
Wednesday, September 27th, 2006
CMX Weekly Newsletter News Fun and Freebies Recent CMX Content Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats Check the News! Adobe + CMX = Great Article Tom Green of Community MX and Scott Fegette of Adobe teamed up together recently to clear up some misconceptions about Flash Video data rate and bandwidth. The resulting article, posted at CommunityMX as well as Adobe, is a clear, concise discussion on how to get the best bandwidth results out of your Flash Video. Scott explains the idea behind writing the article in his blog. Blaze v3 Components in Progress Grant Skinner is a recognized Flash expert, and is currently working with Adobe and Metaliq to get the v3 components for Blaze, aka Flash 9, up to speed. As you would guess, Grant can't go into specifics, but he does say on his blog that the upcoming components for Flash 9 will be much easier to skin than v2 components. His excitement is pretty contagious, and we're anxious to see what will come of his work. O'Reilly - Forget All The Bad Stuff We Said About You O'Reilly has published hundreds of technical books, covering every subject you can think of, including Flash, Perl, ColdFusion, ASP, and bunches of others. They've put up a specialized search on their website which lets you do a search on any code you might want more information on. For instance, do a search on "regex" or "cfcontent" or "AutoEventWireup" and you'll get that code within the context of how it was published in one or more of their books. Get The Skinny on Flex Builder 2 FlashMagazine.com has a pretty good review of Flex Builder 2. Overall, they give it very high marks. Admittedly the reviewer, Jens C. Brynildsen, is not a seasoned Flex user, but that probably makes for a practical review if you're just starting out with Flex yourself. Brynildsen reports that the number of possibilities open to Flex users over Flash users is huge, but that those same possibilities, because there are so many, can be a bit intimidating to someone just getting into Flex. Check out the review at FlashMagazine.com. iWoz Gonna Read This Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computers, has just written an autobiography about the beginnings of Apple. He discusses the role he played in Apple's early years and throughout the rest of his career inside and outside of Apple. Wozniak breaks out of his shell a bit and uncharacteristically takes the credit for engineering the first Apple computers, dispelling the stories about the collaborational efforts of both Steves. More on this at CNN.com.
Satisfied Customers Speak Out! "Thanks for great article! First time I've ever come close to understanding how to do settings. Thanks again for most informative and useful article. I was able to cut the file size of a broadband-use flv by mor than 50%!" - Keith D., CMX Subscriber, commenting on Tom Green's and Scott Fegette's free FLV Data Rate and Bandwidth... Demysitifed 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: "The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office." - Robert Frost Get Some Berkeley Schoolin' For Free Google Video, in cooperation with the University of Berkeley, is posting more than 250 hours of lectures on their website at video.google.com/ucberkeley. Some of the courses will be complete, in their entirety, and all of it is free. More on this at Yahoo.com. So take some time between reading this newsletter and surfing Community MX and get some akademik learnin' in. Slingbox To Couch Potatoes: You Will Never Go Hungry Again! Slingbox allows you to take your television programming with you and watch it anywhere you can get an internet connection. We're not talking about just downloading specific television shows or movies. Slingbox lets you control your television or cable box from anywhere you happen to be, through your laptop or your windows-based mobile phone. Slingbox has been around a while, but they've just come out with three new versions - Pro, AV and Tuner. If you miss TV when you're away from home, this is a simple and relatively inexpensive ($180 - $250) way to get the television programming you're used to. You can learn more at Slingbox.com or check out this article at News.com. They're All Number Two To Us PCWorld.com just put up a list of the 25 Worst Websites. We can't even imagine how tough it was to weed out the millions of competitors striving to make the top of this list. However, PCWorld did a good job of finding some pretty bad sites. Not suprisingly, BidForSurgery.com made the list, as did WindowsUpdate.com. It looks like InmatesForYou.com made the list as well, but since some of us found our spouses there, we're just going to ignore that one. We won't give away the #1 worst site, but it might suprise you. Check out the list at PCWorld.com. Cartoons Hit Close To Home Bill Amend draws a hilarious cartoon strip called FoxTrot about a typical family. Well, a typical cartoon family anyway. The youngest kid is a brainiac and last week's strip had him designing a web page for a school project. We won't give away what happens, but it's pretty hilarious. Ultimately though, it hits a bit too close to home. Check out the first part in the series at GoComics.com and click on "next day" to see the next strips in the series. As Long As Trogdor Made The List, We're Happy Aaron Simpson at ColdHardFlash.com, has put together his own personal list of the Top Ten Most Influential Online Flash Shorts. You may or may not agree with Aaron's list, which includes mostly comedy stuff, including Strongbad, Happy Tree Friends and others. At least a couple of them are offensive, so don't say we didn't warn you. Or, if you like that sort of thing, we just promoted it...
CMX Text Field Auto Complete Extension The CMX Auto Complete Behavior for Dreamweaver and Dreamweaver MX 2004 allows you to quickly and easily add fully customizable "auto complete" functionality (think Google Suggest) to any text or textarea input field on a web page. The "auto complete suggestions" box can easily be customized using CSS to integrate seamlessly into your page design and automatically sizes and positions itself for each input/textarea; no knowledge of JavaScript of the complexities of AJAX required! Take a look at this Extension by CMX Partner Rob Williams
Fun and Freebies! Where Stevie Wonder Got His Inspiration If you don't know whether or not it's good luck for a frog to wander into your house, maybe you need to visit OldSuperstitions.com, where all of the good and bad superstitions are separated into various categories to make them easy to find. Can't remember if a horseshoe should be hung open end up or down? Just do a search for "horseshoe" and you'll be an expert in no time. Eat It Whose day would be complete without seeing sandwiches that look like other stuff? Not ours! Check it out at JustElite.net. We're Ashamed To Say We Do Not Find This Uncool... Ever wanted to turn something on or off with the flick of a Star Trek switch? Over at Axe-Man.org, where free time is apparently in abundance, you can find out how to design a switch to turn something (?) on or off with a switch that looks just like one of the computer panels on the Enterprise.
Turning a Tile Image into a Fireworks Pattern There are lots of tile images available on the web for free, or you may be keen on creating your own. But once you've got the image, how do you set it up so that it displays in the Property Inspector's patterns menu to use for filling vector shapes? You could do a lot of copying and pasting to manually repeat the image, but that is way too much work. And there is a much easier way; Fireworks Patterns. You can apply patterns to fill any vector shape, thus giving the shape a more textured, organic or photo-realistic appearance. This brief tutorial will show you how to take a seamless tile image and add it to the Fireworks Patterns menu. This free article by CMX Partner Jim Babbage can be found here.
Weekly Content Listing Working with Shared Libraries - Part 3: Sharing Fonts with Static Text Robert Reinhardt In this "Working with" series, you learn how to create and use shared libraries with your Flash movies. Shared libraries can help you optimize your workflow, making it easier to update assets across several Flash movies used for any type of project. In the last tutorial of this series, you learned how to create a runtime shared library (RSL) file and share its graphical assets with other Flash movies. In this tutorial, you learn how to create a runtime shared library containing font symbols, to reuse the fonts with static text fields in other Flash movies. Sharing fonts is one of the best ways to trim down SWF file sizes for large projects involving many SWF files. The Working with Shared Libraries Series: Working with Shared Libraries - Part 1: Sharing Symbols in Authortime Libraries Working with Shared Libraries - Part 2: Sharing Symbols in a Runtime Shared Library Working with Shared Libraries - Part 3: Sharing Fonts with Static Text Working with Shared Libraries - Part 4: Sharing Fonts with Dynamic Text Coming Soon Working with Shared Libraries - Part 5: Sharing Fonts with Runtime-Created Text Fields Coming Soon Working with Shared Libraries - Part 6: Using CSS with Shared Fonts Coming Soon Working with Shared Libraries - Part 7: Sharing Components Coming Soon Computer Math 0101 [FREE] Tom Muck One of the very first things that you should learn if you are dealing with programming of any variety is the concept of binary and hexadecimal number systems. The foundation of computers is based in binary—1s and 0s—and its cousin hexadecimal Everything from HTML/CSS color codes to URL encoding to IP addresses to memory/hard drive capacity and everything in between exposes the concept of binary and hexadecimal With a basic understanding, working with computers is a bit easier. Regular Expressions By Example Rob Williams Regular expressions are a powerful pattern-based tool for searching and manipulating text. Unfortunately for newcomers they can also seem quite complicated and often times be simply overwhelming. In this article we'll take a bit more of a hands-on approach to regular expressions and see how some of the various symbols and characters of regular expressions can be combined to form patterns that have real world practical uses. Dynamic Text Formatting Demystified - Part 2: setNewTextFormat Joseph Balderson Ever tried formatting a text field in flash using ActionScript, only to get all tangled up in a myriad of class properties and methods? In Parts 1 & 2 of this series we'll look at how to create a text field and format it completely with code. Part 3 will examine dynamic font embedding, Part 4 will look at how to use HTML formatting, and in Part 5 will show you how to use CSS stylesheets in Flash. The Dynamic Text Formatting Demystified Series: Dynamic Text Formatting Demystified - Part 1: setTextFormat Dynamic Text Formatting Demystified - Part 2: setNewTextFormat Dynamic Text Formatting Demystified - Part 3: Embedding Fonts Coming Soon Dynamic Text Formatting Demystified - Part 4: HTML Formatting Coming Soon Dynamic Text Formatting Demystified - Part 5: Stylesheets Coming Soon Create Pages that Fill the Browser with CSS [FREE] Zoe Gillenwater A frequently asked question in CSS forums is how to create pages that stretch vertically to fill the browser window, regardless of the amount of content. With tables, you would nest your entire design in a table with a single cell and set both the cell and table's height to be 100 percent. With CSS, it's also quite simple and easy. In this tutorial, you will learn the basic CSS technique for making pages fill the browser window, which you can also use any time you have a div that you want to stretch to fill its parent. Please note, however, that this is not a tutorial about making a footer stick to the bottom of the browser viewport or about emulating frames. These are more complicated layout requirements that may be covered in further tutorials, building on the 100 percent height technique introduced here. CFDirectory How To: Inserting Results into Database for Future Searches Chaz Chumley Using CFDirectory allows us to return directory contents, but what if you have a larger directory that doesn't change much or takes a long time to return results? Why not take the results and insert them into a database for optimized searching for a later time. Building an Animated Drop-Down Menu: Part 1 Derrick Ypenburg If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me how to make a functional, bug-proof, animated drop-down menu instead of having to resort to using a component, well, you know the old saying. Creating your own animated drop-down menus can be tricky for a number of reasons: The complexity involved with having numerous buttons to roll-over; The roll-over that triggers the menu to slide down and how it can not interfere with the sub buttons in the drop-down; How does the menu animate back up when the user rolls off? I'm going to break down the creation of creating an animated, drop-down menu from scratch, into 3 articles. In this article we will build the basic shell for the menu that will include: a button that animates the menu down and up, a container that will be animated and that will hold the buttons for the menu, and the basic code to get the menu responsive and working. Parts 2 and 3 will cover creating button classes for the menu and configuring and populating the menu using XML. Building a Flash Video Kaleidoscope - Part 1: Video Reflection [FREE] Tom Green, Joseph Balderson The ideas that sparked this series came about in an unexpected manner. Having just completed an article on the subject of creating reflections in Flash, I started thinking about how it could be done using video instead of images. In typical Community MX fashion, I bounced my question off of our Flash guy Joseph Balderson, and we rapidly solved the problem. (That's happens when a couple of "Tech weenies" get hold of Flash Video.) By that I mean we have a fascination with what we can do with this technology. As such the two of us starting thinking:, "Yeah that is interesting but, really, what more can we do with this basic technique?" It turns out there is quite a bit more you can do with the video reflection technique. At one point in our discussion Joe said, "Hey, now that we have one reflection working, why not add a few more? Let's show 'em how to build a video kaleidoscope too!!" And so this series was born. Approximate download size: 4.2MB Recreate the Law & Order Logo in Fireworks Kim Cavanaugh I admit it. I'm a sucker for Law & Order, the long-running television show about police and prosecutors in New York City. Whenever I'm ready to plop on the couch and take it easy for a while I can always be sure to find an episode of Law & Order on somewhere on some station or the other. The episodes are almost always interesting and engaging, and you can even pop in halfway through almost any episode and quickly figure out what's going on. I think it's safe to say that I've seen the logo for Law & Order hundreds, if not thousands, of times. Every time I do I always note the interesting interplay of colored shadows that make the logo stand out. As it happens, this logo is also a great way to learn a little about how shadows are used in Fireworks 8 for dramatic effect, as you can see in this example. Creating a Soft Mask in Flash - Part 1: Flash Player 7 and Earlier David Stiller Masking has been available in Flash for as long as I can remember. This feature can be very useful and is easy to implement, either by hand or with ActionScript. The only regrettable point, in fact, is that soft masking (where the edges are blurry) has always required a tricky and tedious workaround ... until now. This two-part series examines both the historical workaround — that's the tedious one — and a new (as of Flash 8) approach that is much easier. Knowing both will allow you to apply soft masks in SWFs published to just about any version of the Flash Player. Here in Part 1, we'll take a quick tour of mask basics, then learn the approach for SWFs published for Flash Player 7 and earlier. The Creating a Soft Mask in Flash Series: Creating a Soft Mask in Flash - Part 1: Flash Player 7 and Earlier Creating a Soft Mask in Flash - Part 2: Flash Player 8 and Later Coming Soon
Fundamental Fusebox: Part 1 - An Overview Fusebox has long been the leading ColdFusion web application framework, noted for its use of the model-view-controller (MVC) architecture. Now Fusebox 5 has been released, and this introductory article provides an overview, including a review of changes from the previous version. The article also takes a look at the new "skeleton" application provided for Fusebox 5. Check out the Article by CMX Partner Thomas Pletcher
Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats! This week's Tip, Trick or Dirty Cheat is courtesy of John Gallant, CMX Partner. Disabling Rules Quickly When writing CSS code by hand, a quick and dirty method of disabling an existing rule is to remove one character from the selector. You can also disable a single declaration within a rule by removing a character from the property name, rendering that declaration invalid and causing all browsers to ignore it completely. Just be sure you clean up such tests before delivering the code to avoid embarrassment! 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!

Adobe + CMX = Great Article

Tom Green of Community MX and Scott Fegette of Adobe teamed up together recently to clear up some misconceptions about Flash Video data rate and bandwidth. The resulting article, posted at CommunityMX as well as Adobe, is a clear, concise discussion on how to get the best bandwidth results out of your Flash Video. Scott explains the idea behind writing the article in his blog.

Blaze v3 Components in Progress

Grant Skinner is a recognized Flash expert, and is currently working with Adobe and Metaliq to get the v3 components for Blaze, aka Flash 9, up to speed. As you would guess, Grant can't go into specifics, but he does say on his blog that the upcoming components for Flash 9 will be much easier to skin than v2 components. His excitement is pretty contagious, and we're anxious to see what will come of his work.

O'Reilly - Forget All The Bad Stuff We Said About You

O'Reilly has published hundreds of technical books, covering every subject you can think of, including Flash, Perl, ColdFusion, ASP, and bunches of others. They've put up a specialized search on their website which lets you do a search on any code you might want more information on. For instance, do a search on "regex" or "cfcontent" or "AutoEventWireup" and you'll get that code within the context of how it was published in one or more of their books.

Get The Skinny on Flex Builder 2

FlashMagazine.com has a pretty good review of Flex Builder 2. Overall, they give it very high marks. Admittedly the reviewer, Jens C. Brynildsen, is not a seasoned Flex user, but that probably makes for a practical review if you're just starting out with Flex yourself. Brynildsen reports that the number of possibilities open to Flex users over Flash users is huge, but that those same possibilities, because there are so many, can be a bit intimidating to someone just getting into Flex. Check out the review at FlashMagazine.com.

iWoz Gonna Read This

Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computers, has just written an autobiography about the beginnings of Apple. He discusses the role he played in Apple's early years and throughout the rest of his career inside and outside of Apple. Wozniak breaks out of his shell a bit and uncharacteristically takes the credit for engineering the first Apple computers, dispelling the stories about the collaborational efforts of both Steves. More on this at CNN.com.

Satisfied Customers Speak Out!

"Thanks for great article! First time I've ever come close to understanding how to do settings. Thanks again for most informative and useful article. I was able to cut the file size of a broadband-use flv by mor than 50%!"

- Keith D., CMX Subscriber, commenting on Tom Green's and Scott Fegette's free FLV Data Rate and Bandwidth... Demysitifed 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:

"The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office." - Robert Frost

Get Some Berkeley Schoolin' For Free

Google Video, in cooperation with the University of Berkeley, is posting more than 250 hours of lectures on their website at video.google.com/ucberkeley. Some of the courses will be complete, in their entirety, and all of it is free. More on this at Yahoo.com. So take some time between reading this newsletter and surfing Community MX and get some akademik learnin' in.

Slingbox To Couch Potatoes: You Will Never Go Hungry Again!

Slingbox allows you to take your television programming with you and watch it anywhere you can get an internet connection. We're not talking about just downloading specific television shows or movies. Slingbox lets you control your television or cable box from anywhere you happen to be, through your laptop or your windows-based mobile phone. Slingbox has been around a while, but they've just come out with three new versions - Pro, AV and Tuner. If you miss TV when you're away from home, this is a simple and relatively inexpensive ($180 - $250) way to get the television programming you're used to. You can learn more at Slingbox.com or check out this article at News.com.

They're All Number Two To Us

PCWorld.com just put up a list of the 25 Worst Websites. We can't even imagine how tough it was to weed out the millions of competitors striving to make the top of this list. However, PCWorld did a good job of finding some pretty bad sites. Not suprisingly, BidForSurgery.com made the list, as did WindowsUpdate.com. It looks like InmatesForYou.com made the list as well, but since some of us found our spouses there, we're just going to ignore that one. We won't give away the #1 worst site, but it might suprise you. Check out the list at PCWorld.com.

Cartoons Hit Close To Home

Bill Amend draws a hilarious cartoon strip called FoxTrot about a typical family. Well, a typical cartoon family anyway. The youngest kid is a brainiac and last week's strip had him designing a web page for a school project. We won't give away what happens, but it's pretty hilarious. Ultimately though, it hits a bit too close to home. Check out the first part in the series at GoComics.com and click on "next day" to see the next strips in the series.

As Long As Trogdor Made The List, We're Happy

Aaron Simpson at ColdHardFlash.com, has put together his own personal list of the Top Ten Most Influential Online Flash Shorts. You may or may not agree with Aaron's list, which includes mostly comedy stuff, including Strongbad, Happy Tree Friends and others. At least a couple of them are offensive, so don't say we didn't warn you. Or, if you like that sort of thing, we just promoted it...

CMX Text Field Auto Complete Extension

The CMX Auto Complete Behavior for Dreamweaver and Dreamweaver MX 2004 allows you to quickly and easily add fully customizable "auto complete" functionality (think Google Suggest) to any text or textarea input field on a web page. The "auto complete suggestions" box can easily be customized using CSS to integrate seamlessly into your page design and automatically sizes and positions itself for each input/textarea; no knowledge of JavaScript of the complexities of AJAX required!

Take a look at this Extension by CMX Partner Rob Williams

Fun and Freebies!

Where Stevie Wonder Got His Inspiration

If you don't know whether or not it's good luck for a frog to wander into your house, maybe you need to visit OldSuperstitions.com, where all of the good and bad superstitions are separated into various categories to make them easy to find. Can't remember if a horseshoe should be hung open end up or down? Just do a search for "horseshoe" and you'll be an expert in no time.

Eat It

Whose day would be complete without seeing sandwiches that look like other stuff? Not ours! Check it out at JustElite.net.

We're Ashamed To Say We Do Not Find This Uncool...

Ever wanted to turn something on or off with the flick of a Star Trek switch? Over at Axe-Man.org, where free time is apparently in abundance, you can find out how to design a switch to turn something (?) on or off with a switch that looks just like one of the computer panels on the Enterprise.

Turning a Tile Image into a Fireworks Pattern

There are lots of tile images available on the web for free, or you may be keen on creating your own. But once you've got the image, how do you set it up so that it displays in the Property Inspector's patterns menu to use for filling vector shapes? You could do a lot of copying and pasting to manually repeat the image, but that is way too much work. And there is a much easier way; Fireworks Patterns. You can apply patterns to fill any vector shape, thus giving the shape a more textured, organic or photo-realistic appearance. This brief tutorial will show you how to take a seamless tile image and add it to the Fireworks Patterns menu.

This free article by CMX Partner Jim Babbage can be found here.

Weekly Content Listing

Working with Shared Libraries - Part 3: Sharing Fonts with Static Text

Robert Reinhardt

In this "Working with" series, you learn how to create and use shared libraries with your Flash movies. Shared libraries can help you optimize your workflow, making it easier to update assets across several Flash movies used for any type of project.

In the last tutorial of this series, you learned how to create a runtime shared library (RSL) file and share its graphical assets with other Flash movies. In this tutorial, you learn how to create a runtime shared library containing font symbols, to reuse the fonts with static text fields in other Flash movies. Sharing fonts is one of the best ways to trim down SWF file sizes for large projects involving many SWF files.

The Working with Shared Libraries Series:
Working with Shared Libraries - Part 1: Sharing Symbols in Authortime Libraries
Working with Shared Libraries - Part 2: Sharing Symbols in a Runtime Shared Library
Working with Shared Libraries - Part 3: Sharing Fonts with Static Text
Working with Shared Libraries - Part 4: Sharing Fonts with Dynamic Text Coming Soon
Working with Shared Libraries - Part 5: Sharing Fonts with Runtime-Created Text Fields Coming Soon
Working with Shared Libraries - Part 6: Using CSS with Shared Fonts Coming Soon
Working with Shared Libraries - Part 7: Sharing Components Coming Soon

Computer Math 0101 [FREE]

Tom Muck

One of the very first things that you should learn if you are dealing with programming of any variety is the concept of binary and hexadecimal number systems. The foundation of computers is based in binary—1s and 0s—and its cousin hexadecimal Everything from HTML/CSS color codes to URL encoding to IP addresses to memory/hard drive capacity and everything in between exposes the concept of binary and hexadecimal With a basic understanding, working with computers is a bit easier.

Regular Expressions By Example

Rob Williams

Regular expressions are a powerful pattern-based tool for searching and manipulating text. Unfortunately for newcomers they can also seem quite complicated and often times be simply overwhelming.

In this article we'll take a bit more of a hands-on approach to regular expressions and see how some of the various symbols and characters of regular expressions can be combined to form patterns that have real world practical uses.

Dynamic Text Formatting Demystified - Part 2: setNewTextFormat

Joseph Balderson

Ever tried formatting a text field in flash using ActionScript, only to get all tangled up in a myriad of class properties and methods? In Parts 1 & 2 of this series we'll look at how to create a text field and format it completely with code. Part 3 will examine dynamic font embedding, Part 4 will look at how to use HTML formatting, and in Part 5 will show you how to use CSS stylesheets in Flash.

The Dynamic Text Formatting Demystified Series:
Dynamic Text Formatting Demystified - Part 1: setTextFormat
Dynamic Text Formatting Demystified - Part 2: setNewTextFormat
Dynamic Text Formatting Demystified - Part 3: Embedding Fonts Coming Soon
Dynamic Text Formatting Demystified - Part 4: HTML Formatting Coming Soon
Dynamic Text Formatting Demystified - Part 5: Stylesheets Coming Soon

Create Pages that Fill the Browser with CSS [FREE]

Zoe Gillenwater

A frequently asked question in CSS forums is how to create pages that stretch vertically to fill the browser window, regardless of the amount of content. With tables, you would nest your entire design in a table with a single cell and set both the cell and table's height to be 100 percent. With CSS, it's also quite simple and easy. In this tutorial, you will learn the basic CSS technique for making pages fill the browser window, which you can also use any time you have a div that you want to stretch to fill its parent.

Please note, however, that this is not a tutorial about making a footer stick to the bottom of the browser viewport or about emulating frames. These are more complicated layout requirements that may be covered in further tutorials, building on the 100 percent height technique introduced here.

CFDirectory How To: Inserting Results into Database for Future Searches

Chaz Chumley

Using CFDirectory allows us to return directory contents, but what if you have a larger directory that doesn't change much or takes a long time to return results? Why not take the results and insert them into a database for optimized searching for a later time.

Building an Animated Drop-Down Menu: Part 1

Derrick Ypenburg

If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me how to make a functional, bug-proof, animated drop-down menu instead of having to resort to using a component, well, you know the old saying.

Creating your own animated drop-down menus can be tricky for a number of reasons: The complexity involved with having numerous buttons to roll-over; The roll-over that triggers the menu to slide down and how it can not interfere with the sub buttons in the drop-down; How does the menu animate back up when the user rolls off?

I'm going to break down the creation of creating an animated, drop-down menu from scratch, into 3 articles. In this article we will build the basic shell for the menu that will include: a button that animates the menu down and up, a container that will be animated and that will hold the buttons for the menu, and the basic code to get the menu responsive and working.

Parts 2 and 3 will cover creating button classes for the menu and configuring and populating the menu using XML.

Building a Flash Video Kaleidoscope - Part 1: Video Reflection [FREE]

Tom Green, Joseph Balderson

The ideas that sparked this series came about in an unexpected manner.

Having just completed an article on the subject of creating reflections in Flash, I started thinking about how it could be done using video instead of images. In typical Community MX fashion, I bounced my question off of our Flash guy Joseph Balderson, and we rapidly solved the problem. (That's happens when a couple of "Tech weenies" get hold of Flash Video.) By that I mean we have a fascination with what we can do with this technology. As such the two of us starting thinking:, "Yeah that is interesting but, really, what more can we do with this basic technique?"

It turns out there is quite a bit more you can do with the video reflection technique. At one point in our discussion Joe said, "Hey, now that we have one reflection working, why not add a few more? Let's show 'em how to build a video kaleidoscope too!!" And so this series was born.

Approximate download size: 4.2MB

Recreate the Law & Order Logo in Fireworks

Kim Cavanaugh

I admit it. I'm a sucker for Law & Order, the long-running television show about police and prosecutors in New York City. Whenever I'm ready to plop on the couch and take it easy for a while I can always be sure to find an episode of Law & Order on somewhere on some station or the other. The episodes are almost always interesting and engaging, and you can even pop in halfway through almost any episode and quickly figure out what's going on.

I think it's safe to say that I've seen the logo for Law & Order hundreds, if not thousands, of times. Every time I do I always note the interesting interplay of colored shadows that make the logo stand out. As it happens, this logo is also a great way to learn a little about how shadows are used in Fireworks 8 for dramatic effect, as you can see in this example.

Law and Order example

Creating a Soft Mask in Flash - Part 1: Flash Player 7 and Earlier

David Stiller

Masking has been available in Flash for as long as I can remember. This feature can be very useful and is easy to implement, either by hand or with ActionScript. The only regrettable point, in fact, is that soft masking (where the edges are blurry) has always required a tricky and tedious workaround ... until now.

This two-part series examines both the historical workaround — that's the tedious one — and a new (as of Flash 8) approach that is much easier. Knowing both will allow you to apply soft masks in SWFs published to just about any version of the Flash Player. Here in Part 1, we'll take a quick tour of mask basics, then learn the approach for SWFs published for Flash Player 7 and earlier.

The Creating a Soft Mask in Flash Series:
Creating a Soft Mask in Flash - Part 1: Flash Player 7 and Earlier
Creating a Soft Mask in Flash - Part 2: Flash Player 8 and Later Coming Soon

Fundamental Fusebox: Part 1 - An Overview

Fusebox has long been the leading ColdFusion web application framework, noted for its use of the model-view-controller (MVC) architecture. Now Fusebox 5 has been released, and this introductory article provides an overview, including a review of changes from the previous version. The article also takes a look at the new "skeleton" application provided for Fusebox 5.

Check out the Article by CMX Partner Thomas Pletcher

Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats!

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

Disabling Rules Quickly

When writing CSS code by hand, a quick and dirty method of disabling an existing rule is to remove one character from the selector. You can also disable a single declaration within a rule by removing a character from the property name, rendering that declaration invalid and causing all browsers to ignore it completely. Just be sure you clean up such tests before delivering the code to avoid embarrassment!

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!