16. March 2003




Capture screen movement and convert to swf

These apps capture everything on your screen and convert it to a swf. Truly the best way to show a demo of software working or for training purposes.

Camtasia was one of the first products on the shelves, but only exported to avi format. Currently they have add-on components that will export to swf format.

Other products are FlashCast from MDM and CamStudio from RenderSoft which is free. Also, worth a look is ScreenFlash and RoboDemo.


by Miguel Moreno

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8. March 2003




Page turn effect in Flash

I noticed an article on Actionscript mentioning some page turn effect and found this site made by HP in Flash. It is an impressive site with lots of experimental Flash effects and peculiar design. For the page turn effect, make sure you select the "Shrek" application.

http://www.hp.com/...


by Miguel Moreno

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7. March 2003




Sell merchandise with your own brand at Cafepress

I went to this particular site, registered and was amazed by the simplicity and ease of setting up my own shop with my own brand.

So, what does this site do? You upload your logo and then they place that logo on a variety of items, such as shirts, hats, mugs, mousepads and more. You then decide which of these items to place on your shop and then anyone can come in and buy these items with your brand on it.

It is completely free and you can open as many shops as you like. I can imagine you can create a logo for an event or a sports team, upload it, and then buy the shirts from your own shop inless than 20 minutes. What I am trying to say is that you do not have to go to someplace and talk to someone and give out lots of money to have custom-shirts or other promotional materials made.

In any case, I ordered a shirt of my own shop today and am curious to see what the quality is like.

Check it out: CafePress.com or see my sample shop here: http://www.cafepress.com/mxer

I saw this site first at Moik78, a fellow developer and blogger.


by Miguel Moreno

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4. March 2003




Flash Event Calendar

Nifty component that lets you view the events on a given day.

This component seems very promising and will prove itself with its ease of use compared to ASP or Coldfusion based calendars, where the whole page needs to be refreshed. Check it out.

http://sparkos.com/...


by Miguel Moreno

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2. March 2003




Netscape Horror

If you have developed any HTML pages you will agree that whatever amazing design you have come up with, Netscape will find a way to break it and display it incorrectly. Recently I was working on a simple HTML site and noticed that Netscape 6 was adding a horizontal and vertical space in between my tables. I went as far as installing the new version 7, and still the same problem.

After hours of research and expressing out loud my honest feelings to the Netscape browser on my screen, I found out the following: I had as the very first line of my HTML page:


I had taken my document type declaration straight from the HTML 4.01 recommendation itself...

Nonetheless, Netscape treated this fully valid declaration just as if it were a figment of my imagination. Further tinkering finally brought the solution: Netscape apparently only recognizes a single, particular URI within the transitional document type declaration:

Although the content of these DTDs is identical, using the URI of the first document type declaration will break the page in Netscape 6 and 7 whereas using the URI of the second will prove successful. Let me know if any questions.


by Miguel Moreno

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1. March 2003




SWF to PDF

Gregg has formerly posted solutions for creating EPS, PNG and JPEG. The scripts are based around an ActionScript class that outputs the Flash drawings as text. You then have to save this on your desktop and rename the file to .PDF

Automating this on a server should be fairly simple so that the server could write the PDF and send it back to the user. Coders should also be able to extend the class further to include both text and images to create a complete tool out of this...

Check it out...


by Miguel Moreno

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