The Central Control Center of Dreamweaver is and always has been the Insert bar. I am one of those developers who rarely if ever uses the menu system unless I need something I can’t get off the Insert bar. Freestanding and named the Object toolbar in Dreamweaver through version 4, then docked in version 6 and later renamed Insert bar, the Dreamweaver engineers fixed it to the top of the document window, where it provides easy one touch access.
Read MoreI can’t believe I’m doing this. I’m glad to be here writing for you about the soon to be launched next generation of Dreamweaver, but I can’t believe it’s a whole version since the last time we did this. I’m Nancy Gill and I’m very happy to have been asked by the DMX Zone to return for an encore performance and introduce to you Dreamweaver CS3, the first version of Dreamweaver to bear the company name of “Adobe.” I remember being online around midnight on Sunday night in April of 2005 when the word came down the Team Macromedia list that the sale of our beloved Macromedia to Adobe Systems (of all companies) would be announced on Monday morning. I never went to bed that night. As people came online over the next 4-6 hours and heard the news, there was a lot of speculation, reaction and very mixed emotions. What was going to happen to our favorite Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Flash? Had this artsy corporate giant bought out the company we had laughed with and cried over only to kill off the products we had spent close to a decade using and promoting?
Read MoreIf you've built applications in Flash, you'll probably have created at least one that loaded content from an external file. Maybe a text or XML file, or even a PHP or ASP .NET file that grabs information from a database. External files are useful because you don't need to update the application each time the content changes.
You'll be glad to know that you can also load external files into Flex applications, although things have changed quite a bit since earlier versions of Flash. You can load information from text files, XML documents and even from web services.
Read MoreIt seems that everyone these days suffers from “information anxiety,” not only in the amount of information that’s available but also in how to interpret that information so that it’s useful rather than detrimental. In this tutorial, Linda presents varying perspectives on information design, the role that graphic designers play in presenting visual information, and suggests a project that will round out your portfolio and that will help you visualize quantitative and qualitative information.
Read MoreAn annual report represents a juicy job for any designer, but the work can be rough. An understanding of the company in question, a trust between a designer and that company, and a willingness to forgo some creativity when it comes to dealing with financial pages is a must. In this article, Linda demonstrates some annual report problems and how to avoid them as you begin to create an annual report sample for your portfolio.
Read MoreRSS feeds are a common way for Web site owners to provide information to the public, usually as a series of news items. Each news item is provided using a standard XML language so it can be read with an RSS reader or aggregator. In this article, I want to show you how to create a Flex 2 application that consumes an RSS feed.
We'll grab the feed from the Adobe xml news aggregator at http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mxna/. This aggregator displays news items from several different sources. We'll display a list of headlines from the news feed in a List control. When we click a headline, we'll see further details about that news item. We'll also be able to open the item in a Web browser to see the full details.
Read MoreWith the complexity of applications these days, developers must take special care to make sure that their code is robust, scalable and re-usable. Depending on the size of the application you’re creating the thought of manually coding your own data access layer might seem like a huge overhead.
The problem with some of the controls provided by the .NET framework is that they essentially eliminate the developer from the coding equation, and instead provide default built in plumbing for a lot of common features an application may require. If your client requires a very simple, small scale application that only provides a minimal set of features you can usually get away with this approach.
Read MoreIn part one of this tutorial, we looked at getting the basics of the scroller in working order. We've created our XML data source and extracted the relevant information from it and displayed it on the page. In this part, we're going to refine it initially by making it actually look like a news scroller. We'll then add some additional features that make it pause scrolling when the mouse pointer rolls over a news item, and deal with the issue of linking to or displaying the full story information in some way.
Read MoreWelcome to the second article in our two part series on creating an image gallery using Flex Builder 2. You need to complete the first part of this series before you start this article. In part 1, we created a simple photo gallery application that loaded external photos and displayed their title. In this article, we'll add styling to the application and load the details of each photo from an XML document.
I want to cover
With the release of .NET 2.0 comes the learning curve of a new technology. Once again we all get to stumble through becoming familiar with a new set of .NET user interface controls. It’s an evolutionary process, whereby the benefits and shortcomings of these new controls are exposed over time.
There are of course new developers who never had to suffer through the evolution of the .NET 1.x DataGrid control. This was probably the largest focus of much research and information available on the Internet as developers tried to find myriads of different uses for this control.
Read MoreWelcome to part 1 of this tutorial series on creating an image gallery using Flex Builder 2. In this two part series, we'll build an image gallery application that loads external images. In part 1, we'll create the application and I'll show you how to load external photos and display a title. You'll be able to use buttons to navigate through the images in the gallery. In part 2, we'll add styling to the application and load photo details from an XML document.
In this article, I want to cover the following topics:
In the second article in the series, I'll cover
Brochures, mailers, postcards, and fliers offer the second cornerstone to a client’s corporate image package after stationery. Corporate branding (logo, taglines, etc.) should carry over onto any collateral materials, so the projects contained in the beginning of this tutorial go that route. There are some layout and folding considerations to learn, after all. But, to offset this often puzzling routine,
PORTFOLIO PROJECT: You can develop two different projects in this tutorial for your portfolio. One would consist of a traditional brochure, and the second – which would be for the same company – would provide a more creative and offbeat solution.
TOOLS: Any software that allows you to create a print layout, including software that allows you to work with images either as vectors or bitmaps.
WHAT YOU’LL ACCOMPLISH: This project will help you to understand folds and layouts for various mailing materials for a corporate client or small business. Preferably, these projects would match the stationery that you create from the stationery article, so that you can show your ability to continue a corporate package. This is the second in three steps which leads to the total corporate package that also includes an annual report (following article).
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