senocular.com

The tutorial on Creating Custom Auto Shapes for Macromedia Fireworks MX 2004 is complete.

Features:
- Covers Auto Shapes, Auto Shape tools and Auto Shapes as utilities
- Explains most every detail of Auto Shape creation and Auto Shape capability
- Has over a dozen auto shape examples each with fully commented source files
- Offers a collection of useful functions that can help with Auto Shape development and
- Lists bugs and and common pitfalls never before documented

I think a big reason there aren't many more Auto Shapes out there is because people just don't know how to make them. Hopefully this will shed some light on the subject :smile:

The new Edge newsletter is out for December. You can check it out here. Highlights include a FlashPaper case study with Erain and a section on Fireworks tips and tricks. As always, don't expect much from these articles, they're pretty flaky. For instance, in the Fireworks tips and tricks article, no real tips or tricks were given; mostly only standard features were covered and not to any real extent (even at the end the tips weren't anything un-intuitive). Nevertheless, the article focuses on a few developers and how they use these features in their work which makes for some worthy light reading.

As if there wasn't enough penguin games out there, Macromedia has brought us another one in the form of a 2004 Holidays Greeting. Its cute, but not very hard. I managed to get a perfect 30 on my second jump.

Ever think about making your own Auto Shapes for Fireworks? Decide against it because you didn't know how? Hopefully that will soon change. I'm currently working on an Auto Shape tutorial that should make Auto Shape creation easy enough for anyone capable and willing. Much like most of my tutorial attempts, it's quickly becoming long and bloated. I have no ETA yet, but hopefully it will be out by year's end. You can see my notes and a preview of what I have so far here.

By request, I have created some collapsing menus and included them for download. There are 3 types of menus available, all of which should be quite easy to edit and customize as needed.

This new simple auto shape, File Info, for Fireworks creates a bar at the bottom of your document listing out various properties of that document such as name, size, resolution, etc. The format of these properties is fully customizable using the control point provided with the shape.

Here is a new Fireworks extension (panel) that allows you to have linked objects. By linked objects I mean that when you select one, the others become selected along with it, much like how linked objects work in something like photoshop. Here, however, you have no handy link icon in your layers panel; its all really kind of hidden. No worries; I'm working on a more enhanced version that provides a layers panel-like inspector for object selection and linkage handling. Then again, I may never get to finish it (so bring back the worries). In the mean time, you can use this simple version if you find the feature useful.

I just uploaded two new Flash MX flas, Load Consecutive jpgs and Preload Next Image. I made these a good while ago for a basic preloading tutorial I fear I'll just never get to. No point in letting them rot away on my hard drive as they have been doing for this long.

Updates: Here are some other new files added:
multipleenterframeevents.fla
fadeimagesequence.fla
drawrandomspiral.fla
dynamicdotaroundglobe.fla

For those of you who missed it last week, you should definitely take a look at the Josh Dura's MAX sneak peeks video. There's a nice sneak peek of the next version of Flash (8Ball) including some demonstrations of its new capabilities.

So far, from what I've seen, I can only say my biggest gripe is that all the advancement seems very Flash Player-centric and not much seems to have really changed much in the Flash IDE (though object editing mode seems nice).

Update: Christopher has pointed out better quality MAX video courtesy of Macromedia which you can watch here.

This worries me a little. Macromedia has removed both the Fireworks and Freehand trials from their main downloads page. In looking at that page, you see virtually every trial imaginable aside from poor Fireworks and Freehand. Why is this? If you attempt the original Fireworks download redirect, you get the following messge. Scott from Macromedia has posted the following in the Dreameaver forums:

This is correct, the Freehand and Fireworks trial versions were discontinued recently, although both products are still actively supported. However, it had less to do with the relative size of the applications and more to do with the demand and cost of maintaining 30-day trials for those products. If you have comments or opinions on this to pass along, please let customer service know directly:
http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/cscontact/

Oddly enough, you can still download both trials from the Studio download page.

What does this really say about Macromedia's support for these products?