July 29, 2002

Masking Effects in Fireworks MX

Create eye-catching collage effects with masking and layer-blending techniques. Italian artist Japi Honoo shares her trade secrets. In Fireworks MX, masking is used to create all sorts of useful and interesting visual effects. Any object—vector or bitmap—can be used to mask another. You can also design your own mask by starting with a clean slate and painting as you go with the many bitmap tools in Fireworks MX. With these masking and bitmap tools now more accessible than ever on the new Property Read more [...]
July 24, 2002

Building Functioning Flash Buttons With Fireworks Graphics

Thanks in large part to Live Effects, Fireworks makes beautiful buttons. Given its ability to export to SWF, a lot of people assume that they can create killer buttons in Fireworks for use in Flash. Unfortunately, the integration of the two programs doesn’t extend quite that far. But that doesn’t mean you can’t create buttons in Fireworks for use in Flash. It just means that you need to do a couple extra steps. Read more [...]
July 24, 2002

Debugging your Fireworks MX Flash Commands (Part II) The Art of Tracing

For quick down and dirty (yet still effective) debugging, you can use the timeless art of tracing variables staight out from the internal Flash player within Flash MX to the output window. This is often useful when you wish to check if a condition exists and report that value to the output window. You can also Pseudo Trace your movie if it is a Fireworks MX Flash Command within Fireworks MX as we shall see later. Read more [...]
July 23, 2002

Debugging your Fireworks MX Flash Commands (Part I) The Debug Movie Window

When developing Flash movies that rely on variables, functions and nested functions, there is nothing more annoying than previewing your movie, and things dont happen as you want them to, or even worse...strange things start to happen. It can be easier than you imagine to get stuck in an infinite loop that will crash Flash MX if you're in a rush, and your brain isn't engaged when working with looping commands. Read more [...]