce. The largest image the lab can handle is 12" by 18" so you would think that my starting point would be to create a new document that would be those dimensions at a suitable resolution for reproduction. If I was in Photoshop, that would be my first step. And indeed, this entire process could be done in Photoshop as well (hmmm sounds like a hook for part 2!). Fireworks, however, gets a bit sluggish with large files, and I first needed to come up with my design. So I created a file that was 12" x 18" at 72ppi as a mock-up. This would allow me to quickly play around with my design until I was happy, but within the correct proportions. Come follow along as I show you how to work with high res images and make high quality prints using Fireworks as your creation tool. The Mobile Internet - Part 3: Background Images & A Different Breed of Mobile Browser Adrian Senior In this article we will look at some of the differences in how our background images are rendered. We'll specifically be looking at Internet Explorer, Opera and Opera Mini. We will also investigate the affect that specific media types have on the displaying of background images and we'll finish up by taking a look at a different breed of mobile browser. The Mobile Internet Series: The Mobile Internet - Part 1: An Introduction The Mobile Internet - Part 2: Image Display & Filtering The Mobile Internet - Part 3: Background Images & A Different Breed of Mobile Browser
Convert an Existing Site to Use ASP.NET Master Pages and Themes One of the great advantages in ASP.NET v2.0 is the introduction of master pages and themes. This tutorial presents a practical example of converting an existing site to use master pages and themes. Our example site is the Community MX North Pole JumpStart. You'll learn how to chop up the code to create the master page, where to put the theme files and how to modify the existing css file so that it works well with the theme. It's actually a very quick process and one that can be adapted to any JumpStart offered by Community MX. Check out the Article by CMX partner Heidi Bautista
Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats! This week's Tip, Trick or Dirty Cheat is courtesy of CMX partner Tom Muck 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!

TODcon 2007 in VEGAS - Come To Learn and Meet Friends

For the few who haven't experienced it yet, TODCon is the most informative yet informal Macromedia-related event you're ever going to find. Whether you're a seasoned veteran of Macromedia products or just starting out, you will have a great time learning a great deal from many knowledgeable speakers about CSS, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, ColdFusion, Flash, and even about running your business properly. Those who attend usually end up coming back every year because of the unique and informal atmosphere. You don't want to miss out on this event. This year, TODCon will take place in Las Vegas, Nevada. We predict that this year's turnout will be even bigger than last year's.

You're invited to register for this fantastic, one of a kind event. Hurry, so you can take advantage of the early bird registration discount.

Free ColdFusion Server

Smith is a lightweight, fairly capable and free server to run your ColdFusion pages on. It does not support every kind of CF code you can throw at it, but for those who need a CF server and don't want to pay for Adobe's CF server, it might be a good alternative. It looks like Smith might become open source soon, which could have some positive impact for the ColdFusion language in general. ColdFusion is one of the simplest server languages available, and a free server option could make it more popular, and more widely used. You can learn more about Smith at SmithProject.org.

Who Needs Midis When You Have ActionScript 3?

Hard-core Flash coders know you can generate sound purely by using the right ActionScript in Flash. But until now, we hadn't heard of anyone creating whole songs that way. 8bitboy is "an amiga modplayer for the flash9 player" that you can download at PopForge.de. The creators of 8bitboy are Andre Michelle and Joa Ebert. You can read Andre's and Joa's blogs to get more information on how it all came about. Our own David Stiller and Joseph Balderson flipped over 8bitboy, and wanted to make sure it was passed on to the Flash users out there.

WalMart... On The Cutting Edge?

Getting the permission from all of the major movie studios to distribute their movies online in digital format is impossible - unless you're WalMart, who has Disney, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Sony, 20th Century Fox and Universal , on board and ready to go. You can go to Walmart.com and start downloading as soon as you've come to grips that WalMart actually arranged this coup. Movies are the same price you'll find in their store, and you can also purchase any number of television shows. Now that WalMart has scored, it will be interesting to see if anyone else is going to step up to the plate. NYTimes.com has the full story.

Parallels RC2

If you want to run Windows on your Mac, the main choices for making it happen are Apple's Bootcamp or Parallels. The choice just got tougher with the release of Parallels Release Candidate 2. This release has quite a few improvements over previous versions that include a new look and support for CD and DVD burning within each OS you run. If you aren't already running Bootcamp, or even if you are, it might be worth checking out. More information on this at enGadget.com.

Satisfied Customers Speak Out!

"Excellent piece of work! The presentation was so basic that even I could follow these examples and instructions! Please hurry and keep these coming as I really need to unscramble all the CSS info floating around here on CMX that I've read and get these basics down first! Each year that goes by, CMX gradually becomes the text book in all the various areas of web design and programming, making my dollar have more and more value with this subscription! Please hurry with the next installment of this series! "

CMX Subscriber Dale C., commenting on Sheri German's FREE tutorial "The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part One"

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's no use saying, ''We are doing our best.'' You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary." — Winston Churchill

A List of Reasons We Love Lists

Our newsletter can be a bit "list heavy" at times. We love lists. Lists organize things in an easily readable and digestible format. David Letterman has had a Top 10 list for years, and of course each year we have lists of the best or worst "whatever" of the year. NetBusinessBlog really gest into the list spirit by making a list of the reasons we all love lists. Number eight is because "people like counting." Huh... We hadn't considered that one, but we'll add it to our list.

Uh, Speaking of Lists...

Connected Internet has a list (ok, they call it a "guide") of ways you can optimise Windows XP. It's sorted for beginning, intermediate and advanced users, and includes items for helping you improve boot time, optimising your display settings, making programs load faster and other handy tips. If you're not upgrading to Vista anytime soon, some of these may help make XP a more robust application.

Fireworks and Firefox Make a Good Team

Jon Hicks is on the branding team for Mozilla's Firefox. He took a sketch and recreated it using Fireworks MX, and the result is the Firefox logo you've come to love. Or hate. Depends on who you are, I suppose. On his blog, Jon illustrates (nyuck nyuck) the process he and others had to go through to get the logo looking as snazzy as it is. Steven Garrity, another person responsible for shaping the Firefox brand, has more information on the process too. Check out his blog.

Because We're Soooooo Smart

It doesn't matter who you are or what you do. Seeing otherwise smart people do really dopey things probably cracks you up. RinkWorks.com has a treasure chest of computer-related dopey things that people have done. Like the user who held the mouse in the air and pointed it at the screen like a TV remote, all the while clicking madly. There are plenty more where that came from. Kind of reminds us of ClientCopia.com.

Pull Up a Seat. And Then Pull It Apart, Then Wind It Around, And...

It's difficult to get excited about a chair, but in this newsletter, we've got two that you might want to look at. See the Fun and Freebies section for one of them, and check out Glumbert.com for the other. We've never seen a chair like this. You can take it frome being a chair to a couch to a piece of art just by... well, we're not sure what you'd call the process. You just kind of twist it into the shape you need it to be. It's not the most pleasant thing to look at, but the functionality is amazing. Plus, transforming it would be an entertaining party trick.

Dynamic Letter Anchors Extension

Frequently on a dynamic page that displays a long list of content, such as a list of names, you want to allow a user to jump down to a specific letter of the alphabet. On a static list, this is easy -- just insert anchor links at key places on your page where the first letter of a word changes. On a dynamic page, it is not as easy. Using this extension, you can create a list of links for your data AND create the dynamic anchors to go along with them.

Check out the Extension by CMX Partner Tom Muck

Fun and Freebies

Oh, Poop

We don't typically put links to toilets in our newsletter, but this pimped-out toilet from Roto-Rooter is an exception. In the Roto Rooter Sweepstakes, you can win a toilet unlike any toilet you've ever seen before. It's got a DVD player, a Gateway eMachine, a flat panel TV, a fridge with a beer tap, and plenty of other stuff, including a megaphone so you can easily ask for more toilet paper from the safety of your warm seat. Want it? Enter to win it at RotoRooter.com.

If He Loves Apple So Much, Why Doesn't He Marry It?

Bill Gates is not the biggest proponent of Apple. But that doesn't mean he's always looked at them as a rival. As you can see in this YouTube video, Gates held Apple in very high esteem at one point.

Great Spoofs of The "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" Ads

Apple's "Get a Mac" campaign has been copied quite a bit. There are probably hundreds of copycat and spoofs of the ads on the internet. TecheBlog.com got all of the best ones together for you.

Flash Video Deployment: A Case Study with TEACHnow.org, Part 1: Video Requirements

Since the release of Flash Player 8, a lot of buzz has been generating about the new and improved quality of Flash Video, thanks to the On2 VP6 codec that is part of the Flash Player 8 plug-in. In Part 1 of this series, the process of deploying a 35-minute documentary with Flash Video is examined.

This free article by CMX Partner Robert Reinhardt can be found here.

Weekly Content Listing

Dealing with the Dreaded IRS Audit…

Paul Davis

The dreaded IRS audit, learn about preparing before you get an audit and how to make the audit process livable.

This article is about USA tax laws only. The author is not a tax attorney or accountant, take all of the advice to your tax attorney and accountant before utilizing any of the information.

Server-Side Includes in PHP

Rob Williams

Server-side includes are one of the most important concepts for web developers today. They not only save you time but also make sites easier to update and maintain while reducing redundancy and duplicate pieces of code. The cavet that most new developers run into is that although the idea of server-side includes in general seems quite simple, often the implementation can be quite frustrating if not planned out correctly. In this article we'll talk about not only the theory, but also some practical examples, of how to properly implement server-side includes using PHP.

Fixed Position in IE7 - Part Six - Tricky Popups!

John Gallant, Holly Bergevin

Our series so far has covered fixed positioning for main elements on a web page, and we've also shown some tricks with hovered popups and fixed positioning.

This installment takes a look at usability and accessibility issues that the previous hovered popups create, and uses JavaScript to replace the hovering, and overcome the problems. We also take a look at how to make the popup content available if JavaScript is disabled.

The Fixed Position in IE7 Series:
Fixed Position in IE7 - Part One
Fixed Position in IE7 - Part Two
Fixed Position in IE7 - Part Three: Fixed Position and Older IE Versions
Fixed Position in IE7 - Part Four: Fixed Popups!
Fixed Position in IE7 - Part Five: Fixed Popups from Flowed Elements
Fixed Position in IE7 - Part Six: Tricky Popups!

Using Kerning for Better Headlines [FREE]

Kim Dudley

The success of a promotional piece is often dependent upon the setup of the text. If the spacing between the lines in a paragraph is too tight, causing the text to be hard to read, it is likely a potential client will skip over much of the content. On the other hand, if the text is set up well it not only effectively delivers the information but it can also portray a specific image or style for the company.

The choice of fonts and the spacing of that font's characters goes a long way in the legibility of the text. In this article we will look at how different applications work with a font's kerning information and how you can manually kern your titles and headlines for a more professional look.

Expression Web [FREE]

Heidi Bautista

Microsoft is seriously pursuing web designers these days, not just web developers. They already provide some pretty great authoring tools for developers. Visual Studio has been around forever but many designers find the design surface too ... minimal, shall we say. Visual Web Developer (VWD) Express Edition, the lighter-weight authoring tool introduced in 2005 is free, which is nice, but it's also targeted towards the developer audience.

Recently Microsoft launched a new initiative aimed at capturing the designer audience. Introducing Expression Studio: a suite of four products expressly designed for the web designer.

Expression Web - web authoring design tool
Expression Blend - user interface design tool that can incorporate multiple media types (vector and pixel art, video, audio, etc.)
Expression Design - illustration and graphic design tool
Expression Media - asset management tool, visually catalogues and organizes dozens of different media formats, based on the iView MediaPro product acquired by Microsoft in June, 2006.

This article reviews Expression Web - the web authoring tool included in Expression Studio.

The Displacement Map Filter Demystified: Part 2 - Skewing and Magnification

David Stiller

Flash Professional 8 introduced a number of exciting new visual filters — such as drop shadow, blur, glow, and bevel — which reproduce many of the corresponding filters of Photoshop and Fireworks. Of these, most are available via the Property inspector's Filters tab. All filters are accessible to ActionScript, but a few actually require programming. One of these is the DisplacementMapFilter class, which distorts images based on the colors or transparency in a special reference map.

Here in Part 2 of this series, you will learn how a gradient fill can be used to skew and magnify pixels in an imported graphic file. In future installments, you will learn how to add curvature and even ripples.

The Displacement Map Filter Demystified Series
The Displacement Map Filter Demystified: Part 1 - How it Ticks
The Displacement Map Filter Demystified: Part 2 - Skewing and Magnification

ColdFusion Report Builder - Part 3c: Input Parameters

Chaz Chumley

This is the last article in our three part series on using input parameters with ColdFusion Report Builder. If you have been following along we have created a simple report that took an input parameter to change the title of the report and to modify or filter the data being retrieved from our query. Finally we will be discussing showing or hiding a region of a report based on an input parameter.

The ColdFusion Report Builder Series:
ColdFusion Report Builder - Part 1: Exploring the IDE
ColdFusion Report Builder - Part 2: Building a Simple Report
ColdFusion Report Builder - Part 3a: Input Parameters
ColdFusion Report Builder - Part 3b: Input Parameters
ColdFusion Report Builder - Part 3c: Input Parameters

Photos to Art

Knut Kubenz

So you've always wanted to be a painter but you never had the money for oils, acrylics or water colors and were always worried about getting your clothes and hands dirty. Here's a method which allows you all of the creative freedom you want as a painter without the expense or the mess.

Photoshop provides such tools as Layer Blends and Filters which can take a fairly ordinary looking image and turn it into something very painterly. Although there are many filters available in Photoshop, we're not going to just plug one in and leave it. This method allows you to go beyond this to manipulate color, saturation, brightness, contrast and texture.

Creating a Printable Photo Poster - A Fireworks Project

Jim Babbage

A friend of mine was checking out my flickr site recently, and she found a few photos that she felt would be perfect for her office. Three images, set in a single frame. Well to save a little money (and to exercise my FW skills again) I thought it would be cool to make a collage of those three images, set to the largest size that my local online photo lab can reproduce.

The largest image the lab can handle is 12" by 18" so you would think that my starting point would be to create a new document that would be those dimensions at a suitable resolution for reproduction.

If I was in Photoshop, that would be my first step. And indeed, this entire process could be done in Photoshop as well (hmmm sounds like a hook for part 2!). Fireworks, however, gets a bit sluggish with large files, and I first needed to come up with my design. So I created a file that was 12" x 18" at 72ppi as a mock-up. This would allow me to quickly play around with my design until I was happy, but within the correct proportions.

Come follow along as I show you how to work with high res images and make high quality prints using Fireworks as your creation tool.

The Mobile Internet - Part 3: Background Images & A Different Breed of Mobile Browser

Adrian Senior

In this article we will look at some of the differences in how our background images are rendered. We'll specifically be looking at Internet Explorer, Opera and Opera Mini.

We will also investigate the affect that specific media types have on the displaying of background images and we'll finish up by taking a look at a different breed of mobile browser.

The Mobile Internet Series:
The Mobile Internet - Part 1: An Introduction
The Mobile Internet - Part 2: Image Display & Filtering
The Mobile Internet - Part 3: Background Images & A Different Breed of Mobile Browser

Convert an Existing Site to Use ASP.NET Master Pages and Themes

One of the great advantages in ASP.NET v2.0 is the introduction of master pages and themes. This tutorial presents a practical example of converting an existing site to use master pages and themes. Our example site is the Community MX North Pole JumpStart. You'll learn how to chop up the code to create the master page, where to put the theme files and how to modify the existing css file so that it works well with the theme. It's actually a very quick process and one that can be adapted to any JumpStart offered by Community MX.

Check out the Article by CMX partner Heidi Bautista

Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats!

This week's Tip, Trick or Dirty Cheat is courtesy of CMX partner Tom Muck

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.

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That's it for this week. Stay tuned for the next CMX newsletter!