"Director Is Not Dead" By Kevin Schmitt Long-time Director users have been wondering where the product has been heading even before Macromedia was swallowed up by Adobe, so who better than Adobe's Product Manager for Director and the Shockwave Player himself, Tom Higgins, to bring us up-to-date on the latest goings-on in the world of Director? The bottom line seems to be that the Director faithful can breathe a little easier, as Adobe appears not to have forgotten about you. ...Read More »

Adobe's Mike Downey Talks Flash By Kevin Schmitt Being a big Flash guy, as well as a somewhat big After Effects guy, I'm more than a little curious about how the two products will influence each other now that they're both living under the Adobe roof. But I'm also curious about where Flash is going in general, so I was quite pleased to be able to pose a few questions recently to Mike Downey, Adobe's Senior Product manager for Flash. ...Read More »

Xara Xtreme: Lots of Power, Not Much Dough By Esther Schindler Xara Xtreme has an impressive suite of graphics editing features and most of the power of the big boys. Unfortunately for us casual users, it also has some of their learning curve. ...Read More »

Achieving Amazing Easing Effects in Flash By Rafiq R. Elmansy In previous versions of Flash, motion tweening was a difficult and time-consuming way to give animations realistic motion effects. The Ease In/Ease Out feature was helpful but its limitations became apparent when you applied it to complex animations because you had to create a lot of frame-by-frame shape and motion tweening to mimic something that looked natural. ...Read More »

Web Browsers Evolve As Web Usage Changes By The Associated Press The major Web browsers are getting facelifts as they increasingly become the focal point for handling business transactions and running programs over the Internet rather than simply displaying Web sites. ...Read More »

InterVideo MediaOne Gallery By John Virata InterVideo MediaOne Gallery enables you to organize and share your media files. The application, priced at $49.95, takes a visual approach to photo and video files, icon based look at documents such as Word or PDFs, and a song name, artist, duration, album, and location look of music files. ...Read More »

Mac OS X Web Server Tips for Designers, Part 3 By Kevin Schmitt For our final foray into ways to beef up the Web server included with Mac OS X, we might as well delve into technologies that actually require the server to be running in order to work. Today we're going to learn how to switch on two such server-side technologies that are built into Mac OS X but disabled by default: PHP and SSI. And considering how tantalizing I've already made our final installment sound, how could you not read further? ...Read More »

Mac OS X Web Server Tips for Designers, Part 2 By Kevin Schmitt We've been rolling through one of the decidedly unsexy (albeit often necessary) aspects of being a Web designer: the need to actually use an honest-to-goodness Web server to test out your sites. Mac OS X makes this process pretty easy, but there are some extra steps one can take to make the whole experience a tad more full-featured. Let's go over a few more tips for adding some extra bling to Mac OS X's indigenous Web server. ...Read More »

13-Inch MacBook Benchmarks 3 By Dave Nagel Nobody expects the 13-inch MacBook to be a 3D powerhouse. Nevertheless, there are those who need to take their 3D work on the road and might not be able to afford a MacBook Pro. And so it would be helpful for those folks to know what they might expect. Well, what they might expect might, in fact, be less than what the MacBook can deliver, at least with native software. ...Read More »

MDM Zinc 2.5 for Windows (with Mac OS X Plug-In) By Kevin Schmitt Adobe Flash is great for browser-based stuff, but let's face facts: it's pretty lousy for offline use. Sure, you can save Flash movies as standalone projectors, but the glaring lack of customization or ability to interface with the host OS has created a mammoth opening for third parties to drive through. Enter Zinc, from UK-based MDM, which (to put it simply but crudely) puts Flash movies on an enormous steroid regimen. How well does it make Flash into a full-blown application development environment? Let's find out. ...Read More »

Kodak V570 digital camera By John Virata The Kodak V570 digital camera is the first of its kind that sports dual lenses in the same unit. That is right, this point and shoot digital camera features a standard lens as well as a 5X (39-117mm) optical zoom lens. Two all glass, Schneider-Kreuznach C-Variogon lenses are incorporated into this slightly larger than business card-sized digital camera. It incorporates Kodak's new Retina dual lens technology to achieve the ultra wide angle (23mm equivalent) and 5X optical zoom range. ...Read More »

Microsoft's Expression Web Designer vs. Adobe's Dreamweaver By Matthew David Microsoft's new Expression Web Designer, still in beta, is aimed its graphics guns squarely at Dreamweaver's turf. Matthew David examines the Expression features to see if you should batten down the hatches before the battle begins. (Hint: it's more than a repackaged FrontPage.) ...Read More »

Little by little, Google`s window on the desktop widens By The Associated Press A lot of people seem to believe that Google Inc. can rule any market segment it wants. Hype meters have gone haywire assessing the search company's expansion into such far-flung fields as financial news and wireless Internet connectivity. ...Read More »

Windows XP Advice for Intel Mac Owners By Kevin Schmitt So you're the owner of one of those shiny new Intel Macs that seems to be getting all the press these days. And since Apple has so thoughtfully released BootCamp, you may be more than a little curious about what's going on over on the Windows side of the fence. As Windows-on-a-Mac can be a strange (and possibly dangerous) new world, here are a few tips to help you navigate the waters. ...Read More »

Mac OS X Web Server Tips for Designers, Part 1 By Kevin Schmitt OK, so you're a Web designer. Perhaps it's all you do, or perhaps it just a small part of what you do, but wherever you happen to be on the Web design food chain, you can definitely benefit from setting up and using the Web server that is included with every installation of Mac OS X. And while many of you may already have the server running, there's a lot more that could conceivably be done to soup things up a bit. ...Read More »

Creating Timers in Flash, Part 2 By Kevin Schmitt Timing stuff in Flash isn't exactly the glitziest of tasks, but sometimes it just has to be done. In our last installment, we went over two relatively basic methods for creating timers, each with varying degrees of simplicity and/or accuracy. Today we're going for as much accuracy as we can, and we're going in two completely opposite directions. Intriguing? I thought so. I am, after all, the master of suspense, so let's get down to business, shall we? ...Read More »

Revisiting "Bad" CSS, Part 2 By Kevin Schmitt In part one of this fantastically riveting two-part series, we learned all about the insane fun that goes along with IE conditionals. Now, in part 2 (which I know you have been waiting breathlessly for), we're going to--wait for it--actually write some of said conditionals all by ourselves! I know, I know--the air is thick with excitement. So, without further ado, let's get this party started. ...Read More »

Revisiting "Bad" CSS, Part 1 By Kevin Schmitt 'Round about Thanksgiving time last year (late November for those outside the U.S.), I wrote a piece on how to use non-standard ("bad") CSS to present different content to different browsers. Now, with IE 7 threatening to be unleashed on an unsuspecting public, it's high time to revisit the basic concept and see if we can't clean it up a bit. In part 1 (of 2), we'll be setting up an example and going through what IE conditionals are, which will ultimately make designing sites for IE a little less messy once IE 7 gets thrown into the mix. ...Read More »

The Tween Class: A Flash Designer's Best Friend, Part 2 By Kevin Schmitt I hope you're already having a blast playing with the Tween class after our last riveting installment, but there is still much to discuss. Today, we're going to go over methods, properties, and event handlers for the Tween Class, but since those sound so, well, "programmerey," let's just say we're going to learn how to monitor and control our Tweens as they go about their little Tween errands. ...Read More »

First Look: Pixmantec RawShooter Essentials By John Virata With more digital cameras sporting the capability to shoot in the Raw image format, those who have cameras with that feature might not want to invest in software that offers the capability to convert Raw images. While some digital imaging tools offer some sort of Raw support, some do not. Pixmantec RawShooter Essentials 2006, previously marketed by Corel Corp. in North America but available free from Pixmantec, enables you to convert Raw image files to JPEG or TIFF. ...Read More »