If you run around the web, you may have noticed a trend out there with the themes people run. I’m not sure what anyone else calls it, but I call them Lifted Corners and I figured out a simple way to achieve it in Fireworks 8 (should be the same in most later versions.

There’s really not a lot of steps here and it’s pretty simple.

1.

You can do this a couple of ways, for the sake of this tutorial I’m going to use the Canvas as my background. So saying that, choose a color for your background. I would suggest white for now, it shows the shadows the best.

Another thing to think about is the width of your theme, say the content would be 780px, if that is the case I would suggest anywhere from 800 to 820 for the width of your canvas. The reason why is to allow for the shadow width.

Posted in Computers, Fireworks, Tutorial No Comments »

Before I lost data, you would have seen a few posts on my favorite flavor of Linux - Ubuntu. I’ve been a casual user since the days of Mandrake 7 and Fedora Core 1. But ever since Canonical Ltd started releasing versions of it, I’ve been hooked.

I tried out all the versions and watched as they’ve progressively gotten better and better. With the release of 7.04 I found it working very well out of the box, so much so I installed it on my laptop and forced my wife to use it (she wasn’t exactly happy about that but got use to it).

But like most OS’s in my house they come and go with a base install of Windows generally dominating the machines. The only real reason is for games. Other than that, Linux (Ubuntu more specifically) works out just fine. Even more so now!

Posted in Computers, Linux, Nerdom, Programming, Regular Express 2 Comments »

I was going through all my feeds and checking out all the nerdy stuff going on, when I came across something that rang vaguely familiar with me. Adobe Flex was releasing a version 3. Why did that ring a bell with me? It finally came to me, while I was out at the Zend conference, there was a booth for Adobe Flex and giving out cds with it. I had really been intrigued with it and wanted to try it.

So I downloaded a copy - it’s even better now, it’s a 61 day trial on the Flexbuilder (eclipse based) program. So after scouring around the livedocs and other sites around the net I came up with a hacked little program that allows you to enter a rss feed and it’ll go get it and show you a teaser for the entry you select. It seems to me, rss readers are becoming the replacement for the standard ‘Hello World’ creation.

Posted in Flex, Programming 1 Comment »