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Design Psychology: Hoax or Hot Stuff?

Every few years a new trend floats through design markets. These changes usually focus on form and/or function, and it seems that audiences (and many designers) are swept along with the tide without means to contradict or question the outcome. The latest buzz phrase, “design psychology,” began in the architectural design market a few years ago, and now you can partake in courses on this subject at many colleges. Before you plunk down hard-earned cash to learn more about how psychology affects the success of your Web design (or any other design), learn first what this term means to you and your work. Through the following information and links to other sites, I hope to show you how to spot research hoaxes (or poor studies) and how to recognize hot information that will help you succeed with your online endeavors.

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Linda Goin
3108

Creating Animated GIFs with Photoshop & ImageReady

Love them or hate them, you just can’t avoid animated GIFs. The often-maligned animated GIF may not be the favorite visual device it once was, but it still serves very legitimate purposes. From banner ads to slide shows to dynamic simulations, animated GIF files are often the best solution on a web page. Flash is excellent at creating animations, but for many reasons Flash is not always a viable option. This leaves animated GIFs as the most effective way to create movement on a web page without resorting to scripting, plug-ins and ‘invalid markup’.

There are a number of tools to create Animated GIFs. From stand-alone tools like ULead GIF Animator, to high-end software like Fireworks and Photoshop, there’s a tool available to fit your needs. Because most web authors have a copy of Photoshop, that’s what we’ll focus on in this tutorial. However, many of this article’s methods will apply to other software as well.

Photoshop has long been the standard for pictures destined for printing. With version 5.5, Adobe started including ImageReady, a separate but similar program, which focused on creating images for the web. ImageReady makes it possible to slice, optimize and animate your Photoshop images. It also gives you the ability to create interactive elements like rollover buttons and image maps. Of course, for our purposes in this article, we’ll focus on creating Animated GIF files in Photoshop and ImageReady.

I used Photoshop CS and ImageReady CS on Windows XP for this tutorial, but most of the steps will be similar to the Macintosh version and previous versions on either platform. The process of creating Animated GIFs hasn’t changed much in the last few versions.

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Zac Van Note
117856
FREE

Free! - Making accessible forms part 2

As outlined in part 1 of this article, forms are one of the most crucial parts of your website. They're used to complete important tasks such as buying products and contacting you so their accessibility is crucial. This second part of our two-part article outlines some more ways to optimise the accessibility of your forms.

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Trenton Moss
2135

XMLHttpRequest

If you've been using the web of late you'll have noticed some funky things being done with client side HTML that pulls data from a server without the need to refresh the page. Such techniques are used in pages like Google's Suggest, (www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en) Maps (maps.google.com/)and Gmail (www.gmail.com), along with a number of other applications from web professionals trying out the technology. It's similar to how Flash can pull XML data and utilise it, but using plain old HTML and JavaScript.

In this tutorial we're going to look at the basics of how this is done using XMLHttpRequest, and show a simple application you can put it to.

To use this tutorial you'll need an understanding of JavaScript and basic XML and PHP, if you're only familiar with server behaviors the tutorial is probably a bit advanced for you. I've tried to keep the example as un-cluttered as possible to focus on the core idea behind the technology.

How it works

Normally when you request a web page, your browser sends a request for the page and then the page is returned. The browser only interacts with the server at the page request, so our only way to get an update to the page based on user data is to request a new one or use a plug-in like Flash or Java.

XMLHttpRequest allows us to request additional data from the server via JavaScript. A series of calls to the XMLHttpRequest object allow us to request small batches of XML data from a server source over a web connection. Because they're small, the technique is ideal for small dynamic updates to page information. For security reasons these requests can only go to the server that the JavaScript was originally downloaded from.

The technology was originally created by Microsoft as an Active X object, but other browsers have followed suit with a native JavaScript Object. This object is actually part of the W3C standard, but is obscurely hidden within the depths of the SVG specification.

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Matt Machell
5037

Moving objects with ActionScript part 1

You're probably familiar with motion tweens and using them to create movement in a Flash movie. Motion tweens move objects around the Stage, rotate them and fade them in and out. What you might not know is that you can achieve the same effect using ActionScript. This approach gives you much more flexibility and you can write functions that you can reuse in your Flash projects.

This is the first in a series of articles looking at scripted motion in ActionScript. In this article, we'll start by creating simple motion in a straight line. We'll look at how you can bounce an object off the walls of a movie clip.

The other articles will be on:

  • Circular motion
  • Fades and rotations
  • Inertia and gravity effects
  • Creating springs
  • Tweening and Transition classes

By the end of each article, you'll be able to create a function that you can reuse throughout your movies. I

I've assumed that you are using Flash MX or Flash MX 2004 and that know how to add ActionScript to a movie. I've used ActionScript 1.0 for my examples.

You can download the source files for the tutorial from the blue Properties box that contains the article PDF. There's a heading titled Code Download and you can click the Details link next to it to get the zip file. The download includes the starter files you'll need as well as the completed files.

Note: If you have difficulties downloading the source files or PDF, you might have a problem with your cookies. Delete the cookies from your machine and try again. In Internet Explorer, you can do this by choosing Tools > Internet Options... and clicking the Delete Cookies... button on the General tab.

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Sas Jacobs
15532

Introduction to Coldfusion Components

Introduction

Coldfusion Components also known as CFC’s. A lot of people I know who program Coldfusion and not use CFC’s have as excuse; it’s too hard to learn! It’s too hard to learn?? No way!!

It’s very easy to learn. It’s just an other way of thinking than you’re used to. You must see CFC’s as building blocks. By constructing “building blocks” you’re code is much cleaner and far more reusable, thus quicker to build your application. Most (if not every) Coldfusion developer knows UDF’s (User Defined Functions) and Custom Tags. CFC’s are almost the same as Custom Tags, but have some differences:

  • Custom Tags have a single entry point; CFC’s can have multiple entry points. This makes it possible to create a single component that does many related actions. (To do that with custom tags you would need multiple tags or cumbersome switch processing.)
  • Custom Tags have no formalized parameters passing and validation mechanism; CFC’s do. In other words unlike custom tags, CFC’s can validate passed data, enforce data types, check for required parameters, and optionally assign default values.
  • Custom Tags cannot persist; CFC’s can. Custom Tags are blocks of code that are executed as is, while CFC’s are objects and can be treated as such.
  • Custom Tags are designed to contain code; CFC’s are designed to contain both code and data.
  • Custom Tags are accessible only by Coldfusion and only locally; CFC’s can be accessed as web services, opening up a whole new world of reuse possibilities.

To sum it up, CFC’s and Custom Tags are quite different. Although their functionality does overlap a little, they really do not solve the same problems at all. So to learn the basics of CFC’s while head right on it and start with some sample “spaghetti code” and transform it to a structured and reusable way; a CFC. Please note that this article only covers the basics of CFC’s and does not handle any advanced topics.

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Michael van Leest
7274

Flash Classes: Let it snow, the Flash way

The article is about the Snow class that is available together with this document and can also be downloaded from http://www.flzone.com/go?9496. The article will explain the functionality of the Snow class and can be used as an introduction to classes and strict data typing in ActionScript 2.0.

Why make a class for the snow effect? It can be easily reused and is fully customizable. You can set the number of snowflakes you want on the screen, the speed the snow falls down the screen and even the wind speed that affects the snow. This and many more options are possible with the Snow class and make it a reusable code that can be applied in many ways.

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Patrick Woldberg
6596
FREE

Free! - Selecting Records per Page with the Horizontal Looper Behaviour

This tutorial shows how to let the visitor select the number of records per page from a List Box using Tom Muck’s Horizontal Looper Extension.

Since there will be probably be several pages on your site with this behaviour, we are going to use a Session to store the visitor’s choice so it will be valid on all the pages, instead of the visitor having to set the number of records on each page they visit.

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Bill Graham
4669
FREE

Free! - Making accessible forms part 1

Forms are one of the most crucial parts of your website. Forms are used to:

      • Buy products
      • Sign up to newsletters
      • Contact you

These are the goals of your website! When a web user fills out a form they're doing something you want them to do. Unless you make sure they're accessible to one and all, some of your site visitors may not be able to perform some of these crucial tasks.

The group of users who can experience the most problems with forms is visually impaired users utilizing screen readers. Fear not though, help is at hand. Our two part article will show you how to optimize your forms for accessibility and allow absolutely everyone to use them.

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Trenton Moss
3691

CSS From the Ground Up: Embedded Style

In the past few articles, I’ve been discussing various forms of style sheets and how you can use Dreamweaver to create and work with them. As you’ve read along, you’ve noticed that I’ve been describing what is known as the “Cascade” within CSS. This is one of the primary concepts of CSS that helps us create a hierarchy of application for our styles.

In this article, the focus is on embedded style. While many readers will have likely used embedded style at some point, some might not know about how embedded style works within the Cascade. Some readers might also know when and where to decide to use embedded style and what the problems with using it as much as what the benefits are.

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molly holzschlag
1394
FREE

Free! - CSS shorthand properties

One of the main advantages of using CSS is the large reduction in web page download time. To style text, you used to have to use the <font> tag over and over again. You probably also laid out your site with tables, nested tables and spacer gifs. Now all that presentational information can be placed in one CSS document, with each command listed just once.

But why stop there? By using CSS shorthand properties you can reduce the size of your CSS document even more.

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Trenton Moss
5512

Querying Amazon with Flash

You've probably heard the term Web services and wondered what all the fuss was about. A Web service is a way for you to request information from another computer system. They work over the Internet and use XML to deliver their content. You send off a request and you receive the results in an XML format. You can use Web services to look up lots of different types of information including currency exchanges, television guides, movie reviews and weather updates.

In this tutorial, we'll look at how you can query the Amazon Web services using Flash. This tutorial assumes that you have Flash MX 2004 Professional. You'll need this version, because we're going to use the XMLConnector component to load the data. The tutorial assumes that you have a basic understanding of XML files. You'll also need some kind of Web server and server-side language to make the request. I'll be using IIS with ASP.NET in my examples.

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Sas Jacobs
1851
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