
Wednesday, September 28th, 2005
CMX Weekly Newsletter News Fun and Freebies Recent CMX Content Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats Check the News! ColdFusion 7.0.1 Update Packs a Punch The ColdFusion 7.0.1 update provides greater stability, Mac OS X "Tiger" and Mac OS X Server "Tiger" support plus updated support for Oracle 10g, Red Hat Linux AS 4, Solaris 10, and IBM WebSphere 5 Network Deployment. According to Macromedia, it should "enhance performance, stability, and security of your ColdFusion applications." Further, it comes with JRun Updater 5, Verity Server patch level 21, and Apache Axis 1.2.1. Macromedia recommends that anyone running the Developer, Standard or Enterprise versions of ColdFusion install the update immediately. It's available on Macromedia's website. Google To Buy AOL? Financial analysts are saying that the recent talks between AOL and Microsoft - see this ElectricNews.net story - may be causing Google to consider buying AOL. Microsoft is pushing for AOL to use MSN as its search engine instead of Google. If that happens, Google could stand to lose about twelve percent of its revenue - what they made from AOL last year. However, if Google buys AOL, it can protect its interests more directly. Given recent tensions between Microsoft and Google, it wouldn't be surprising if Microsoft snatched up AOL just to upset Google's applecart. See this News.com article for more. Studio 8 For Free? If you purchased Studio MX 2004 shortly before Studio 8 became available, you may qualify for a free upgrade. See Stephanie Sullivan's entry at the CMX blog for more information. For Those Who Refuse To Follow Trends, But Really Like The Trends If you'd like to own an iPod, but you're too terminally unique to jump on the iPod bandwagon, you can now make your own, and be like Keith Axline, author of this Wired.com article. He bought an Mp3 player kit for $100 on the internet, and after a couple of hitches in the road, got his unique Mp3 working. Critical Flaws in OS X Found and Fixed Apple has issued ten fixes for flaws in OS X that security firms are calling "critical." Not installing the patches issued by Apple could result in hackers being able to remotely access your computer and change your administration privileges or mismanage data on your computer. The patches can be found on Apple's website. Find out more at Yahoo.com.
Satisfied Customers Speak Out! "Thanks for this in-depth article. I've been working in print and the web for about 4 years now, and I finally understand the basics of why fonts line up the way they do! The explanation of the baseline in conjunction with the line height was particularly enlightening. " - JayDee, CMX Subscriber, commenting on John Gallant and Holly Bergevin's article, "How Inline Elements work, Part II" . 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: "Computers are magnificent tools for the realization of our dreams, but no machine can replace the human spark of spirit, compassion, love, and understanding." — Louis Gerstner Google Stops Talking Tough Three months ago, CNet.com reporter Elinor Mills wrote an article involving the threat that Google poses to personal privacy. To illustrate her point, she gave up some details on what she could find out about Google CEO Eric Schmidt using Google's search engine. Two things mentioned in Mills' article were Schmidt's personal monetary worth and a link to website exposing his home address. Schmidt did not react well, and issued a statement saying that Google would not allow any Google employees or executives to be interviewed by CNet.com for a year. Suddenly Google has changed their minds without comment. We're thinking that Mills' most recent article at CNet might be the reason. She quoted Schmidt regarding the size of Google's search index being three times as large as its competitors. Did you hear that? That was the sound of a back being scratched. More info at Yahoo.com. What Kind of Nigerian Spammer Do You Think You Are? We didn't have any more space in the Fun and Freebies section, but we couldn't let this one go. At BBSpot.com, you can take a seventeen-question quiz and find out which type of spammer matches your personality. Here's a sample question: Which of the following does not belong: Zamboni, Otter, Tornado, Oompa-Loompa or Clippy?. With this kind of precise personality test, how can they not be right on? Learn If Your Text Stuff Is Like Readable Have you ever had a client who asked you to create some copy for them? In the case of a sentence or two, it's not that bad, but a few paragraphs can start to look nonsensical once you retype them a hundred times. The Readability Calculator Standards-Schmandards.com might help you. You can paste some type into a text field on their site, and they'll rate the readability of that text for you, using readability indexes that make sense to someone... just not us. In any case, it seems to work. We typed in "Spot done gone down the wellhole and buried my shoes yonder" and we achieved a very low score, as we should have. Font Resources You Might Not Have Seen OK... Helvetica, no wait.. it's Arial, right? Aw, heck. Do you need a list of the most common fonts found on Mac and PCs? No problem. Check out AmpSoft.com for a quick rundown. On the other hand, if you know what fonts you like but can't make up your mind which might look best for your purpose, go to Typetester.maratz.com, where you can choose three different fonts and see how they look in parargraph format, side by side in bold, italic and regular. Find The Perfect Recipe For a lot of folks, a link to FoodieView.com would not rank too high as newsletter fodder. But you've got to understand how much we love cookies here at Community MX. Finding a good chocolate chip cookie recipe is almost as good as finding a huge rebate on a new video card. FoodieView.com has over 130,000 recipes (and counting) indexed, and you can seearch them by typing in... for instance... "Chocolate chip cookie" which brings up about 2,127 matches. Mmmmm....
Introducing the CMX CSS Snippet Collection - Part One CSS Positioning layouts are hot, and many people are trying to make the transition from the mostly reliable, but non-semantic, table-based layouts we've all used for years. CSS 2.1 provides great features for laying out pages, and the specs for CSS 3 indicate that some day the future of design on the web will be ever brighter indeed. We here at CMX try to make the learning curve as painless as possible with our many CSS tutorials and articles. Now we'd like to offer you a diagnostic tool that spares you some typing and memorizing. We are proud to introduce the CMX CSS Snippets Collection. Snippets, as you may well be aware, are bits of reusable code that paste as blocks or around selections with the click of an insert button. This article includes an extension for installing part one of the collection into the Dreamweaver Snippets panel, and a tutorial that explains the problems and solutions that the hacks correct. Part One of the CMX CSS Collection includes the following: * Caio Hack * Anti-Caio Hack * IE Mac only * IE Mac only 2 * Hide from Mac * Holly Hack * Box Model Hack * Tan Hack * Tan Hack and Anti-Mac combined * 6 IE Conditionals for all IE, 5.0, 5, 5.5, gte 5.5, and 6 Take a look at this article by CMX Partner Sheri German
Fun and Freebies! Help Steve Jobs Look Cool Even with all of his money, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, just doesn't have the fashion sense he could have. Now you have a chance to dress Steve up any way you like, thanks to GeekCulture.com. Don't try to remove the underwear though - it makes Steve mad. Don't Be All 404, You Could End Up In Graybar Land TypePad.com has a great collection of the latest business slang. One of our favorites is "Percussive Maintenance", which is the act of "whacking the crap out of an electronic device to get it to work again" The Stepford Wives of the News Just about every news outlet has stories of doom and gloom, and it can make a person forget that good things happen every day. HappyNews.com wants to change all that by just presenting happy and positive stories that may get buried under all the negative stuff every day. For instance, their headline on the day we looked was "Shanghai to host matchmaking marathon" which was followed by "World's best clock gets even better." See? Happy happy happy.
Getting Rid of the Page Shift (Free Article) If you've built a centered, fixed-width site, or just browsed through any sites with such layouts, you may have noticed a strange left to right shift in the content between pages that doesn't occur in Internet Explorer, but does in other browsers, such as Firefox, Opera, and Safari. Find out why it happens and what to include in your style sheet to prevent it on your own site, as well as how to customize your browser so that you never see the shift again on any site across the web! This free article by CMX Partners Zoe Gallagher can be found here.
Weekly Content Listing Exploring Lighting Blends in Fireworks 8 Kim Cavanaugh The release of Fireworks 8 includes a huge set of new specialized tools for performing subtle lighting and filtering tasks. While Fireworks has had a limited number of blend modes available in the past, with the new features such as Soft and Fuzzy Light, Dodges and Burns, and a wealth of others, you can now make much more subtle adjustments to photographs and images than you could in previous versions of Fireworks. The new blend modes may be one of those features that you pass over as you evaluate Fireworks 8, but they are certainly worth a look not only for photo editing but also for some of the lighting effects you can achieve with your drawings and vector objects as well. This series of 5 Captivate video tutorials, with over 25 minutes of instruction, provides you a look at some advanced techniques for drawing in Fireworks, as well as an exploration of the new lighting blends found in Fireworks 8. Beginning with 4 simple vector shapes you'll see how to combine the vector drawing tools in Fireworks to transform those simple objects into a 3 dimensional drawing of a pencil, with a simulated light source shining on the canvas. Choosing a Video Codec for Your Flash 8 Movie [FREE] Robert Reinhardt By now, you've probably heard about--and seen--the new On2 VP6 codec featured in Flash Player 8. While the codec offers image quality that is far superior to Sorenson Spark, On2 VP6 is not always the best choice for your video content. In this article, you learn how to determine which codec will offer the best experience to your audience. CMX AJAX Loader Extension Rob Williams The CMX AJAX Loader behavior allows you to dynamically load new XHTML/XML from your web server and insert it into any element on the current page without requiring the user to perform a full refresh. By eliminating full page refreshes you can improve both the performance of your site and the end user's experience. Now you can start enjoying the benefits of AJAX technology without having to worry about the complicated scripting that makes it work! Using Script Assist in Flash Professional 8 Tom Green It vanished in Flash MX 2004 but has been returned, all spiffed up and using a a new name in Flash Professional 8. Script Assist is a great way to learn how to use ActionScript in Flash. Script Assist won't write your code, but it is a great addition to Flash 8 if you are just getting into writing ActionScript. Working with the Flash 8 Bitmap API - Part 1 Joey Lott In the Working with the Flash 8 Bitmap API series learn how to work with the BitmapData class in order to achieve a variety of effects. In Part 1 learn the basics such as how to construct a BitmapData object and display it on the stage. The Flash 8 Bitmap API Series: Working with the Flash 8 Bitmap API - Part 1 Working with the Flash 8 Bitmap API - Part 2 Coming Soon A CSS Web Design Case Study: Constructing a Personal Site - Slicing the Comp Zoe Gillenwater In the last article of this series, you saw how I constructed my design comp in Fireworks. This article will cover how to slice the comp and export the pieces as web-ready graphics for placement in the CSS and XHTML. Why didn't I just cover this step in the last article? Because slicing a comp actually has more to do with the XHTML page than it does with the design comp construction. If you intend to build your pages using CSS to control the layout, you will need to slice your pages in a very different way than you may be used to from building table-based layouts. You'll see how I sliced my comp with CSS in mind, and I'll contrast this with how I might have sliced it had I intended to use tables instead. Teaching Dreamweaver the Web Standards Way [FREE] Sheri German I have been teaching Dreamweaver in various training venues since version 2. Each new upgrade adds more features and makes my job more complex. How does a teacher help beginners make sense of an increasingly overwhelming interface that includes seemingly endless choices? My syllabus has changed a lot over the years, and this is what I have learned: pare the syllabus to the absolute essentials. Subtract, do not add. Aim for elegant simplicity. Focus on Web Standards. This article gives teachers a syllabus they can use to help their beginning students learn Dreamweaver within the framework of Web Standards. Working with Transparency in Freehand Kim Dudley Freehand's live raster effects have introduced traditional bitmap effects into Freehand's vector world. Transparency is one of these effects. Freehand's transparency effect is a great tool. It is easy to use and offers comparable results when compared to transparency effects available in bitmapped based applications like Fireworks. This tutorial will demonstrate how to apply transparency effects to artwork drawn in Freehand and discuss when it should and should not be used. An Introduction to MOSe [FREE] Gordon Mackay The term MOSe means Mozilla, Opera and Safari enhancement. In this article we will explore some practical ways in which you can spice up your CSS designs for users equipped with up to date browsing software. Due to the lack of modern CSS support in some browsers, many developers and designers find themselves in the rut of only using code that they know works for the masses. However, if we take advantage of modern CSS syntax and proprieatary code we can enhance aethetics beyond the norm for users with standards compliant browser software without sacrificing the experience for users equipped with older browsers. Let's have a look at some commonly used design elements and see how we can add some more flavour to them. Building Application.cfc Adrian Senior In this tutorial we will build an Application component for use with ColdFusionMX 7 and later. Within the component we will look at error handling and implementing a debugging session that you can easily switch on and off on a live site without showing the information to your users. We'll also implement a user count function so you can see how many active users you have on your site at any time.
Create Great Attention Grabbers in Fireworks Recently I needed to send out one of those e-mail messages that contains specific instructions on what the recipient should do on their computer. You know the ones. "First, CLICK HERE, then read the instructions posted on the next page." Of course the challenge with these kinds of messages is that you never know if the person reading the instructions will really be paying attention, or will even understand what it is you want them to do. In an attempt to make it perfectly clear what they should do I decided to highlight the items with big bold graphics that catch the eye. In short, I needed an attention grabber, and for that I turned to Fireworks In these two Captivate video tutorials you'll see how I created the two objects I used--a red circle that appears to be brushed onto the image, and a bold curved arrow. Check out the Video Article by CMX Partner Kim Cavanaugh
Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats! This week's Tip, Trick or Dirty Cheat is courtesy of John Gallant , CMX Partner. Find Your Way Through The Div Tags When working on complex CSS pages with lots of DIV elements, it's all too easy to get confused. DIV opening tags are usually supplied with classes or id's, so telling them apart by eye is easy, but DIV closing tags all look alike. It's very common for coders to accidentally lose a DIV closing tag, or somehow end up with one too many. This problem can drastically alter how the layout is rendered, and non-experts may have real difficulty finding the cause. Avoid this fate by always inserting identifying comments alongside each DIV closing tag. That way it becomes obvious when tag pairs don't add up. 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!

ColdFusion 7.0.1 Update Packs a Punch

The ColdFusion 7.0.1 update provides greater stability, Mac OS X "Tiger" and Mac OS X Server "Tiger" support plus updated support for Oracle 10g, Red Hat Linux AS 4, Solaris 10, and IBM WebSphere 5 Network Deployment. According to Macromedia, it should "enhance performance, stability, and security of your ColdFusion applications." Further, it comes with JRun Updater 5, Verity Server patch level 21, and Apache Axis 1.2.1. Macromedia recommends that anyone running the Developer, Standard or Enterprise versions of ColdFusion install the update immediately. It's available on Macromedia's website.

Google To Buy AOL?

Financial analysts are saying that the recent talks between AOL and Microsoft - see this ElectricNews.net story - may be causing Google to consider buying AOL. Microsoft is pushing for AOL to use MSN as its search engine instead of Google. If that happens, Google could stand to lose about twelve percent of its revenue - what they made from AOL last year. However, if Google buys AOL, it can protect its interests more directly. Given recent tensions between Microsoft and Google, it wouldn't be surprising if Microsoft snatched up AOL just to upset Google's applecart. See this News.com article for more.

Studio 8 For Free?

If you purchased Studio MX 2004 shortly before Studio 8 became available, you may qualify for a free upgrade. See Stephanie Sullivan's entry at the CMX blog for more information.

For Those Who Refuse To Follow Trends, But Really Like The Trends

If you'd like to own an iPod, but you're too terminally unique to jump on the iPod bandwagon, you can now make your own, and be like Keith Axline, author of this Wired.com article. He bought an Mp3 player kit for $100 on the internet, and after a couple of hitches in the road, got his unique Mp3 working.

Critical Flaws in OS X Found and Fixed

Apple has issued ten fixes for flaws in OS X that security firms are calling "critical." Not installing the patches issued by Apple could result in hackers being able to remotely access your computer and change your administration privileges or mismanage data on your computer. The patches can be found on Apple's website. Find out more at Yahoo.com.

Satisfied Customers Speak Out!

"Thanks for this in-depth article. I've been working in print and the web for about 4 years now, and I finally understand the basics of why fonts line up the way they do! The explanation of the baseline in conjunction with the line height was particularly enlightening. "

- JayDee, CMX Subscriber, commenting on John Gallant and Holly Bergevin's article, "How Inline Elements work, Part II" .

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:

"Computers are magnificent tools for the realization of our dreams, but no machine can replace the human spark of spirit, compassion, love, and understanding." — Louis Gerstner

Google Stops Talking Tough

Three months ago, CNet.com reporter Elinor Mills wrote an article involving the threat that Google poses to personal privacy. To illustrate her point, she gave up some details on what she could find out about Google CEO Eric Schmidt using Google's search engine. Two things mentioned in Mills' article were Schmidt's personal monetary worth and a link to website exposing his home address. Schmidt did not react well, and issued a statement saying that Google would not allow any Google employees or executives to be interviewed by CNet.com for a year. Suddenly Google has changed their minds without comment. We're thinking that Mills' most recent article at CNet might be the reason. She quoted Schmidt regarding the size of Google's search index being three times as large as its competitors. Did you hear that? That was the sound of a back being scratched. More info at Yahoo.com.

What Kind of Nigerian Spammer Do You Think You Are?

We didn't have any more space in the Fun and Freebies section, but we couldn't let this one go. At BBSpot.com, you can take a seventeen-question quiz and find out which type of spammer matches your personality. Here's a sample question: Which of the following does not belong: Zamboni, Otter, Tornado, Oompa-Loompa or Clippy?. With this kind of precise personality test, how can they not be right on?

Learn If Your Text Stuff Is Like Readable

Have you ever had a client who asked you to create some copy for them? In the case of a sentence or two, it's not that bad, but a few paragraphs can start to look nonsensical once you retype them a hundred times. The Readability Calculator Standards-Schmandards.com might help you. You can paste some type into a text field on their site, and they'll rate the readability of that text for you, using readability indexes that make sense to someone... just not us. In any case, it seems to work. We typed in "Spot done gone down the wellhole and buried my shoes yonder" and we achieved a very low score, as we should have.

Font Resources You Might Not Have Seen

OK... Helvetica, no wait.. it's Arial, right? Aw, heck. Do you need a list of the most common fonts found on Mac and PCs? No problem. Check out AmpSoft.com for a quick rundown. On the other hand, if you know what fonts you like but can't make up your mind which might look best for your purpose, go to Typetester.maratz.com, where you can choose three different fonts and see how they look in parargraph format, side by side in bold, italic and regular.

Find The Perfect Recipe

For a lot of folks, a link to FoodieView.com would not rank too high as newsletter fodder. But you've got to understand how much we love cookies here at Community MX. Finding a good chocolate chip cookie recipe is almost as good as finding a huge rebate on a new video card. FoodieView.com has over 130,000 recipes (and counting) indexed, and you can seearch them by typing in... for instance... "Chocolate chip cookie" which brings up about 2,127 matches. Mmmmm....

Introducing the CMX CSS Snippet Collection - Part One

CSS Positioning layouts are hot, and many people are trying to make the transition from the mostly reliable, but non-semantic, table-based layouts we've all used for years. CSS 2.1 provides great features for laying out pages, and the specs for CSS 3 indicate that some day the future of design on the web will be ever brighter indeed.
We here at CMX try to make the learning curve as painless as possible with our many CSS tutorials and articles. Now we'd like to offer you a diagnostic tool that spares you some typing and memorizing. We are proud to introduce the CMX CSS Snippets Collection. Snippets, as you may well be aware, are bits of reusable code that paste as blocks or around selections with the click of an insert button.
This article includes an extension for installing part one of the collection into the Dreamweaver Snippets panel, and a tutorial that explains the problems and solutions that the hacks correct.
Part One of the CMX CSS Collection includes the following:
* Caio Hack
* Anti-Caio Hack
* IE Mac only
* IE Mac only 2
* Hide from Mac
* Holly Hack
* Box Model Hack
* Tan Hack
* Tan Hack and Anti-Mac combined
* 6 IE Conditionals for all IE, 5.0, 5, 5.5, gte 5.5, and 6

Take a look at this article by CMX Partner Sheri German

Fun and Freebies!

Help Steve Jobs Look Cool

Even with all of his money, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, just doesn't have the fashion sense he could have. Now you have a chance to dress Steve up any way you like, thanks to GeekCulture.com. Don't try to remove the underwear though - it makes Steve mad.

Don't Be All 404, You Could End Up In Graybar Land

TypePad.com has a great collection of the latest business slang. One of our favorites is "Percussive Maintenance", which is the act of "whacking the crap out of an electronic device to get it to work again"

The Stepford Wives of the News

Just about every news outlet has stories of doom and gloom, and it can make a person forget that good things happen every day. HappyNews.com wants to change all that by just presenting happy and positive stories that may get buried under all the negative stuff every day. For instance, their headline on the day we looked was "Shanghai to host matchmaking marathon" which was followed by "World's best clock gets even better." See? Happy happy happy.

Getting Rid of the Page Shift (Free Article)

If you've built a centered, fixed-width site, or just browsed through any sites with such layouts, you may have noticed a strange left to right shift in the content between pages that doesn't occur in Internet Explorer, but does in other browsers, such as Firefox, Opera, and Safari. Find out why it happens and what to include in your style sheet to prevent it on your own site, as well as how to customize your browser so that you never see the shift again on any site across the web!

This free article by CMX Partners Zoe Gallagher can be found here.

Weekly Content Listing

Exploring Lighting Blends in Fireworks 8

Kim Cavanaugh

The release of Fireworks 8 includes a huge set of new specialized tools for performing subtle lighting and filtering tasks. While Fireworks has had a limited number of blend modes available in the past, with the new features such as Soft and Fuzzy Light, Dodges and Burns, and a wealth of others, you can now make much more subtle adjustments to photographs and images than you could in previous versions of Fireworks. The new blend modes may be one of those features that you pass over as you evaluate Fireworks 8, but they are certainly worth a look not only for photo editing but also for some of the lighting effects you can achieve with your drawings and vector objects as well.

This series of 5 Captivate video tutorials, with over 25 minutes of instruction, provides you a look at some advanced techniques for drawing in Fireworks, as well as an exploration of the new lighting blends found in Fireworks 8. Beginning with 4 simple vector shapes you'll see how to combine the vector drawing tools in Fireworks to transform those simple objects into a 3 dimensional drawing of a pencil, with a simulated light source shining on the canvas.

Choosing a Video Codec for Your Flash 8 Movie [FREE]

Robert Reinhardt

By now, you've probably heard about--and seen--the new On2 VP6 codec featured in Flash Player 8. While the codec offers image quality that is far superior to Sorenson Spark, On2 VP6 is not always the best choice for your video content. In this article, you learn how to determine which codec will offer the best experience to your audience.

CMX AJAX Loader Extension

Rob Williams

The CMX AJAX Loader behavior allows you to dynamically load new XHTML/XML from your web server and insert it into any element on the current page without requiring the user to perform a full refresh. By eliminating full page refreshes you can improve both the performance of your site and the end user's experience. Now you can start enjoying the benefits of AJAX technology without having to worry about the complicated scripting that makes it work!

Using Script Assist in Flash Professional 8

Tom Green

It vanished in Flash MX 2004 but has been returned, all spiffed up and using a a new name in Flash Professional 8. Script Assist is a great way to learn how to use ActionScript in Flash. Script Assist won't write your code, but it is a great addition to Flash 8 if you are just getting into writing ActionScript.

Working with the Flash 8 Bitmap API - Part 1

Joey Lott

In the Working with the Flash 8 Bitmap API series learn how to work with the BitmapData class in order to achieve a variety of effects. In Part 1 learn the basics such as how to construct a BitmapData object and display it on the stage.

The Flash 8 Bitmap API Series:
Working with the Flash 8 Bitmap API - Part 1
Working with the Flash 8 Bitmap API - Part 2 Coming Soon

A CSS Web Design Case Study: Constructing a Personal Site - Slicing the Comp

Zoe Gillenwater

In the last article of this series, you saw how I constructed my design comp in Fireworks. This article will cover how to slice the comp and export the pieces as web-ready graphics for placement in the CSS and XHTML. Why didn't I just cover this step in the last article? Because slicing a comp actually has more to do with the XHTML page than it does with the design comp construction. If you intend to build your pages using CSS to control the layout, you will need to slice your pages in a very different way than you may be used to from building table-based layouts. You'll see how I sliced my comp with CSS in mind, and I'll contrast this with how I might have sliced it had I intended to use tables instead.

Teaching Dreamweaver the Web Standards Way [FREE]

Sheri German

I have been teaching Dreamweaver in various training venues since version 2. Each new upgrade adds more features and makes my job more complex. How does a teacher help beginners make sense of an increasingly overwhelming interface that includes seemingly endless choices? My syllabus has changed a lot over the years, and this is what I have learned: pare the syllabus to the absolute essentials. Subtract, do not add. Aim for elegant simplicity. Focus on Web Standards. This article gives teachers a syllabus they can use to help their beginning students learn Dreamweaver within the framework of Web Standards.

Working with Transparency in Freehand

Kim Dudley

Freehand's live raster effects have introduced traditional bitmap effects into Freehand's vector world. Transparency is one of these effects. Freehand's transparency effect is a great tool. It is easy to use and offers comparable results when compared to transparency effects available in bitmapped based applications like Fireworks. This tutorial will demonstrate how to apply transparency effects to artwork drawn in Freehand and discuss when it should and should not be used.

An Introduction to MOSe [FREE]

Gordon Mackay

The term MOSe means Mozilla, Opera and Safari enhancement. In this article we will explore some practical ways in which you can spice up your CSS designs for users equipped with up to date browsing software.

Due to the lack of modern CSS support in some browsers, many developers and designers find themselves in the rut of only using code that they know works for the masses. However, if we take advantage of modern CSS syntax and proprieatary code we can enhance aethetics beyond the norm for users with standards compliant browser software without sacrificing the experience for users equipped with older browsers.

Let's have a look at some commonly used design elements and see how we can add some more flavour to them.

Building Application.cfc

Adrian Senior

In this tutorial we will build an Application component for use with ColdFusionMX 7 and later.

Within the component we will look at error handling and implementing a debugging session that you can easily switch on and off on a live site without showing the information to your users. We'll also implement a user count function so you can see how many active users you have on your site at any time.

Create Great Attention Grabbers in Fireworks

Recently I needed to send out one of those e-mail messages that contains specific instructions on what the recipient should do on their computer. You know the ones. "First, CLICK HERE, then read the instructions posted on the next page." Of course the challenge with these kinds of messages is that you never know if the person reading the instructions will really be paying attention, or will even understand what it is you want them to do. In an attempt to make it perfectly clear what they should do I decided to highlight the items with big bold graphics that catch the eye. In short, I needed an attention grabber, and for that I turned to Fireworks In these two Captivate video tutorials you'll see how I created the two objects I used--a red circle that appears to be brushed onto the image, and a bold curved arrow.

Check out the Video Article by CMX Partner Kim Cavanaugh

Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats!

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

Find Your Way Through The Div Tags

When working on complex CSS pages with lots of DIV elements, it's all too easy to get confused. DIV opening tags are usually supplied with classes or id's, so telling them apart by eye is easy, but DIV closing tags all look alike. It's very common for coders to accidentally lose a DIV closing tag, or somehow end up with one too many.

This problem can drastically alter how the layout is rendered, and non-experts may have real difficulty finding the cause. Avoid this fate by always inserting identifying comments alongside each DIV closing tag. That way it becomes obvious when tag pairs don't add up.

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!