
Wednesday, September 20th, 2006
CMX Weekly Newsletter News Fun and Freebies Recent CMX Content Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats Check the News! Learn Flash in a Flash Adobe has some interesting Flash seminars coming up: "Photoshop to Flash: Optimizing Pixels and Workflow", "The Evolution of Animation: Bed Rock Revisited" and "Learning ActionScript 3 for Flash Professional." They're selling out pretty quickly. There were three others we could mention, but they're sold out already. For more information, or to register, go to Adobe's events page. Internet Explorer 7 RC1 Released Like they say in this TechWeb.com article, an "RC1" is a bRelease Candidate, and is typically close to the final version that will be released. Most, if not all, bugs should be worked out. So if you want to see what IE7 is going to be like upon its final release, this is a good way to find out. At least on of our staff members at CMX has installed RC1 and says it's running "smooth and trouble free." You can download IE7 RC1 from Microsoft.com. Adobe Acrobat Connect Replaces Adobe Breeze Adobe Acrobat 8 has just been released. Acrobat is now being promoted as a communicational tool and comes combined with Acrobat Connect, which allows users to hold meetings with up to fifteen users at a time, for $39/month. Interestingly, you cannot share pdf files within Connect, as one CMX staffer pointed out. Unlike Breeze, Connect does not have built-in VoIP, so you'll need a phone conference system to meet with more than one other person. But still, for the price, it could be worth checking out. Here's the press release for Connect, as well as the press release for Acrobat 8. Microsoft Stands On a Soapbox Microsoft has thrown its hat into the video uploading ring with a service it calls "Soapbox." It's currently in the beta stage, which you can sign up for at SoapBox.MSN.com. Microsoft says there will not be any advertising on SoapBox, unlike YouTube.com. Rob Bennett, General Manager of entertainment and video services at Microsoft, believes that they'll be able to give YouTube a run for their money. The two services sound nearly identical, but it's likely that MS will throw a twist into the mix that could give them an edge. We'll have to stay tuned. Web Surfers Anonymous If you've been creeping around the internet, afraid that your IP address might be used by some nefarious hackers, or you use Bittorrent file swapping and you'd rather keep it a secret, you might want to take a look at Torpark. It allows you to use an alternate network to browse the internet, maintaining your privacy wherever you might happen to roam. Torpark runs on top of Firefox 1.5 and the file size is small enough to fit on a Flash drive, so you can take it just about anywhere you need to. Wikipedia has a pretty good summary of what Torpark is and how it works.
Satisfied Customers Speak Out! "Thanks Jim--great tutorial and easy to follow. The timing on presenting this tutorial was perfect. I can put this to use right away." - Harlene F., CMX Subscriber, commenting on Jim Babbage's Create an Old Style Postcard with Fireworks 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: "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one." - Albert Einstein YouTube's Little Helper YouTube.com doesn't make it easy to download their videos, but if you use Firefox, then DownloadHelper might... help. DownloadHelper is an extension for Firefox that sits in the browser waiting for you to find a video you might want to download. When you trigger it, it will download the video for you. It's not just for YouTube's flv videos however. It will work on just about any website that you might find a video on. You can read more about it, and/or download it from Addons.Mozilla.org. It Was Bound To Happen: Google Tackles The World's Problems Most of us have been to Google.com, but have you been to Google.org yet? Same company, different cause. Google.org is a philanthropic organization that has a starting capital of one billion dollars, and is on a mission to help rid the world of poverty, global warming and disease. One of the first things on their agenda is to develop a super-efficient hybrid car that runs on ethanol, gasoline and electricity. People involved withe project say that they're not as concerned with monetary success as social success. It's doubtful that stockholders feel the same way... The Google blog has a much better description of Google.org and what they're up to. Mac Reliability Charted Out MacInTouch.com put together a survey for Mac laptop users, and have posted the results. At a glance, you can see which laptops are more dependable or less dependable than the others. For instance, the survey results show which units needed the fewest repairs, which required the most repairs, and even in what year of the computer's life those repairs were needed. We won't go through the results, but the positive news is that more recent laptops require less repairs. Citizendium Just Doesn't Roll Off The Tongue, Does It? Recent problems concerning the intergrity of the information found at Wikipedia.org has caused some consternation among people who thought they were getting straight information from anonymous strangers on the internet... The Citizendium Project wants change that. They don't quite have anything solid to look at yet, but their plan is to capture the spirit of Wikipedia - and admittedly copy all of their articles - but to make it a more responsible information outlet, with new input and edits to existing entries coming from less anonymous sources. The FAQ at Citizendium.org has bunches of information on what they're trying to accomplish. Will this work out the way the folks at Citizendium plan? Clay Shirky is not so sure... Those Tubes Are Getting Fuller According to InternetWorldStats.com, 16% of the world is now on the internet. Three months ago, we were looking at 15.7%, but recently Asia and parts of Europe saw significant increases in internet usage. According the chart at ReadWriteWeb.com, America leads with the most internet users, taking up 19.7% of total worldwide internet usage. Russia leads the way in increased growth for language for the years 2000 through 2005 - a 664.5% increase to be nearly exact. China is next, with a 346.7% increase in websites catering to the Chinese during those years. China also has the largest population, so their increased usage figures pretty large in the mix. At this rate, the internet should be a pretty nice-sized melting pot.
CMX Get Put All Open Extension for Dreamweaver Maybe you're working on a set of files and you want to make sure you're editing the latest live versions. Or perhaps you find yourself working with quite a number of related files. When you're done, you have all the files opened and need to upload them all to the live server. You could just select each one in the Files panel (Site panel in DWMX), and upload them individually, or you could use the Select Recently Modified command to upload the files. If you've only worked on one set of files today, you could try the Select Newer Local and wait for ages as Dreamweaver compares every file in your site against the remote file modification date. Take a look at this Extension by CMX Partner Danilo Celic
Fun and Freebies! A.L.I.C.E. Knows The Meaning Of Life Pandorabots.com provides websites with interactive bots you can use to chat with users. You can also download A.L.I.C.E. to your PDA and take her along with you. Its responses are automated, and provides some pretty interesting chats. For instance, we decided to discuss the meaning of life. Here's the transcription: CMX: What is life? ALICE: Life is the opposite of death. CMX: What is death? ALICE: Death is the opposite of life. CMX: What is nothing? ALICE: A thing that does not exist or something of little or no value, seriousness, importance, etc. CMX: How did you get so smart? ALICE: Everything I need to know, I learned from my botmaster. Man, bots sure are smart. Be An Airport Security Screener Not to make light of airport security, but this Flash game at Shockwave.com puts you in charge of screening everyone at an airport security checkpoint. You've got to make sure no one is carrying anything in their luggage they shouldn't, as well as make sure there is nothing on their person that should prevent them from boarding their flight. Be quick, because you can't make the line back up too far. What Are Words For? For Emailing, Of Course! Dailymail.co.uk has some great statistics on email in the workplace. For instance, "The typical office worker spends a staggering 27 minutes a day emailing friends and family." Is that all? At Community MX, we've got that beat by a mile. Our boss never reads this newsletter, so we're safe... probably...
Let's Learn ColdFusion: Building a Simple Admin - Part 1 In this series you will build a simple administration area complete with a control panel that will allow you to manage the content of your website. The system you will build is aimed at the small business website where one or two users will have total control of the website's content. This free article by CMX Partner Adrian Senior can be found here.
Weekly Content Listing Transparent Gradients in Illustrator Kim Dudley Have you ever wished you had a tool from one application in another? One such tool I would like to have in Illustrator is Photoshop's gradient tool. Of course Illustrator has a gradient tool but unlike Photoshop's it can only create a gradient between two colors. Photoshop's gradient tool can create a gradient from a color to transparency. Sometimes, however, by using different tools the same effect can be acheived. In this tutorial we will look at a way to create the look of Photoshop's gradient tool in Illustrator by using Illustrator's Opacity mask. FLV Data Rate and Bandwidth... Demysitifed. [FREE] Tom Green, Scott Fegette The issue really isn't getting an FLV to play on your web page. The issue is properly creating that FLV before it hits the browser. All About CSS Drop Shadows - Part Seven John Gallant, Holly Bergevin In the previous tutorial in our series (Part Six) we detailed a fancy "button-depress" trick for use with the drop shadow method that was for browsers other than IE. This time we will explain how you can get IE6/Win and IE5.5/Win to behave the same way, more or less. The All About CSS Drop Shadows Series: All About CSS Drop Shadows - Part One All About CSS Drop Shadows - Part Two All About CSS Drop Shadows - Part Three All About CSS Drop Shadows - Part Four All About CSS Drop Shadows - Part Five All About CSS Drop Shadows - Part Six All About CSS Drop Shadows - Part Seven Getting Organized with Adobe Bridge - Part 3: Keywords and Searches and Collections - Oh My! Jim Babbage In the last two instalments of this series, we looked at Batch Renaming and Working with Metadata within Bridge. In this third part, we're going to explore the Keywords panel. We'll also learn how to create searches for specific files and how to create and save collections based on a search. From an organizational perspective, assigning keywords to images can greatly speed up your workflow when you are searching for a specific file or type of file. The tough part is making sure you add all that information on a consistent basis. Spend a little time now, save a lot in the future. Keywords can be generic, such as "photograph" or "vector," to more specific, such as "steamships" or "sunset". This aricle explains how to add keywords, keyword sets, create keyword templates to speed up your workflow, and also how to serach for files and save those searches as collections. 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! Creating Daily Stats Pages Tom Muck A stat page can be used for an e-store, blog, ad rotater, or any other type of application where you want to track a specific series of "things" that happen each day. For example, on a blog you might track blog hits. In an e-store, you might track daily sales. For an ad rotator you might track click-throughs. This article will show how to write a query to group the daily activity in the first section, and how to display that as a graph using ColdFusion in the second section. The article will use SQL Server syntax, but could be adapted to any database. Also, the SQL code is applicable to any server model—not only ColdFusion. This is part 1 of 2. Google for Students (and Anyone) Sheri German No matter how many other search tools I teach my students about, they always seem to return to Google. In order to help them get beyond the lonely search field on the Google home page, I introduce them to some of the many ways to use Google for better results. Let's Learn ColdFusion: Building a Simple Admin - Part 2 Adrian Senior In Part 1 of this series we looked at how to lay out the basic appearance of our administration area and set up some simple but effective security to allow our clients to easily access what will become our administration area's control panel. To hold the information our clients create we will need to make use of a database. That is where we will begin Part 2. The database will be simple, though it will provide all the functionality we need in our first venture into developing a dynamic website. The Let's Learn ColdFusion: Building a Simple Admin Series: Let's Learn ColdFusion: Building a Simple Admin - Part 1 Let's Learn ColdFusion: Building a Simple Admin - Part 2 ASP.NET v2.0 - Using the SiteMapDataSource and Menu Controls Heidi Bautista Constructing menus for navigation is a really common task. Version 2.0 of the ASP.NET Framework provides all sorts of tools to make this task easier. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to create a multi-level menu using the and controls and an XML file that supplies the data to display in the Menu. InDesign - Part 4: Publishing a Document Kim Dudley InDesign is a great tool for setting up multiple page layouts or documents that have a combination of text and graphics. In this series of tutorials, we have followed the process of creating a multiple page document in InDesign. The tutorials have been broken down into four separate parts covering the following topics: Setting up a new document with master pages Adding and formatting text Working with graphics Publishing the document for print and online In this, the final tutorial in this series, we will prepare the cookbook for publication. InDesign has many tools that help prepare artwork for its final destination, whether that be online or in print. In this tutorial we will take a quick look at the methods used for preparing the document for an offset printer and for outputting the artwork as a PDF. The InDesign Series: InDesign - Part 1: Setting up a Document InDesign - Part 2: Adding and Formatting Text InDesign - Part 3: Working with Graphics InDesign - Part 4: Publishing a Document Approximate download size: 965k Plan Your Business with a Business Plan Paul Davis "Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning" - Winston Churchill Plan your business for success and stop worrying about it! A well written business plan will give your business direction, goals and objectives. If you don't know where you're going, you'll never get there.
Cool Pie Charts While Fireworks has a tool for creating pie charts I find that the resulting two-dimensional chart is more often than not quite dull and boring. In this tutorial I will show you how to spruce up your pie charts and transform them into attractive graphics that will look good on any page. It's really very simple, so let's do it already. :) Check out the Article by CMX Partner Gordon Mackay
Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats! This week's Tip, Trick or Dirty Cheat is courtesy of Jim Babbage, CMX Partner. Quick Blend Mode If you have a scroll mouse, you can quickly scroll through the Blend Modes menu in the Fireworks Layers panel to see the blend mode applied to your selected object or layer. Just click inside the Blend Mode Menu, then click once more to collapse the menu and scroll away! Would you like your tip published? Submit it to tips@communitymx.com. That's it for this week. Stay tuned for the next CMX newsletter!

CMX Weekly Newsletter

News
Fun and Freebies
Recent CMX Content
Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats

Check the News!

Learn Flash in a Flash

Adobe has some interesting Flash seminars coming up: "Photoshop to Flash: Optimizing Pixels and Workflow", "The Evolution of Animation: Bed Rock Revisited" and "Learning ActionScript 3 for Flash Professional." They're selling out pretty quickly. There were three others we could mention, but they're sold out already. For more information, or to register, go to Adobe's events page.

Internet Explorer 7 RC1 Released

Like they say in this TechWeb.com article, an "RC1" is a bRelease Candidate, and is typically close to the final version that will be released. Most, if not all, bugs should be worked out. So if you want to see what IE7 is going to be like upon its final release, this is a good way to find out. At least on of our staff members at CMX has installed RC1 and says it's running "smooth and trouble free." You can download IE7 RC1 from Microsoft.com.

Adobe Acrobat Connect Replaces Adobe Breeze

Adobe Acrobat 8 has just been released. Acrobat is now being promoted as a communicational tool and comes combined with Acrobat Connect, which allows users to hold meetings with up to fifteen users at a time, for $39/month. Interestingly, you cannot share pdf files within Connect, as one CMX staffer pointed out. Unlike Breeze, Connect does not have built-in VoIP, so you'll need a phone conference system to meet with more than one other person. But still, for the price, it could be worth checking out. Here's the press release for Connect, as well as the press release for Acrobat 8.

Microsoft Stands On a Soapbox

Microsoft has thrown its hat into the video uploading ring with a service it calls "Soapbox." It's currently in the beta stage, which you can sign up for at SoapBox.MSN.com. Microsoft says there will not be any advertising on SoapBox, unlike YouTube.com. Rob Bennett, General Manager of entertainment and video services at Microsoft, believes that they'll be able to give YouTube a run for their money. The two services sound nearly identical, but it's likely that MS will throw a twist into the mix that could give them an edge. We'll have to stay tuned.

Web Surfers Anonymous

If you've been creeping around the internet, afraid that your IP address might be used by some nefarious hackers, or you use Bittorrent file swapping and you'd rather keep it a secret, you might want to take a look at Torpark. It allows you to use an alternate network to browse the internet, maintaining your privacy wherever you might happen to roam. Torpark runs on top of Firefox 1.5 and the file size is small enough to fit on a Flash drive, so you can take it just about anywhere you need to. Wikipedia has a pretty good summary of what Torpark is and how it works.

Satisfied Customers Speak Out!

"Thanks Jim--great tutorial and easy to follow. The timing on presenting this tutorial was perfect. I can put this to use right away."

- Harlene F., CMX Subscriber, commenting on Jim Babbage's Create an Old Style Postcard with Fireworks
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:

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one." - Albert Einstein

YouTube's Little Helper

YouTube.com doesn't make it easy to download their videos, but if you use Firefox, then DownloadHelper might... help. DownloadHelper is an extension for Firefox that sits in the browser waiting for you to find a video you might want to download. When you trigger it, it will download the video for you. It's not just for YouTube's flv videos however. It will work on just about any website that you might find a video on. You can read more about it, and/or download it from Addons.Mozilla.org.

It Was Bound To Happen: Google Tackles The World's Problems

Most of us have been to Google.com, but have you been to Google.org yet? Same company, different cause. Google.org is a philanthropic organization that has a starting capital of one billion dollars, and is on a mission to help rid the world of poverty, global warming and disease. One of the first things on their agenda is to develop a super-efficient hybrid car that runs on ethanol, gasoline and electricity. People involved withe project say that they're not as concerned with monetary success as social success. It's doubtful that stockholders feel the same way... The Google blog has a much better description of Google.org and what they're up to.

Mac Reliability Charted Out

MacInTouch.com put together a survey for Mac laptop users, and have posted the results. At a glance, you can see which laptops are more dependable or less dependable than the others. For instance, the survey results show which units needed the fewest repairs, which required the most repairs, and even in what year of the computer's life those repairs were needed. We won't go through the results, but the positive news is that more recent laptops require less repairs.

Citizendium Just Doesn't Roll Off The Tongue, Does It?

Recent problems concerning the intergrity of the information found at Wikipedia.org has caused some consternation among people who thought they were getting straight information from anonymous strangers on the internet... The Citizendium Project wants change that. They don't quite have anything solid to look at yet, but their plan is to capture the spirit of Wikipedia - and admittedly copy all of their articles - but to make it a more responsible information outlet, with new input and edits to existing entries coming from less anonymous sources. The FAQ at Citizendium.org has bunches of information on what they're trying to accomplish. Will this work out the way the folks at Citizendium plan? Clay Shirky is not so sure...

Those Tubes Are Getting Fuller

According to InternetWorldStats.com, 16% of the world is now on the internet. Three months ago, we were looking at 15.7%, but recently Asia and parts of Europe saw significant increases in internet usage. According the chart at ReadWriteWeb.com, America leads with the most internet users, taking up 19.7% of total worldwide internet usage. Russia leads the way in increased growth for language for the years 2000 through 2005 - a 664.5% increase to be nearly exact. China is next, with a 346.7% increase in websites catering to the Chinese during those years. China also has the largest population, so their increased usage figures pretty large in the mix. At this rate, the internet should be a pretty nice-sized melting pot.

CMX Get Put All Open Extension for Dreamweaver

Maybe you're working on a set of files and you want to make sure you're editing the latest live versions. Or perhaps you find yourself working with quite a number of related files. When you're done, you have all the files opened and need to upload them all to the live server. You could just select each one in the Files panel (Site panel in DWMX), and upload them individually, or you could use the Select Recently Modified command to upload the files. If you've only worked on one set of files today, you could try the Select Newer Local and wait for ages as Dreamweaver compares every file in your site against the remote file modification date.

Take a look at this Extension by CMX Partner Danilo Celic

Fun and Freebies!

A.L.I.C.E. Knows The Meaning Of Life

Pandorabots.com provides websites with interactive bots you can use to chat with users. You can also download A.L.I.C.E. to your PDA and take her along with you. Its responses are automated, and provides some pretty interesting chats. For instance, we decided to discuss the meaning of life. Here's the transcription:

CMX: What is life?
ALICE: Life is the opposite of death.
CMX: What is death?
ALICE: Death is the opposite of life.
CMX: What is nothing?
ALICE: A thing that does not exist or something of little or no value, seriousness, importance, etc.
CMX: How did you get so smart?
ALICE: Everything I need to know, I learned from my botmaster.

Man, bots sure are smart.

Be An Airport Security Screener

Not to make light of airport security, but this Flash game at Shockwave.com puts you in charge of screening everyone at an airport security checkpoint. You've got to make sure no one is carrying anything in their luggage they shouldn't, as well as make sure there is nothing on their person that should prevent them from boarding their flight. Be quick, because you can't make the line back up too far.

What Are Words For? For Emailing, Of Course!

Dailymail.co.uk has some great statistics on email in the workplace. For instance, "The typical office worker spends a staggering 27 minutes a day emailing friends and family." Is that all? At Community MX, we've got that beat by a mile. Our boss never reads this newsletter, so we're safe... probably...

Let's Learn ColdFusion: Building a Simple Admin - Part 1

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

This free article by CMX Partner Adrian Senior can be found here.

Weekly Content Listing

Transparent Gradients in Illustrator

Kim Dudley

Have you ever wished you had a tool from one application in another? One such tool I would like to have in Illustrator is Photoshop's gradient tool. Of course Illustrator has a gradient tool but unlike Photoshop's it can only create a gradient between two colors. Photoshop's gradient tool can create a gradient from a color to transparency. Sometimes, however, by using different tools the same effect can be acheived.

In this tutorial we will look at a way to create the look of Photoshop's gradient tool in Illustrator by using Illustrator's Opacity mask.

FLV Data Rate and Bandwidth... Demysitifed. [FREE]

Tom Green, Scott Fegette

The issue really isn't getting an FLV to play on your web page. The issue is properly creating that FLV before it hits the browser.

All About CSS Drop Shadows - Part Seven

John Gallant, Holly Bergevin

In the previous tutorial in our series (Part Six) we detailed a fancy "button-depress" trick for use with the drop shadow method that was for browsers other than IE. This time we will explain how you can get IE6/Win and IE5.5/Win to behave the same way, more or less.

The All About CSS Drop Shadows Series:
All About CSS Drop Shadows - Part One
All About CSS Drop Shadows - Part Two
All About CSS Drop Shadows - Part Three
All About CSS Drop Shadows - Part Four
All About CSS Drop Shadows - Part Five
All About CSS Drop Shadows - Part Six
All About CSS Drop Shadows - Part Seven

Getting Organized with Adobe Bridge - Part 3: Keywords and Searches and Collections - Oh My!

Jim Babbage

In the last two instalments of this series, we looked at Batch Renaming and Working with Metadata within Bridge. In this third part, we're going to explore the Keywords panel. We'll also learn how to create searches for specific files and how to create and save collections based on a search.

From an organizational perspective, assigning keywords to images can greatly speed up your workflow when you are searching for a specific file or type of file. The tough part is making sure you add all that information on a consistent basis. Spend a little time now, save a lot in the future. Keywords can be generic, such as "photograph" or "vector," to more specific, such as "steamships" or "sunset".

This aricle explains how to add keywords, keyword sets, create keyword templates to speed up your workflow, and also how to serach for files and save those searches as collections.

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!

Creating Daily Stats Pages

Tom Muck

A stat page can be used for an e-store, blog, ad rotater, or any other type of application where you want to track a specific series of "things" that happen each day. For example, on a blog you might track blog hits. In an e-store, you might track daily sales. For an ad rotator you might track click-throughs.

This article will show how to write a query to group the daily activity in the first section, and how to display that as a graph using ColdFusion in the second section. The article will use SQL Server syntax, but could be adapted to any database. Also, the SQL code is applicable to any server model—not only ColdFusion. This is part 1 of 2.

Google for Students (and Anyone)

Sheri German

No matter how many other search tools I teach my students about, they always seem to return to Google. In order to help them get beyond the lonely search field on the Google home page, I introduce them to some of the many ways to use Google for better results.

Let's Learn ColdFusion: Building a Simple Admin - Part 2

Adrian Senior

In Part 1 of this series we looked at how to lay out the basic appearance of our administration area and set up some simple but effective security to allow our clients to easily access what will become our administration area's control panel.

To hold the information our clients create we will need to make use of a database. That is where we will begin Part 2. The database will be simple, though it will provide all the functionality we need in our first venture into developing a dynamic website.

The Let's Learn ColdFusion: Building a Simple Admin Series:
Let's Learn ColdFusion: Building a Simple Admin - Part 1
Let's Learn ColdFusion: Building a Simple Admin - Part 2

ASP.NET v2.0 - Using the SiteMapDataSource and Menu Controls

Heidi Bautista

Constructing menus for navigation is a really common task. Version 2.0 of the ASP.NET Framework provides all sorts of tools to make this task easier. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to create a multi-level menu using the and controls and an XML file that supplies the data to display in the Menu.

InDesign - Part 4: Publishing a Document

Kim Dudley

InDesign is a great tool for setting up multiple page layouts or documents that have a combination of text and graphics. In this series of tutorials, we have followed the process of creating a multiple page document in InDesign. The tutorials have been broken down into four separate parts covering the following topics:

Setting up a new document with master pages
Adding and formatting text
Working with graphics
Publishing the document for print and online

In this, the final tutorial in this series, we will prepare the cookbook for publication. InDesign has many tools that help prepare artwork for its final destination, whether that be online or in print. In this tutorial we will take a quick look at the methods used for preparing the document for an offset printer and for outputting the artwork as a PDF.

The InDesign Series:
InDesign - Part 1: Setting up a Document
InDesign - Part 2: Adding and Formatting Text
InDesign - Part 3: Working with Graphics
InDesign - Part 4: Publishing a Document

Approximate download size: 965k

Plan Your Business with a Business Plan

Paul Davis

"Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning" - Winston Churchill

Plan your business for success and stop worrying about it! A well written business plan will give your business direction, goals and objectives. If you don't know where you're going, you'll never get there.

Cool Pie Charts

While Fireworks has a tool for creating pie charts I find that the resulting two-dimensional chart is more often than not quite dull and boring. In this tutorial I will show you how to spruce up your pie charts and transform them into attractive graphics that will look good on any page. It's really very simple, so let's do it already. :)

Check out the Article by CMX Partner Gordon Mackay

Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats!

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

Quick Blend Mode

If you have a scroll mouse, you can quickly scroll through the Blend Modes menu in the Fireworks Layers panel to see the blend mode applied to your selected object or layer. Just click inside the Blend Mode Menu, then click once more to collapse the menu and scroll away!

Would you like your tip published? Submit it to tips@communitymx.com.

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