Musings of a code slave » Flash

Corrections for my books

David Powers — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 18:52:32 +0000

I hate it when I find a mistake in a technical book—particularly when it’s one of mine. There’s nothing more frustrating than trying to learn a new concept and hitting a brick wall because the code doesn’t work. Mistakes creep in for a variety of reasons. But whatever the reason, I know I’m letting down my readers if there’s a serious error in one of my books. So, as well as trying to avoid errors in the first place, I try to respond to error reports as quickly as possible.

I recently discovered that friends of ED has closed its website and merged it with that of its parent company, Apress. Unfortunately, none of my books’ errata are yet listed on the new site. So, I’ve scrabbled around to put them back together and host them here. You can find the corrections for the following Apress/friends of ED titles on this site:

I find it hard to believe that there weren’t any mistakes in The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS4, but I can’t trace any record of corrections. I haven’t gone back to some of my older books. Good though they were, they’re based on versions of software that are no longer supported. What’s more, most of them were reprinted with corrections.

I also plan to keep up to date the corrections pages on this site for the books I have published with Adobe Press.

If you come across any errors or code that doesn’t work, please report them directly to the publisher. That way corrections can be incorporated into reprinted versions of the book. But if you don’t get an acknowledgement from the publisher within a day or so, please leave a comment here, and I’ll try to deal with the issue as quickly as possible.

Adding an Adobe Bridge web gallery to a site

David Powers — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:57:50 +0000

For the past two versions, Dreamweaver has come bundled with Adobe Bridge, a program that’s designed to make it easy to sort through visual assets, such as photographs, PDFs, and Flash movies. The idea behind Bridge is that it gives you quick access to items that you might want to work with in different parts of the Adobe Creative Suite. It’s particularly useful for Flash developers who want to build part of their movie in Illustrator or Photoshop. However, most Dreamweaver users seem to remain blissfully ignorant of its existence; or if they do know about it, they leave Bridge firmly shut.

That’s a shame, because Bridge has some very useful features. I use it frequently for batch renumbering my photos and for selecting photos to use in websites. The thumbnail images can be resized, making light work of choosing the best photo to zap into Photoshop and optimize for a web page. The other great feature in Bridge is what is called the Adobe Output Module. Among other things, this creates Flash-based web galleries of your visual assets. It’s incredibly easy to use, and produces really nice results.

The only problem is that the HTML file generated by Bridge makes the Flash movie fill the entire browser window, making it impossible to incorporate the gallery into an existing website. Well, it’s not really impossible. All it needs is a little editing of the HTML and JavaScript. I have created a new tutorial with step-by-step instructions to show how to incorporate an Adobe Bridge web gallery into a website. I hope you find it useful.

Problem with Adobe trial versions in June

David Powers — Wed, 28 May 2008 13:33:35 +0000

A bug in mechanism that counts down the remaining days of trial versions of most Adobe software means that any trial launched during June 2008 will expire after only one day instead of the normal 30. Access to the trial versions has already been blocked on the Adobe site, but if you have already downloaded a trial with the intention of installing it later, don’t install during June. If you do so, it will expire after one dayâ€”and you won’t be able to reinstall it on the same machine. For more information, read the FAQ on the Adobe site.

The fly has landed

David Powers — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 14:53:15 +0000

Goodness knows what must have got into the mind of my editor at friends of ED, Chris Mills, when choosing the cover for Foundation ActionScript for Flash 8. It’s dominated by a massive blue fly with huge golden eyes. Must be thankful for small mercies, though. At least the fly isn’t resting on its usual favourite food, and CornÃ© van Dooren‘s artwork has done its usual magic of turning the fly into a rather exotic beast. Still, don’t judge a book by its cover alone.

This version of Foundation ActionScript is based on the original material written by Sham Bhangal, but Kristian Besley and I have revised the book from top to bottom. Barely a page has been left untouched, and we’ve added a lot of new material. It now weighs in at 620 pages, in contrast to 460 in the MX 2004 edition. Unfortunately, the previous edition had a huge number of misprints. It was put together in the period when friends of ED was trying to recover from the bankruptcy of its original owners, Peer Information Ltd, and it obviously didn’t go through the same rigorous quality checks that foED books do now. Kris and I have removed all the errorsâ€”at least, we hope we have! We’ve also removed aspects of ActionScript, such as prototypes, that we know are being scrapped in ActionScript 3.0.

Obviously, I’m biased about a book that I’ve spent so many months working on, but I think readers will appreciate all the changes that have been incorporated. From my point of view, one of the most important is the decision to switch back to a single column layout. The two-column layout of the previous edition made me go cross-eyed attempting to read some of the code examples. This time, the page is less cluttered, allowing you to concentrate on the content, rather than trying to weave your way through a tangled web of ActionScript.