/* Position Is Everything */ Big John, one of the most helpful CSS gurus around, has a new CSS resource page. Lots of good stuff there, but be sure to check out his great demos on Three Column Stretch and Source Ordered Columns.
Flash MX Resources
I’ve been reviewing at some Flash MX books for this page, and as part of the process, I decided to see what was available free on the Web.
Here are a few Flash MX resources I found:
:: flashcomponents.net ::
FlashGuru’s MX 101
ActionScrip Toolbox
FlashMXPro.com
A List Apart: Flash MX: Moving Toward Accessible Rich Media
Dailydose: Flash MX Blog
SXSWi: How to Convince Your Company to Embrace Web Standards
This is a panel of folks from AOL and Time, Inc. (except Kimberly Blessing) This always surprises people because AOL has adopted standards. The panelist are Kimberly Blessing, are Kevin Lawver, Steve Chipman, Alla Gringaus, Arun Ranganathan.
Kevin said that often the people trying to bring change from a large organization feel like pirates who are operating in rebellion. He said that finding a manager to support your efforts and keeping things positive rather than negatively is important.
Arun explained how AOL worked with people like banks and Firefox and other outside groups to help spread the message about standards. He said that the job is not finished yet, and he continues to work on W3C initiatives and AOL’s operation on all browsers.
Kimberly worked previously with AOL on the ecommerce segment. She quickly realized that using standards to create templates for the site would help make the site useable to everyone. Changes were made in small increments. Later she began a training program because it was so hard to find people who were trained in using standards. She brought industry experts in to do training.
Alla advises finding out what matters to your target. Listen to people and only talk to them about the parts of the process that don’t pertain to their particular goals. She mentioned a site they just launched called Office Pirates.
Steve talked about helping introduce people to the standards community and connecting them with the blogs to read. It also helps to give people examples of how sites built with standards compare with sites that don’t in terms of bandwidth, accessibility and appearance.
Mac OS X wish list
While I’m in the mood to create wish lists, here’s what I want from Mac OS X. Give us a built in text editor that will write plain text. The Text Edit software that comes with OS X is very good, but it only writes rich text files, not plain text. Simple Text has disappeared. This means that there is no way to open a file such as a CSS file or an HTML file in any application provided with OS X. Sheesh! I never thought I’d be longing for Notepad, but here I am longing for Notepad. It is an irritation to be forced to scour the download sites for a Mac OS X compatible plain text editor when something like that should be built in.
Color charts and handy reference materials
VisiBone If you have never checked out the products available from VisiBone, they are handy and portable. They have color charts of the Web safe colors and swatch libraries that are ready to use with most graphics software. They have HTML, JavaScript and CSS reference cards and charts. Take a look at their online services, too. Inexpensive and helpful for students and faculty alike.
Adobe Acrobat wish list
If you use the full version of Adobe Acrobat on a Windows machine you are aware of a wonderful feature it has called “reflow.” Reflow allows you to draw a marquee over a selected section of a page, say one column of a Web page, and then the page automatically resizes itself to “flow” at the width you drew. So you can read down a page column by column on a small device such as a PDA. Adobe did not get this feature into Acrobat 5 for the Mac. Adobe, when do Mac users get reflow?
A second wonderful feature of Acrobat (and it works cross-platform) is its ability to convert a Web page to a PDF. This is a great way to show someone a Web site you are designing. Acrobat allows the viewer to click through the links as if it were a real Web page, but also permits the reviewer to attach comments and remarks to the PDF file and send it back. The problem is that Acrobat doesn’t handle divs using CSS positioning well at all. A Web page using CSS positioning may look nothing like the onscreen display after Acrobat converts it to PDF. So the second item on my wish list is for Acrobat to reliably display divs using CSS positioning.
Review: Flash MX ActionScript: The Designer’s Edge
J. Scott Hamlin and Jennifer S. Hall authored Flash MX ActionScript: The Designer’s Edge from Sybex.
Being a programming dunce, I gotta tell you that I really appreciated this book! It helped me understand the fundamentals while still offering up advanced techniques.
There is no CD with this book, but all the files used in the exercises can be downloaded from the Web. As with other such books providing exercise files, there is a partially completed file for you to work the exercises, as well as a completed file so you can see where you are headed with the scripts.
The book is a model of good writing, with clear directions and instructions, full color graphics that clarify and support the information and plenty of helpful aids.
The book contains 11 chapters, covering topics such as cursor interactions, coded animation techniques, ActionScript trigonometry and game building. The chapter on Flash Components teaches you how to customize the built in Flash components such as buttons and check boxes to create your own look. There is a chapter on capturing user input from text fields that shows you how to create and use arrays.
Overall, an outstanding book.