
Wednesday, November 16th, 2005
CMX Weekly Newsletter News Fun and Freebies Recent CMX Content Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats Check the News! Community MX Releases an All-New JumpStart! Sometimes called the "cradle of civilization," Cairo, the capital city of Egypt, is home to the Great Pyramids, the Egyptian Museum that holds King Tut's treasures, the Khan el-Khalili bazaar, and many gorgeous mosques, temples, and churches. It now also joins the growing roster of cities that have become Community MX JumpStarts. We are excited to announce CMX JumpStart Cairo, designed and coded by Adrian Senior. It is a centered, two-column, fixed-width design, and features lush gradients, glows, and fade effects. Like all CMX Jumpstarts, it is constructed using valid XHTML 1.0 markup and CSS 2.1 styling. Cairo also follows the WAI and Section 508 accessibility guidelines to provide you with a solid foundation for any design. The package includes an extension for installing Cairo into the New Document dialog box, nine tutorials, a source PNG, main and Internet Explorer style sheets (in commented and uncommented versions), and a starter home page. Cairo is available for $29.99 to non-members, but is absolutely free to CMX subscribers. Read more about how to make it yours. If you'd like to read more about its features and see a modified Cairo design, it's a link away. Windows Turns Twenty This year, Microsoft Windows turned twenty years old. Those who purchased their first personal computer after 1995 may not have any knowledge of the first ten years of Windows, back when Paint was an amazing graphics editor. Internet.ls-la.net shows the evolution of Windows from version 1.01 through Windows 3.11. This will make you really appreciate the innovation that has taken place in the computer world during the past 20 years. We Always Said Ricky Martin Was a Virus Sony is serious about not wanting you to copy their music CDs on your computer. Serious enough that they thought placing self-installing software that left your computer open to virus infections was quite alright. Of course, Sony didn't realize when they placed their XCP software on the CDs that there would be a gigantic security hole, but now that they know, they're allowing people to exchange any CDs containing that software with new CDs that do not have it. Read more about it at NewsFactor.com. And then purchase some CDs from RCA. Sony Makes Up For The Story You Just Read About Sony has announced a free VoIP phone service that resembles similar services like Skype. IVE, or "Instant Video Anywhere", will focus on video conferencing, which definitely attaches a value to this offering. Of course, Sony isn't going to lose money on the deal. For about ten dollars a month, users can get a ten-digit phone number to receive calls, and they'll be able to call a traditional phone from their computer as well. This doesn't mean that Sony is going to become a voice telephony provider. According to Eric Murphy, vice president of video conferencing at Sony Electronics, "we're not going to become a voice telephony provider." See? Read more at Yahoo.com. Freeware For Your Mac It's easy to find open source applications for a computer running Windows, but when it comes to the Mac owners out there, it would seem there's not much to choose from. OpenSourceMac.org is dedicated to making sure that Mac owners have a good source of free applications. Besides the gratuitous games, you'll find software for personal finance, ripping DVDs and word processing, among others.
Satisfied Customers Speak Out! "Thank you so much for this article. It has been a great, great resource for a beginning dot net programmer. " - Dale C., CMX Subscriber, commenting on Heidi Bautista's article, Using the ASP.NET Insert Record Server Behavior - Part 2. 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: "Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute." — J.G. Ballard Google Is At It Again Google has just put up the Beta for Google Base, which is a place where you can upload information about virtually anything and have it be immediately searchable at Base.Google.com for free. Aside from recipes and math functions, the types of things that Google is suggesting you post are the same types of things normally posted at CraigsList.org or eBay. Supposedly Google Base is not meant as competition for anyone, but you can bet there will be some heavy-duty strategy meetings going on over the next few weeks at eBay, as well as newspapers and other outlets who sell classifed ads. More on this at SignOnSanDiego.com. It's Like Having a Movie In Your Pocket A company called Upstream Engineering is working on micro-projector technology that could turn your cell phone, mp3 player or other mobile device into a movie projector. Instead of huddling around someone's cell phone to catch a CNN broadcast, you could project the visuals onto a nearby wall, or maybe your friend's forehead, and see a much larger version of the picture than a cell phone would allow. According to Upstream's developers, their projector is not ready for prime time yet, but they're hoping to make the picture good enough to get cell phone companies interested soon. Turns Out Keylogging Has Nothing To Do With Lumber According to iDefense, keylogging has jumped from about 300 instances in the year 2000 to about 6,191 this year. What is keylogging? It's when a backdoor is opened on your computer that lets a virus through that records the keystrokes occuring on your computer. Those keystrokes are sent back to the originator of the virus, where they can see what you've typed. Often, they find bank account numbers, security card numbers, or other things that can allow them to steal data, money or even your identity. VeriSign iDefense Security Intelligence Services Vice President Joe Payne says the best defense against keylogging is "to carefully track the organizations and hackers who promulgate these programs" and of course, have a good firewall program and keep your virus definitions up to date. Read more about it at TechNewsWorld.com. Good To Know The Internet Is Still Up And Running At the World Summit on the Information Society, more than one hundred countries decided the fate of who gets control of all of the internet domain names in existence. For now at least, it's been decided that the United States will maintain control of the domain names through ICANN, otherwise known as "Internet Corporation for Assigned Names." The agreement should be ratified this week, and we can all breathe safer knowing that no one's taking the internet away anytime soon. More on this at CNN.com. Microsoft Considers Almost-Free Desktop Applications Word on the street - and an internal Microsoft memo - says that Microsoft is thinking about offering free versions of some of their software as they watch revenue slip through their fingers due to alternative products on the market that are cheaper than MS products and in many cases, comparable to the MS counterpart. One quote in this News.com article states "If our competitors release free, advertising-supported versions of these programs, we may need to do the same."
CMX Zip CFC This is a ready-to-use ColdFusion Component you can use to easily create ZIP archives right from within your ColdFusion applications. No outside sofware (such as WinZip) is required and the component only uses Java classes available in any standard ColdFusion MX installation. Take a look at this ColdFusion Component by CMX Partner Arman Danesh
Fun and Freebies Gamers Over Thirty Shouldn't Stand For This JoyStiq.com has a list of 29 no-no's for gamers over the age of thirty. We're not sure we agree with the list. It's not because most of us are over thirty, but more because we don't think anyone should live in their parents’ basement to support a gaming habit (Number 18). Why Would You Have It That Close To The Toilet In The First Place? According to this article at TheRegister.co.uk, an estimated 600,000 cell phones get flushed down the toilet in the UK every year. Is this an accident? Is it done on purpose? We don't know. But stories like this one at NYDailyNews.com and this one at USAToday.com, would indicate that people "drop calls" down the toilet more often than any of us thought. When Bad Things Happen To Good Computers We've linked to this page at Unix.Rulez.org before, but we just never get tired of revisiting it.
Creating Custom Command in Fireworks Learn to use Fireworks to create a custom command to produce thumbnail images. Combine the command with the batch processing power of Fireworks MX to take your productivity to the next level! This free article by CMX Partner Kim Cavanaugh can be found here.
Weekly Content Listing Using Freehand's Gradient Tool to Create an OSX Style Button Kim Dudley Gradient fills are well known to most people who use vector and raster based applications. Gradients are probably one of Freehand's more commonly used tools and are useful for adding depth to vector drawn illustrations and can also add interest to layouts. Gradient fills have been available in Freehand for as long as I can remember yet the tool has grown and expanded since the good ole days. Freehand's gradient tool currently offers six different types of gradients and can be used with multiple colors. The gradient tool is also simple to use and manipulate although there are a couple of tricks that are of benefit when applying gradients to text. In this article we will look at Freehand's gradient tool and the options available when using it. To demonstrate and highlight some of the tool's functions we will draw a simple OSX-style button. The Many Uses of Fireworks - Part 2 - PowerPoint Backgrounds [FREE] Jim Babbage As we learned in Part 1, Fireworks is not just for web graphics. I think of FW as a screen graphics app. It lends itself well to almost any production flow that needs screen quality images, such as Captivate, PowerPoint, Flash, Director and even the desktop. In Part 1, we looked at how to make promotional wallpaper for your site's visitors, including ways to batch process your files at various pixel dimensions. In Part 2, we will explore Fireworks' capability as a graphics editor/creator for PowerPoint and Captivate. For good or ill, PowerPoint has become the de facto standard for many types of corporate presentations. Product launches, sales meetings, conferences, and the list goes on. It's easy enough to build a presentation using only the design templates that come with PowerPoint, but your presentation might look very much like someone else's. Also, the stock designs may not utilize a given company's corporate colors. And in many cases, the person creating the presentation may not have the skills, software or time to put together a custom look. This is where you and Fireworks come in to save the day. Creating custom backgrounds and navigation art — even if it's just optimizing the images that exist in a current presentation — can mean another revenue source for you. And if you're like me — an independent contractor — having your fingers in several pies helps smooth out the highs and lows of project work. Creating a Location Rollover Map with Fireworks Kim Cavanaugh Many times the best way to learn a technique is to tackle a common design task. In this case, let's imagine that you have clients who have asked for a rollover map for their site showing the locations of their stores in California. There are any number of ways to get this done, but in this case we'll look at one of the easiest methods of all—using Fireworks to create all of the images and interactions in a single composition. This series of three video tutorials will take you through the process of setting up your Fireworks file, inserting frames to hold the rollover objects, then using slices and hotspots to generate the final Fireworks HTML that can be inserted into your Dreamweaver page. Along the way you'll pick up some valuable tips and techniques for working with interactive images in Fireworks as well as best practices for making short work of a complicated design task. Working with TopStyle - Part 4 Adrian Senior Welcome to Part 4 of the working with TopStyle series; In this tutorial we will be looking at the Color Palette Editor and the Color Palette Toolbar. We'll investigate and learn how we can manipulate the color values in our selectors, both from a global stand point and by property type. The Working with TopStyle Series Working with TopStyle - Part 1 Working with TopStyle - Part 2 Working with TopStyle - Part 3 Working with TopStyle - Part 4 Using Swap Image with a Select List/Menu - Part 2 Danilo Celic In Part 1, you learned how to take static values from within a list and use those values as the file name for an image that was to be swapped in and shown to the visitor. But, if you actually need the selected value from the list to do something else useful, such as use it to determine which item is getting added to a shopping cart, or update a field in your database, the method described in Part 1 won't be too useful, as it's quite unlikely that your image file names exactly match your record IDs in your database. So, how do you accommodate working under such constraints? Read on to find out how to use Dreamweaver's built-in tools, along with a bit of hand coding, to accomplish your task. Create a Talking Head Video Using Adobe Premiere Pro and Flash Professional 8 [FREE] Tom Green The ability to use video with an Alpha Channel is new to Flash Professional 8. This articles shows how to create the video and then place it in Flash. Ever wondered how they create those talking head videos and cool banner ads on the Macromedia site? Read on... Working with SMIL, Part 3: Real-time Streaming FLVs with the FLVPlayback Component Robert Reinhardt In this tutorial, you learn how to take advantage of SMIL to easily integrate data-rate specific Flash Video content with your Flash Media Server (or Flash Communciation Server) applications. These server technologies take the guesswork and hassle out of determining the Flash client's available bandwidth. The Working with SMIL Series: Working with SMIL - Part 1: The FLVPlayback Component and Progressive FLV Files Working with SMIL - Part 2: Detecting Bandwidth with Progressive FLV Files Working with SMIL - Part 3: Real-time Streaming FLVs with the FLVPlayback Component Building an Image Uploader/Downloader in Flash 8 Danny Patterson Perhaps the most requested feature for Flash by developers is the ability to upload and download files right from inside Flash. For years developers have been writing "workarounds" for this feature using Javascript and HTML. Now with Flash 8, developers can use this funtionality from within Flash. In this article we will examine this new feature and build a simple Image Uploader/Dowloader application; all without any Javascript. Does Flock Rock? Thomas Pletcher Flock, the "social browser" based on Firefox, incorporates a number of web services, including blogging and photo sharing. Is this what Web 2.0 will look like? This article introduces Flock, explains why it's different and takes a look at its major capabilities. Preparing For IE7 - Part One [FREE] John Gallant, Holly Bergevin Internet Explorer 7 is coming, and there are going to be some interesting changes and improvements when it arrives. That's good news, but not if you have been using certain CSS hacks to make IE/Win correctly display your tableless designs! If that is the case, you may expect some or all of your pages to start breaking in IE7 when it begins to penetrate the market. We want to help you avoid pain and anguish later. So please join us now as we begin a series that will discuss the problem, offer solutions, and get you up to speed on the latest IE version testing methods. We'll also 'clean up' a real live CMX Jumpstart, all in easy stages. It's a bit like Y2K all over again, but we got through that and we can get through this too, with just a little effort. Trust us!
Using Image Metadata in PHP The rise of the digital camera has brought significant changes to the way in which we interact with and experience images. Most web-based photo galleries though don't begin to explore the full potential of digital pictures. This week we'll take a look at the importance of metadata, and how we can use it in PHP to make our digital images more portable, better organized, and more effective to our viewers. Check out the Article by CMX Partner Rob Williams
Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats! This week's Tip, Trick or Dirty Cheat is courtesy of Kim Cavanaugh, CMX Partner More Efficient Voice-Overs in Captivate When recording Captivate tutorials I often add a script for a voice-over in one slide that introduces what will be seen in the next series of screen captures. Unfortunately, Captivate does not indicate which slides contain scripts, so it's easy to forget where your voice-over is supposed to go. To remedy this, simply lock the slide where you intend to add your voice-over. Captivate places a lock icon on that slide, making it easier to locate the slide when you're ready to go back and record the audio. 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!

Community MX Releases an All-New JumpStart!

Sometimes called the "cradle of civilization," Cairo, the capital city of Egypt, is home to the Great Pyramids, the Egyptian Museum that holds King Tut's treasures, the Khan el-Khalili bazaar, and many gorgeous mosques, temples, and churches. It now also joins the growing roster of cities that have become Community MX JumpStarts.

We are excited to announce CMX JumpStart Cairo, designed and coded by Adrian Senior. It is a centered, two-column, fixed-width design, and features lush gradients, glows, and fade effects. Like all CMX Jumpstarts, it is constructed using valid XHTML 1.0 markup and CSS 2.1 styling. Cairo also follows the WAI and Section 508 accessibility guidelines to provide you with a solid foundation for any design.

The package includes an extension for installing Cairo into the New Document dialog box, nine tutorials, a source PNG, main and Internet Explorer style sheets (in commented and uncommented versions), and a starter home page.

Cairo is available for $29.99 to non-members, but is absolutely free to CMX subscribers. Read more about how to make it yours.

If you'd like to read more about its features and see a modified Cairo design, it's a link away.

Windows Turns Twenty

This year, Microsoft Windows turned twenty years old. Those who purchased their first personal computer after 1995 may not have any knowledge of the first ten years of Windows, back when Paint was an amazing graphics editor. Internet.ls-la.net shows the evolution of Windows from version 1.01 through Windows 3.11. This will make you really appreciate the innovation that has taken place in the computer world during the past 20 years.

We Always Said Ricky Martin Was a Virus

Sony is serious about not wanting you to copy their music CDs on your computer. Serious enough that they thought placing self-installing software that left your computer open to virus infections was quite alright. Of course, Sony didn't realize when they placed their XCP software on the CDs that there would be a gigantic security hole, but now that they know, they're allowing people to exchange any CDs containing that software with new CDs that do not have it. Read more about it at NewsFactor.com. And then purchase some CDs from RCA.

Sony Makes Up For The Story You Just Read About

Sony has announced a free VoIP phone service that resembles similar services like Skype. IVE, or "Instant Video Anywhere", will focus on video conferencing, which definitely attaches a value to this offering. Of course, Sony isn't going to lose money on the deal. For about ten dollars a month, users can get a ten-digit phone number to receive calls, and they'll be able to call a traditional phone from their computer as well. This doesn't mean that Sony is going to become a voice telephony provider. According to Eric Murphy, vice president of video conferencing at Sony Electronics, "we're not going to become a voice telephony provider." See? Read more at Yahoo.com.

Freeware For Your Mac

It's easy to find open source applications for a computer running Windows, but when it comes to the Mac owners out there, it would seem there's not much to choose from. OpenSourceMac.org is dedicated to making sure that Mac owners have a good source of free applications. Besides the gratuitous games, you'll find software for personal finance, ripping DVDs and word processing, among others.

Satisfied Customers Speak Out!

"Thank you so much for this article. It has been a great, great resource for a beginning dot net programmer. "

- Dale C., CMX Subscriber, commenting on Heidi Bautista's article, Using the ASP.NET Insert Record Server Behavior - Part 2.

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:

"Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute." — J.G. Ballard

Google Is At It Again

Google has just put up the Beta for Google Base, which is a place where you can upload information about virtually anything and have it be immediately searchable at Base.Google.com for free. Aside from recipes and math functions, the types of things that Google is suggesting you post are the same types of things normally posted at CraigsList.org or eBay. Supposedly Google Base is not meant as competition for anyone, but you can bet there will be some heavy-duty strategy meetings going on over the next few weeks at eBay, as well as newspapers and other outlets who sell classifed ads. More on this at SignOnSanDiego.com.

It's Like Having a Movie In Your Pocket

A company called Upstream Engineering is working on micro-projector technology that could turn your cell phone, mp3 player or other mobile device into a movie projector. Instead of huddling around someone's cell phone to catch a CNN broadcast, you could project the visuals onto a nearby wall, or maybe your friend's forehead, and see a much larger version of the picture than a cell phone would allow. According to Upstream's developers, their projector is not ready for prime time yet, but they're hoping to make the picture good enough to get cell phone companies interested soon.

Turns Out Keylogging Has Nothing To Do With Lumber

According to iDefense, keylogging has jumped from about 300 instances in the year 2000 to about 6,191 this year. What is keylogging? It's when a backdoor is opened on your computer that lets a virus through that records the keystrokes occuring on your computer. Those keystrokes are sent back to the originator of the virus, where they can see what you've typed. Often, they find bank account numbers, security card numbers, or other things that can allow them to steal data, money or even your identity. VeriSign iDefense Security Intelligence Services Vice President Joe Payne says the best defense against keylogging is "to carefully track the organizations and hackers who promulgate these programs" and of course, have a good firewall program and keep your virus definitions up to date. Read more about it at TechNewsWorld.com.

Good To Know The Internet Is Still Up And Running

At the World Summit on the Information Society, more than one hundred countries decided the fate of who gets control of all of the internet domain names in existence. For now at least, it's been decided that the United States will maintain control of the domain names through ICANN, otherwise known as "Internet Corporation for Assigned Names." The agreement should be ratified this week, and we can all breathe safer knowing that no one's taking the internet away anytime soon. More on this at CNN.com.

Microsoft Considers Almost-Free Desktop Applications

Word on the street - and an internal Microsoft memo - says that Microsoft is thinking about offering free versions of some of their software as they watch revenue slip through their fingers due to alternative products on the market that are cheaper than MS products and in many cases, comparable to the MS counterpart. One quote in this News.com article states "If our competitors release free, advertising-supported versions of these programs, we may need to do the same."

CMX Zip CFC

This is a ready-to-use ColdFusion Component you can use to easily create ZIP archives right from within your ColdFusion applications. No outside sofware (such as WinZip) is required and the component only uses Java classes available in any standard ColdFusion MX installation.

Take a look at this ColdFusion Component by CMX Partner Arman Danesh

Fun and Freebies

Gamers Over Thirty Shouldn't Stand For This

JoyStiq.com has a list of 29 no-no's for gamers over the age of thirty. We're not sure we agree with the list. It's not because most of us are over thirty, but more because we don't think anyone should live in their parents’ basement to support a gaming habit (Number 18).

Why Would You Have It That Close To The Toilet In The First Place?

According to this article at TheRegister.co.uk, an estimated 600,000 cell phones get flushed down the toilet in the UK every year. Is this an accident? Is it done on purpose? We don't know. But stories like this one at NYDailyNews.com and this one at USAToday.com, would indicate that people "drop calls" down the toilet more often than any of us thought.

When Bad Things Happen To Good Computers

We've linked to this page at Unix.Rulez.org before, but we just never get tired of revisiting it.

Creating Custom Command in Fireworks

Learn to use Fireworks to create a custom command to produce thumbnail images. Combine the command with the batch processing power of Fireworks MX to take your productivity to the next level!

This free article by CMX Partner Kim Cavanaugh can be found here.

Weekly Content Listing

Using Freehand's Gradient Tool to Create an OSX Style Button

Kim Dudley

Gradient fills are well known to most people who use vector and raster based applications. Gradients are probably one of Freehand's more commonly used tools and are useful for adding depth to vector drawn illustrations and can also add interest to layouts.

Gradient fills have been available in Freehand for as long as I can remember yet the tool has grown and expanded since the good ole days. Freehand's gradient tool currently offers six different types of gradients and can be used with multiple colors. The gradient tool is also simple to use and manipulate although there are a couple of tricks that are of benefit when applying gradients to text. In this article we will look at Freehand's gradient tool and the options available when using it. To demonstrate and highlight some of the tool's functions we will draw a simple OSX-style button.

The Many Uses of Fireworks - Part 2 - PowerPoint Backgrounds [FREE]

Jim Babbage

As we learned in Part 1, Fireworks is not just for web graphics. I think of FW as a screen graphics app. It lends itself well to almost any production flow that needs screen quality images, such as Captivate, PowerPoint, Flash, Director and even the desktop.

In Part 1, we looked at how to make promotional wallpaper for your site's visitors, including ways to batch process your files at various pixel dimensions. In Part 2, we will explore Fireworks' capability as a graphics editor/creator for PowerPoint and Captivate.

For good or ill, PowerPoint has become the de facto standard for many types of corporate presentations. Product launches, sales meetings, conferences, and the list goes on. It's easy enough to build a presentation using only the design templates that come with PowerPoint, but your presentation might look very much like someone else's. Also, the stock designs may not utilize a given company's corporate colors. And in many cases, the person creating the presentation may not have the skills, software or time to put together a custom look.

This is where you and Fireworks come in to save the day. Creating custom backgrounds and navigation art — even if it's just optimizing the images that exist in a current presentation — can mean another revenue source for you. And if you're like me — an independent contractor — having your fingers in several pies helps smooth out the highs and lows of project work.

Creating a Location Rollover Map with Fireworks

Kim Cavanaugh

Many times the best way to learn a technique is to tackle a common design task. In this case, let's imagine that you have clients who have asked for a rollover map for their site showing the locations of their stores in California. There are any number of ways to get this done, but in this case we'll look at one of the easiest methods of all—using Fireworks to create all of the images and interactions in a single composition.

This series of three video tutorials will take you through the process of setting up your Fireworks file, inserting frames to hold the rollover objects, then using slices and hotspots to generate the final Fireworks HTML that can be inserted into your Dreamweaver page. Along the way you'll pick up some valuable tips and techniques for working with interactive images in Fireworks as well as best practices for making short work of a complicated design task.

Working with TopStyle - Part 4

Adrian Senior

Welcome to Part 4 of the working with TopStyle series; In this tutorial we will be looking at the Color Palette Editor and the Color Palette Toolbar.

We'll investigate and learn how we can manipulate the color values in our selectors, both from a global stand point and by property type.

The Working with TopStyle Series
Working with TopStyle - Part 1
Working with TopStyle - Part 2
Working with TopStyle - Part 3
Working with TopStyle - Part 4

Using Swap Image with a Select List/Menu - Part 2

Danilo Celic

In Part 1, you learned how to take static values from within a list and use those values as the file name for an image that was to be swapped in and shown to the visitor. But, if you actually need the selected value from the list to do something else useful, such as use it to determine which item is getting added to a shopping cart, or update a field in your database, the method described in Part 1 won't be too useful, as it's quite unlikely that your image file names exactly match your record IDs in your database.

So, how do you accommodate working under such constraints? Read on to find out how to use Dreamweaver's built-in tools, along with a bit of hand coding, to accomplish your task.

Create a Talking Head Video Using Adobe Premiere Pro and Flash Professional 8 [FREE]

Tom Green

The ability to use video with an Alpha Channel is new to Flash Professional 8. This articles shows how to create the video and then place it in Flash. Ever wondered how they create those talking head videos and cool banner ads on the Macromedia site? Read on...

Working with SMIL, Part 3: Real-time Streaming FLVs with the FLVPlayback Component

Robert Reinhardt

In this tutorial, you learn how to take advantage of SMIL to easily integrate data-rate specific Flash Video content with your Flash Media Server (or Flash Communciation Server) applications. These server technologies take the guesswork and hassle out of determining the Flash client's available bandwidth.

The Working with SMIL Series:
Working with SMIL - Part 1: The FLVPlayback Component and Progressive FLV Files
Working with SMIL - Part 2: Detecting Bandwidth with Progressive FLV Files
Working with SMIL - Part 3: Real-time Streaming FLVs with the FLVPlayback Component

Building an Image Uploader/Downloader in Flash 8

Danny Patterson

Perhaps the most requested feature for Flash by developers is the ability to upload and download files right from inside Flash. For years developers have been writing "workarounds" for this feature using Javascript and HTML. Now with Flash 8, developers can use this funtionality from within Flash. In this article we will examine this new feature and build a simple Image Uploader/Dowloader application; all without any Javascript.

Does Flock Rock?

Thomas Pletcher

Flock, the "social browser" based on Firefox, incorporates a number of web services, including blogging and photo sharing. Is this what Web 2.0 will look like? This article introduces Flock, explains why it's different and takes a look at its major capabilities.

Preparing For IE7 - Part One [FREE]

John Gallant, Holly Bergevin

Internet Explorer 7 is coming, and there are going to be some interesting changes and improvements when it arrives. That's good news, but not if you have been using certain CSS hacks to make IE/Win correctly display your tableless designs! If that is the case, you may expect some or all of your pages to start breaking in IE7 when it begins to penetrate the market.

We want to help you avoid pain and anguish later. So please join us now as we begin a series that will discuss the problem, offer solutions, and get you up to speed on the latest IE version testing methods. We'll also 'clean up' a real live CMX Jumpstart, all in easy stages. It's a bit like Y2K all over again, but we got through that and we can get through this too, with just a little effort. Trust us!

Using Image Metadata in PHP

The rise of the digital camera has brought significant changes to the way in which we interact with and experience images. Most web-based photo galleries though don't begin to explore the full potential of digital pictures. This week we'll take a look at the importance of metadata, and how we can use it in PHP to make our digital images more portable, better organized, and more effective to our viewers.

Check out the Article by CMX Partner Rob Williams

Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats!

This week's Tip, Trick or Dirty Cheat is courtesy of Kim Cavanaugh, CMX Partner

More Efficient Voice-Overs in Captivate

When recording Captivate tutorials I often add a script for a voice-over in one slide that introduces what will be seen in the next series of screen captures. Unfortunately, Captivate does not indicate which slides contain scripts, so it's easy to forget where your voice-over is supposed to go. To remedy this, simply lock the slide where you intend to add your voice-over. Captivate places a lock icon on that slide, making it easier to locate the slide when you're ready to go back and record the audio.

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!