ANN: Community MX Week in Review 081204

Community MX proudly announces CMXtraneous a collection of blogs made up
from and by your faithful Community MX staffers. You can expect
observations, utterances, technical information, announcements and probably
a diatribe or two from your friends at Community MX. You can view all of the
latest entries at a glance, or go to each individual blog. You can reach the
main blog here http://www.communitymx.com/blog/

Here is a list of our content from the past week:

Interview with a Usability Engineer [FREE]
http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=4B44E
Joel Martinez

Usability is one of those issues (much like security) that everyone says is
so important, and how it needs to be a focus in their next project.
Unfortunately, more often than not, it falls by the wayside to be replaced
by aggressive deadlines, poor site/application designs, and angry users.
Usability should be given more than a passing thought before, during, and
after your project plan. With the proper plan, you can ensure that your end
users will have a pleasant experience using your product.
I've had the pleasure of working with someone who's entire job is to do
nothing but ensure that usability is at the forefront of a project. Her name
is Lani Hathaway, and she is a usability engineer.

Accessible Forms With Dreamweaver
http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=D1E8F
Tricia Littlefield

Customer interaction through forms is vital. Are your forms accessible?
Topics include making changes in Dreamweaver's preferences to help you build
an accessible form, grouping form elements with fieldset and optgroup
elements, choosing the appropriate input elements for disabled users, and
keeping your label tags associated with your form elements.
Creating Different Types of Corners and Borders with Fireworks MX 2004
http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=B2BD7

Jim Babbage

There's been a lot of talk in CMX town lately - talk about corners. Not
cutting corners, mind you; making corners. Specifically, making corners and
the necessary borders to create flexible boxes in your web page. That
flexible box might be in a table layout, or as we have seen recently, a CSS
layout. Corners do not have to be rounded. And that, ladies and gents, is
what this article is all about. We're going to look at some of the cool
features in Fireworks MX 04 that can help us make some far-out corners, and
use other more traditional FW techniques to create the borders needed for
flexible boxes. We're going to use some of the Auto Shapes found in the Tool
Bar and work with punching vector shapes. We'll also play around with some
Live Effects to get some different results. When we're done, you will be
able to use the resulting graphics in either a table-based or CSS-based
layout.
So walk with me, faithful reader, as we check out some new angles on
corners.

Using Classes and IDs Effectively
http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=E9BF0
Zoe Gillenwater

You know what a class is, and you know what an id is. You may even have an
idea of when to use one over another. But before you go making up classes
and ids willy-nilly and scattering them at whim throughout your (X)HTML
document, read this article to learn how to set up your selectors in the
smartest way.

BBEdit: The Basics and Beyond - Part 2
http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=9A7C2
Thomas Pletcher
In Part I of this article, we toured BBEdit's basic setup and core
capabilities and learned why it's widely regarded as a great HTML editor.
Part 2 takes BBEdit to the next level, showing you how to leverage its
extensibility with AppleScript to create a lean, mean PHP-coding machine,
and a perfect partner for Dreamweaver on the Mac.

Vodafone: How Did They Do That? [FREE]
http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=A9A59
Tom Green

Going from concept- let's show the future of wireless communication- to
upload in less than 30 minutes using the tools in the Studio, I show how to
put a video on a a wrist watch and how to create an effect used in the
Vodafone site.

Flash Your Cookies
http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=EBA75
Paul Newman

Have you ever wanted to store persistent information in your Flash movies?
Shared objects are the answer. You can use them to save login information,
shopping cart data, user preferences, even complex objects like arrays. This
extension for Flash MX 2004 adds an ActionScript 2.0 class called "Cookie"
to your global classpath. The Cookie wrapper class provides a more intuitive
way to write, read, edit, and remove Flash "cookies" in your applications.

Conditionally Show and Hide the Contents of a DataGrid Cell
http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=5535F
Heidi Bautista

Subscribers, thanks for giving us ideas for tutorials! This question popped
up on the PL -.Net forum recently: "Is it possible to conditionally show the
contents of a cell? I have a cell that can be either true or false. I only
want to show the contents of the cell if it is false." Yes, indeed, that's
possible, and this tutorial will explain how. Plus, you'll learn how to
conditionally show the contents of one cell based on the true/false value in
another cell.

Dynamic Graphic Menus with PHP
http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=E1FFA
Rob Williams

The trade-off in web design has always been beauty or ease of maintenance.
Graphical navigation systems tend to look more appealing than straight text,
but are also much more difficult and tedious to maintain and update.
However, by utilizing PHP's built-in image manipulation functions, we can
now effectively create a graphical navigation system that is both easy to
maintain and simple to update...

Pricing Out Freelance Projects
http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=0C8E8
Derrick Ypenburg

If you're new to freelancing, pricing out jobs can be a difficult task. How
much is the job worth? How much am I worth? How do I detail the cost for the
client? This article shows you how to plan your project, breakdown your
project and price your services accordingly.

--
Bill Horvath
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