iGeeks

October 31st, 2003

Content Writing

In school , my teacher used to tell me all the time. “the newspaper is not your confessional!”
But it was. Most of all, I learned that personal writing gets attention. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s an innate thirst for personal experience that we all share. Maybe it’s just literary rubbernecking. Whatever it is, it draws eyeballs like nothing else.
The one thing I know about presenting words in a way that makes an impact. So whether you’re publishing an annual report or your grandmother’s pickle recipes, here are a few basic tips for making the writing on your Web site leave more of a mark. The tips fall into two categories: design and content. Content
There’s a horrible urban legend floating around that says, People don’t read on the Web. That’s just silly. Of course people read on the Web - the Web is mostly comprised of text!
The truth is, people don’t read on the Web when they can’t find anything interesting to read. Although your writing style should vary depending on what you’re writing and who the audience is, here are some basics to keep in mind:
Edit, Edit, Edit: Since Web publishing is cheap, easy, and infinitely changeable (unlike a magazine, which is printed once and then set in stone), often the first thing to go is the editing. Don’t let that happen.
I say to you now: Befriend your editors. Buy them chocolates and roses. Tell them they’re valuable and believe it. Because they are.
If you run your own site, ask your friends to read your text before you post it. You’ll be surprised at the things they catch. If you’re running a Web site for a company or an organization and you’re not employing someone to quality-check the words on your site, you’re perpetuating a major reason why your users aren’t getting everything they could out of your site.
Write in the Active Voice: If you’re writing for the Web, think about the users reading your words. Now think of their hand, poised on the mouse, itching to click. Your challenge is to keep those readers interested enough to stay.
One way to do that is to write actively. That means cutting out the passive voice (”One thing of which I have become aware …” becomes “I’m aware of …”). If you get really good at this, you’ll see your word count go down and your clarity level go up.
Pay Attention to All Words: When I talk about words on the Web, I’m not talking about just the stories. Pay attention to all the communication on a page: navigation text, headlines, titles, status bar messages, everything. The user is taking all these elements in at once. You need to read your pages that way too.
Consistency: Finally, aim for a consistent level of quality. When users read something valuable on your site, you can bet they’ll be back for more. If you don’t disappoint them, your hit count won’t disappoint you.
One college journalism teacher was right, of course. The newspaper isn’t a confessional. But if you pay attention and you follow some of the rules outlined here, your writing can be as riveting as a confessional.

Hemant | 2 comments

October 31st, 2003

Flash MX 2004 updater

Macromedia is planning to release an updater for Flash MX 2004 and Flash MX Professional 2004, it is expected to be available in November 2003. The updater simply fixes bugs in Flash MX 2004 or Flash Professional MX 2004. It will not cause any rework to content created in Flash MX 2004 or Flash Professional MX 2004 and is not an intrusive install. The patch will fix bugs in the authoring environment, and improve stability and performance. It will also retrofit the Help system with better documentation, something that a lot of people seem to have been complaining about.

So far the news of an upcoming update hasn’t been widely circulated, although it should be just as soon as the software becomes available.

According to the newly posted Flash Updater FAQ

Rajender | No comments

October 26th, 2003

CSS support in Flash Player 7

Here is the list of CSS support for the new player.

images/blogpost/mx_css_support.gif” alt=”css support in flash player 7″ />

Brajeshwar | No comments

October 26th, 2003

Instance Name extensions

Found this long back, would be good to keep it here for archive sake.

MovieClip: name_mc
Array: name_array
String: name_str
Button: name_btn
TextField: name_txt
TextFormat: name_fmt
Date: name_date
Sound: name_sound
XML: name_xml
XMLSocket: name_xmlsocket
XMLNode: name_xmlnode
Color: name_color
Video: name_video
Camera: name_cam
Microphone: name_mic
MovieClipLoader: name_mcl
Error: name_err
LoadVars: name_lv
ContextMenu: name_cm
ContextMenuItem: name_cmi
Printjob : name_pj
NetConnection: name_nc
LocalConnection: name_lc
NetStream: name_ns
SharedObject: name_so
FTextfield: name_txf
FDatagrid: name_dg
FTabbed: name_tbv
FSlider: name_sld
FTree: name_tree
FTreeNode: name_tn
FIconButton: name_ib
FProgressBar: name_pr
FBarChart: name_bc
FLineChart: name_lc
FTPieChart: name_pc
FAdvancedCalendar:name_acal
FSimpleMenu: name_sm
FColorPicker: name_cp
FSmartComboBox: name_scb
FRichTextEditor: name_rte
FWeekView: name_wkv
FAccordionpane: name_acp
FCheckBox: name_ch
FPushButton: name_pb
FRadioButton: name_rb
FListBox: name_lb
FScrollBar: name_sb
FComboBox: name_cb
FMessageBox: name_mb
FDraggablePane: name_dp
FScrollPane: name_sp
Continued

Brajeshwar | 2 comments

October 25th, 2003

DRK 5.0 content

“The Macromedia DevNet Resource Kit Volume 5 is now available. Volume 5 delivers the latest functionality to your Macromedia MX 2004 tools with a new set of Macromedia Flash MX 2004 components, Dreamweaver MX 2004 extensions, and a host of components, tags, and utilities for ColdFusion MX. The CD also contains sample applications and an archive of the last three months of articles on the Developer Center website.”

Brajeshwar | No comments

October 24th, 2003

Creatures of Design

We’re all creatures of design. And the first step to getting your message across on the Web is making sure that it is clear and easy to read. That involves a few things:
Line Length: Those columns of text in the newspaper are there for a reason: Short lines of text are easier to read than long ones. Ask a dozen designers how many words should fit on a line, and you’ll get 13 answers. There really is no magic number, but if your text is going from one edge of the browser to the other, chances are it’s too wide. Try instead using tables to make narrow columns of text.
Character Size: We have little control over HTML text on the Web. Fonts are smaller on a Mac than on a PC (the page you’re reading right now is barely legible on my G3 system), and you never know what fonts users have installed on their system.
The remedy is to design flexibly so that anyone will be able to read what you have to say, which means that setting body type in size=2> is generally a bad idea. If you must use size=2, try adding “Geneva” to your first font-face attribute. Geneva was designed specifically for the Mac - it’s much easier to read at small sizes than other Mac fonts. Like so: The HTML code: FONT FACE=”geneva,arial” SIZE=2produces this effect:
The Mac folks will see Geneva, and the PC folks will see whatever you list after it (in this case, Arial).
Leading: Back in the days when type was made of little metal pieces, typesetters put rows of lead in between the lines of type. Nowadays, the only metal used is the copper in the phone line. Nevertheless, leading is still important.
In general, giving readers a little extra leading in between lines of type increases readability. You can do this on the Web using cascading style sheets. Style sheets are still inconsistently supported by the major browsers, but you can write them so that they degrade gracefully (if a user’s browser doesn’t understand CSS, it will revert to the default leading).

Hemant | 1 comment

October 24th, 2003

Sliding Doors of CSS

I had been trying to get this thing working since long.

You can now have a visually appealing user interfaces using Douglas Bowman’s Sliding Doors method in CSS.

Check out the Sliding Doors Method here

Aadesh | 1 comment

October 22nd, 2003

Maya Personal Learning Edition 5 Now Available for Free Download

There’s some Good news for people interested in 3d:
Alias Systems has announced that the highly anticipated Maya Personal Learning Edition™ 5 software is now available for free download from Alias’s Website.

Read the entire article here.

Aadesh | No comments

October 22nd, 2003

Flash UI Resource

hi all:
Here are 2 links which I would like to contribute, They are really good designs for Inspiration.
1) http://www.cwd.dk/
2) http://www.netdiver.net/flashware/ - This link is exclusively for Flash

Vinod | No comments

October 22nd, 2003

Preview Local jpg images with out upload

I have created a Flash MX version of browsing you local HDD jpg images, As you all know Flash only supports non-progressive jpeg images, hence my Flash file only supports the same. After my post there has been few mails which proves that the most popular type (gif, jpeg, png etc) of local image can be previewed.
Yes true!
You need eigther a server side script to convert the uploaded image to non progressive image (or)
a third party tools like (swishzone etc) which convert them locally for you. One more URL which proudly shows how to upload jpg image from flash and preview them. (well I beleive I have written the Browse script inside the form, this site hides the script from the User and reveals only the flash for the user), which is a component.
Continued

Vinod | 1 comment