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Making friends with Bezier curves

If you've come to Fireworks from a bitmap graphics application, you may at first glance find vector graphics counter-intuitive.  One of the more confusing aspects of vector objects are Bézier curves. These allow you to create curved vector objects and are an essential tool in all vector work.  This article is about how to control Bézier curves in Fireworks, how to create the controlling handles for the curves, and how to switch between the different types of handle.  When you master these, you'll have complete control over creating vector shapes in Fireworks.

If you're familiar with Freehand or Illustrator, vector objects will be old friends, though you may wish to follow through this article as a guide to Fireworks-specific controls.

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David Nicholls
11852

Fireworks MX & MX2004: Fun with Productivity Part 2

Web graphics need to be sliced, diced, optimized, and put back together. In the first article we talked about before the design phase - abusing our Properties panel, and preparing designs using safe sizes. This article covers productivity tips for during and after our design phase, with awesome time-saving shortcuts that work in both Fireworks MX & MX2004, and most likely Fireworks 8. Speaking of Fireworks 8, you may not need that new Image Editing panel after I show how to do all those shortcuts. Cutting down production time may make production a bit more fun, just don't tell your clients!

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Chris Charlton
2684

How to validate forms with VBScript Part 2

Introduction

As discussed in Part 1 of How to validate forms with VBScript, this second article we will look at the validation of specific data.

Very often, just ensuring that a form field is populated is not enough, the data being entered is specific (Phone numbers, credit card numbers, email addresses etc) and we can use VBScript to ensure the data entered is what we want.

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Vince Baker
4302

Photoshop Tips & Tricks for Web Designers

There are hundreds of tools and features in Photoshop. Learning the basics requires an investment of time and mental energy. Moving beyond the basics into true mastery requires even more time and an adventurous spirit. Of course, it helps to pull on the countless years of accumulated experience that millions of Photoshop users have amassed. That’s what this article is all about: distilling the useful tidbits learned by years of poking, prodding and just having fun experimenting with this great tool.

Most of the tips presented will work in Photoshop 7, CS (8) or CS2 (9), but in some cases there are techniques that only work if you have certain tools and features. The screen captures were taken in Photoshop 7 and CS2.

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Zac Van Note
5616

Restoring old photographs

Everyone has an album (or box full) of old and faded photographs. Usually these are in poor condition, either through wear and tear or because they were poorly printed in the fist place.  Often the photos were taken with an old box camera, with a lens of dubious quality. But some of the photos have value as family heirlooms and are well worth preserving and restoring. The question is, can you extract the underlying image from the damaged and faded photograph?  The answer is almost always "yes", sometimes miraculously so.

This article runs you through an exercise in photo restoration, using Photoshop's Levels and Curves tools, plus the Healing Brush and Clone Stamp tools. Using this exercise as a starting point, you'll be ready to hone your skills on the family's precious photos of Auntie Nellie and Uncle Fred, and earn the admiration of all your relatives! (Of course, there could also be commercial opportunities, too!)

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David Nicholls
6949

Making an online radio station for your website part 1

Introduction:

Music is considered as the food for our souls. I personally know many people (including me) who love to listen to music while using computer for any reason, be it surfing over internet, developing different applications, checking E-mails, or any other work. So don’t you guys think that adding an MP3 player to your website will be a very pleasing add-on for your visitors? That player will play your selected MP3s continuously one after another like a radio-station without purchasing costly services for streaming your music files over the internet. When the user will be watching your website, he will be enjoying not only the great contents of your website but hear your great music as well. There are two popular methods of doing this.

1)       Purchase costly Real-media, Windows Media or QuickTime Streaming service. All of these services require their respective player’s existence on the target client so many of your clients might not enjoy your hard work.

2)       Use Macromedia Flash MX 2004 to create and stream the MP3s over the internet which requires only the Flash Player to be installed on the target client. According to News.com’s survey report, Macromedia Flash Player is installed on more then 98% computers on the internet, so you can show your work to maximum possible clients.

Requirements for this article:

To complete this article you will need:

  • Macromedia Flash MX 2004 (if you don’t have Flash, you can download a trial version from this link).
  • A text editor for writing some XML and some HTML. (I am using Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004).
  • Some MP3s on your system.
  • Basic knowledge of using Actionscript and handling XML in flash
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Syed Mazhar Hasan Qadri
10511

Integrating Flash and VB.NET: Creating an MP3 Player with Flash and VB.NET – Part 2

In the first article of this series, we learned how to integrate Flash movies with Visual Basic.Net using flash's FSCommands functionality. Now in this article, we will further improve our knowledge of integrating Flash with VB.Net as in this episode; we are going to make a MP3 Player by using Flash and VB.Net. It will be a windows based desktop application that will let you choose MP3 files from your local hard drive and play it by using Flash's built-in Multimedia components. The theme of this article is not only to teach you how to play MP3 files by integrating Flash and VB .NET but more to show you how to integrate and communicate with local files of any computer by using Visual Basic .Net and then passing information to Flash.

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Syed Mazhar Hasan Qadri
7045

Introduction to Regular Expressions

Well, I have procrastinated enough – it's time to get into regular expressions! In the past I have inserted a regular expression (also known as a regexp or regex) in past articles, but I have always stated the discussion of them was out of scope. Truly regex deserves its own article – and then some!

The reason I have delayed is that quite frankly, regular expressions can be very difficult to build, use and understand. Many people find them very difficult and avoid them altogether at all costs. I'll be the first to admit I'm not regular expression expert – however I do use them when I can. Like anything else regular expressions are a tool (in this case, a very powerful one) that can be used to your advantage. It would be silly to discard it altogether because it might be a little harder to use than something with which you are more comfortable.

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Tom Dell'Aringa
1650

Creating a drawing application in ActionScript

Welcome to the final article in the series on drawing with ActionScript. In this article, I'll put together what we've covered in the first two articles to create an application that lets you draw lines in Flash. You'll use your mouse to draw the lines and you'll be able to choose their thickness and colour. We'll also add a Clear button so you can erase the drawing.

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Sas Jacobs
10215

Text Removal from Images

There will come a time in your design career where you will be presented with an image and asked if you can alter it to remove the text. It's happened many times in mine, and not always from a business point of view, sometimes it's a friend who wants a poster making, but the image he's found has loads of text on it etc.. DVD covers, CD's and so on all fall into this category.

So it's handy to know how to take this image and transform it into something resembling its original state.

The image I will be working on in this article is from the soundtrack cover of 'The Merchant of Venice' starring Al Pacino. It's a nice image, with lots of colour blends, so we have our work cut out for us. But with a little patience and using a lot of CTRL+Z (to go back in history when you make a mistake), you should get this edited and looking great in around 30 minutes or so.

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Dave Thomas
6300

Understanding the Accessibility Guidelines

The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) offers a series of guidelines on how to improve the accessibility of your site. How to make it available and usable to the maximum number of people, by taking into account various disabilities and conditions. If your building a site for the public sector, education you'll have to be aware of these, and even if not, the given the benefits of an enlarged userbase, they are well worth putting the effort to learn anyway.

The main guidelines can be found on the WAI site at http://www.w3.org/WAI/ , but are quite in depth. In this tutorial we're going to summarise what the various checkpoints mean for the everyday web designer, how you can test how well your pages comply with them, and some issues to be aware of.

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Matt Machell
1684

Highlighting rows using "Unobtrusive" JavaScript

As I spoke about briefly in my last article, the modern way to include JavaScript in our pages is to keep it out of the local code (page level code). This method of using JavaScript has been dubbed “Unobtrusive” by the web community for the obvious reason – it does not intrude upon your page code. This keeps things nice and neat and is a big help when it comes time to maintain your scripts.

In order to dive into this concept, let’s take an old tried and true script and update. Some time ago, I wrote a couple of articles on colouring rows and highlighting rows in a data table. We’ll revisit one of those tables, and this time we’ll do it a better way – the unobtrusive way.

Just to note, there isn’t necessarily anything “wrong” with doing it the other way. The method we’ll talk about today is slightly more advanced, so each method has its place.

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Tom Dell'Aringa
1744
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