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Transforming color in Flash Movie Clips

Our tutorial today shows you the nitty gritty of programatically changing the colour of movie clips in Flash. Besides looking at how we can set the colour, we also see how we can apply colour transformations by shifting the colour rather than simply setting it.

This way you only need a single symbol for your shape and using the Flash Color object you can make it any colour you wish. If you wanted to load 100 different coloured versions of the same object onto the stage, you would still only need the 1 symbol. This helps keep the file size of your Flash movie down to something manageable for those who still dial up with 56K modems.

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Allan Kent
6898

ASP.NETconfiguration

Asp.net configuration has changed massively from the classic ASP days of pointing and clicking using IIS and altering the odd settings dynamically via the Server or Response objects. We delve into the new configuration settings stored as XML files and look at how to change them and what exactly they contain.

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Chris Ullman
2097
FREE

Accessibility F.A.Q.

Bruce explains the reasons why Web Accessibility is important to all Dreamweaver professionals. It's a skill that will become increasingly demanded by clients as more and more legal test cases go to court, and is a great way of making you stand out from the crowd when tendering for jobs. Also, in the same way that architects can be sued as well as building owners if a building doesn't cater for people with disabilities, constructing accessible web sites could just save yourself a lawsuit...

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Bruce Lawson
10314

JavaScript Tricks for Usable Forms

CSS is an excellent way to add color and style to your forms when displayed in a traditional web browser - without compromising the accessibility of the form for those using a screen-reader or otherwise limited browser. However, for more complex forms we can also incorporate JavaScript to add further effects. While JavaScript can be problematic for usability and accessibility, it can also add to the usability of a form for those whose browsers support it - the trick is to ensure that without JavaScript your form is still totally usable.

We won't be looking at how to write JavaScript in this tutorial; instead we will be exploring the inbuilt Dreamweaver behaviors and those downloadable from the Macromedia Exchange. So this tutorial will also quickly cover the installation and use of third party extensions as well as the functionality that is shipped with Dreamweaver MX.

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Rachel Andrew
6000
FREE

Speed Up Your Site – Using HTTP Compression!

George Petrov, founder of DMXzone, Flashfreaks and the Dynamic Zones network assesses httpZip, a production utility that compresses the files sent to a browser, saving bandwidth and money!

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George Petrov
21057

ActionScript: Flash Buttons with Style

In today's article, Allan shows you how to abstract all the parameters for his flash button into Actionscript, making a generic function that allows the Flash button to be controlled programmatically from outside Flash.

This 13 page article is suitable for beginners and intermediate Actionscripters and Dreamweaver users who wish to enhance the interactivity and look of buttons by using Flash.

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Allan Kent
76809

Real-World JavaScript: "Alertless" Client Side Error Messages

You've put some good old blood, sweat, and tears into your latest project, and you are very happy with the way things have turned out. In particular, the design you have come up with (or implemented) is quite snappy and you are feeling especially proud of yourself.

Then you take a look at your form validation, and those old gray alert boxes that say "please fill in your name, click OK" are just not doing it for you. Isn't there a more elegant way to have client side error messages than the JavaScript popup?

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Tom Dell'Aringa
3677

Backing up MySQL Databases made easy with PHP

In this tutorial, we use PHP as a scripting language to backup a number of MySQL databases so the files can either be downloaded over the web, or are automatically sent to a remote server by FTP. We then create a script which automatically restored the files again, with a minimum of manual intervention.

The system is ideal if you host your own clients, and makes it easy to make sure that all the information in your databases is regularly backed up. The system can be extended further by creating a nice web interface to the backup system, and access can be given to your clients so they can backup their own databases allowing you to offer them a better service.

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Gareth Downes-Powell
11641

Photoshop: Slicing Hybrid Images

We know when to optimise an image as a JPG and when to use GIF, but what about hybrid images, composed of areas of great colour gradient, and other areas with flat colour or text? In this article, Gavin Cromhout - DMXzone's Photoshop Yoda - shows you how to optimise hybrid images, slicing and optimising, locking important colours to produce a seamless reduced-size image.

The tools Gavin uses are Photoshop and ImageReady, but the main concepts are appropriate for web designers whatever image editor they are using.

This tutorial is suitable for beginners upwards; we've seen lots of professional images out there that are badly optimised!

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Gavin Cromhout
10293

Basic Site Marketing and Search Engine Optimisation

In this tutorial, Matt Machell shares some of the techniques he uses to help market your newly created site, and how to optimise your pages to appear high in search engine results. Using a checklist of do's and don'ts, and an extensive list of links to further information, this turorial shows you the professional tips and tricks that will ensure your client's site does battle with the competition for the reader's time and bookmarks.

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Matt Machell
4233

Flash MX Dynamic buttons

Today's tutorial takes concepts and techniques that were explained in the previous tutorial and expands on them to build a dynamic Flash button. The kinds of things that you will learn in today's article include how to get Flash to respond to your mouse, how to import graphics into Flash, what ActionScript is and how we can use it within Flash, creating basic animations for Motion Tweens and packaging it all neatly in a Server Behavior that we can use in Dreamweaver to quickly add our own dynamic buttons to our page.

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Allan Kent
46098

DHTML: Dynamic Client Side Table Sorting

Sort Without the Extra Calories

Now that we have seen a couple of somewhat basic displays of the DOM's potential, let's look at something a bit more powerful and useful. As you know, some of the power of the DOM lies in being able to manipulate the data the client (user) has already received without making a round trip to the server.

One function that you would expect to hit the server for would be to resort some tabular data. However, we can in fact sort a table full of data without ever hitting the server using some powerful DOM techniques and the sort() and reverse() methods of the array object.

In this tutorial, Tom supplies and explains all the code to show you how. It is suitable for a beginner at DHTML, though some JavaScript knowledge would be useful.

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Tom Dell'Aringa
20369
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