Tue Jul 01, 2008
Hey! What Happened to Adobe's myFeedz Service?
I've been working on a series for Community MX about Adobe's move towards online services and just discovered that the myFeedz service appears to be dead in the water. Not only does the application not launch from Adobe Labs, but the developer's blog and online forums appear to be dead and gone as well.
So, is this a temporary glitch intended to make it harder for me to meet my deadline, or has Adobe allowed myFeedz to quietly slip away? Inquiring minds want to know.....
Mon Jun 09, 2008
Three Ponytails
Well, if you get enough geeks together, as we did this past weekend at TodCon 08, you're very likely to see something like this. That's Greg Rewis on the left (Dreamweaver Dude) and Alan Musselman on the right (Fireworks Phreak) and me in the middle. I like the study in contrasts here. :-)
Suitable for printing, you may prefer the full-size image here.
Fri May 30, 2008
Adobe's Dreamweaver and Fireworks Betas
Adobe Systems announced this past Monday the availability of free sneak peeks of upcoming versions of both Dreamweaver and Fireworks, and over at Community MX my partners and I have written a series of articles detailing the new features. All of these are free, and they'll give you a good overview of the changes that are coming to these two venerable web development applications. Here's a quick run-down of what you can learn:
From Jim Babbage:
Fireworks CS4 Public Beta- Part 1: Fireworks Gets a Facelift!
Fireworks CS4 Public Beta - Part 2: Productivity Features
Fireworks CS4 Public Beta - Part 3: Wrapping Text Inside a Path
From Sheri German:
Dreamweaver CS4 Public Beta: What's New? - Part 1
Dreamweaver CS4 Public Beta: What's New? - Part 2
Dreamweaver CS4 Public Beta: What's New? - Part 3
From Paul Davis:
Dreamweaver CS4 Public Beta: The Coding Improvements
And finally, my article today on one of the really significant changes in Fireworks--the ability to work with paths in much the same manner that you can in Illustrator, by way of a new command panel:
Exploring the New Paths Panel in Fireworks CS4 Public Beta
All-in-all the changes that are coming in these two programs mark significant improvements, and clearly show that Adobe has dedicated serious development funding to them. If there was every a knock on Macromedia, it was it often felt that they were getting by on a shoestring, with budgets that often didn't allow new features to be fully developed. With this next release you'll see the effect of the greater resources that Adobe can bring to bear on their programs, and the end result will be major improvements to both the user interface and the capabilities of Dreamweaver and Fireworks.
Fri May 02, 2008
An Illustrated Fireworks Quick Tip
One of the things that we try to do over at Community MX is provide practical, real-world examples in the tutorials that we write. Sometimes those can be tips that are pretty simple, but that might make your time at the computer more productive.
Such is the case with my latest tutorial---A Fireworks Quickie - Vacuuming Pixels--which looks at a simple tip for removing parts of an image. What's the secret? Easy. It has to do with you taking your hands off the mouse when using one of Fireworks' bitmap selection tools.
But you can read that for yourself. This particular article is free!
Thu Apr 17, 2008
Video Overview of Photoshop Express
There's nothing quite like new technology toys to get a couple of geeks going, and you can see in this clip from the weekly technology TV show that we film for our county's teachers, parents, and students, that my partner Lee Keller and I are pretty psyched to play around with Photoshop Express.
Thu Mar 27, 2008
A Fireworks Case Study: Recreating the PBS NOW Logo
You never really can tell when the design-inspiration bug might bite you. My eye catches all sorts of things as I go through the daily routine, and I'm frequently motivated by something I see on television. Perhaps it's an eye-catching effect that's found in a movie trailer, a regular commercial with some snappy graphics, or a logo for a television show.
A quick cruise around the dial a few weeks ago led me to admire the logo that is produced for the Public Broadcasting System here in the United States for their investigative series known simply as NOW. A quick visit to the NOW web site will reveal a design with rich colors and some outstanding uses of CSS techniques for displaying the section headers on the page. It's a beautifully designed site with an eye-catching logo that clearly brands the site as well as the show itself.
In my latest article at CommunityMX.com I approach a duplication of the NOW logo as a case study for designing with Adobe Fireworks. This first part of a two-part tutorial shows how to examine a design and break it into its logical parts, then setup a Fireworks document with layers that make it easier and faster to get the design done. From there you'll learn how to work with custom gradients, how to scale and convert text to paths, and a few other basic and advanced techniques for using Fireworks. A sample Fireworks PNG file is included as a free download with the my duplicated version of the logo.
This is a free article. Enjoy!
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