I am happy to announce our new Flash CS4 video tutorials are finally ready! It only took me a year to get Santo (the author of the video tutorial course) to finally do it – better late than never I suppose.
🙂
… I have to tell you, wrangling up good video authors is like herding cats!
Check out this sample video on using the Flash Bones tool:
Today, the Web is a much more sophisticated place (dynamic shopping carts, blogs, DOM scripting, Ajax etc) … a Web that requires much more sophisticated web designers. To be a competitive and modern web designer these days, you have to learn more than just HTML and CSS .
The ‘foundation’ languages of web design today are:
You don’t have to become a full-fledged nerd coder but you should at least understand the basic concepts and be able to read and write basic scripts. This way, when a client or your boss comes to you with some shopping cart script that he wants you to install … you wont be freaking out because you don’t understand a thing.
So in keeping with my goal of training you guys and girls up, I just wanted to announce my latest video tutorial; a course on Javascript: Beginners Javascript.
… OK, not the most exciting title, but the video tutorials are perfect for people new to programming. Some details:
Beginners Javascript is designed to teach total beginners Javascript programming. By the end of the 5 hrs of video training (over 39 individual videos) you will feel comfortable reading and writing usable Javascript code for everyday web tasks like spawning windows, validating forms and creating simple page effects.
The table of contents:
Introduction (10:09)
First Javascript (10:21)
What is a programming language (6:18)
Javascript event handlers part 1 (8:58)
Javascript event handlers part 2 (6:40)
Javascript event handlers part 3 (4:50)
Javascript errors part 1 (6:39)
Javascript errors part 2 (4:39)
Javascript variables part 1 (10:53)
Javascript variables part 2 (10:01)
Javascript execution (4:21)
Javascript functions part 1 (8:46)
Javascript functions part 2 (6:22)
Javascript functions part 3 (6:32)
Javascript functions part 4 (9:27)
if statements part 1 (7:33)
if statements part 2 (6:52)
if statements part 3 (8:55)
Javascript loops part 1 (8:25)
Javascript loops part 2 (5:58)
Javascript object; a birds eye view (8:31)
Javascript arrays part 1 (3:36)
Javascript arrays part 2 (7:44)
Javascript arrays part 3 (5:28)
Javascript functions cont. part 3 (8:13)
Javascript functions cont. part 4 (10:16)
Javascript functions cont. part 4-b (9:57)
Javascript functions cont. part 5 (9:18)
Introduction to the DOM part 1 (8:31)
Introduction to the DOM part 2 (3:37)
Javascript forms part 1 (14:50)
Javascript forms part 2 (15:10)
Javascript forms part 3 (6:58)
Javascript forms part 4 (8:51)
Creating a toggle menu part 1 (6:59)
Creating a toggle menu part 2 (10:39)
Linking to external Javascript files (5:46)
Spawning windows with Javascript (9:24)
Javascript frameworks, conclusion to course (4:24)
The DOM is short for: Document Object Model. This is basically a virtual map of the currently loaded web page. You can use this map along with the help of Javascript, to travel about your web page and do things like:
Insert tags
Remove tags
Insert text
… And a whole lot more.
The DOM is the key to all those cool Javascript and Ajax affects that we now see all over the Web. Check out my new video that introduces you to the DOM and I also teach you an exercise I came up with to help you better understand the DOM:
1. Basic object oriented concepts.
2. The Javascript object hierarchy.
The goal of this video is to give you a birds eye view of Javascript, to hopefully make it easier to understand how to use this language in later videos.
I just released and brand new course on the Javascript framework called jQuery. JQuery is a very popular Javascript library that many web designers will find themselves working with.
You can find about 40 minutes of free videos from the course here:
As you may know, I am a big WordPress fan and I use it on a few of my ‘killer’ sites. Anyway, I just discovered that the WordPress nerds have used the Google Gears project to speed up the WordPress admin user interface.
What is Gears?
Gears is basically a browser add-on that allows Javascript code to run much faster. To use Gears, you as a programmer, has to build it into your Javascript code (as the WordPress people did ..) and for people to benefit from Gears, it has to be installed into their browsers.
.. You can learn more about this in this video I just created:
You can install Gears (into your web browser) here:
Once in a while, I use email questions sent to me as the subject of an article, this time the question is about whether someone should use a Mac or a PC if they want to get into web design.
… I’m thinking of becoming a web designer and I was wondering if I would be better off with a Mac or a PC? Is there any advantage to using one over the other when building websites?
Thanks,
Jason
Short answer: there is no real advantage on either PC (Windows) or Mac when it comes to web design. Here are the two reasons why:
The technology’s behind websites (HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP etc…) are universal.
All the major software used in web design production can be found on both Mac and PC. The one exception maybe Web Expression from Microsoft.
Outside of web design, some would argue for Mac and others for PC. I use both, but I can see how some might prefer one or the other. That said, prior to the soon to be released Windows 7, Mac has had Windows beat hand-downs … all things considered.
With Windows 7 coming out though, I’ve heard from many reliable nerd sources, that Microsoft has really improved things a lot.
… I will almost certainly be upgrading my XP box when Windows 7 comes out.
Conclusion:
If you are looking to jump into web design, you are pretty much free with regards to which type of computer to get. I would be making my computer choice based on other things, for example:
I just updated to Firefox 3.5.2 in hopes that it might fix some issues I have been having with it on Mac. I can’t say if it has fixed anything yet, but I did discover something new: Firefox now supports the free Open Video Format.
What? Don’t we have Flash already?
Yes, we have Flash, Windows Media, Quicktime and others to embed video into our web pages, but in all those cases, we need to use an outside plugin. With this new video format, you just use plain old HTML!
Some details from Wiki:
As originally recommended by HTML 5, these browsers support Theora when embedded by the video element:
* Mozilla Firefox 3.5
* Google Chrome as of version 3.0.182.2 [1]
* Opera video build
–
Theora is the name of this free video compression format/codec and it produces video quality that is about the same as h.264 – the video format Adobe has decided to use to replace their own FLV format. So it should be pretty good.
To encode your videos into Theora, you will need to find a video encoder that does this. There are already several out there and I am sure more will come out over time … since already several browsers can play Theora videos. For now, you may want to try a video encoder that you can install right into Firefox!
This is cool except for the fact that until Internet Explorer allows us to embed Theora … it’s a no go. Internet Explorer still has the vast majority of browser market, so we as web designers have to build within its’ limitations.
I’m a big fan of Firefox and it has been my primary browser for a few years now. That said, Firefox can never seem to get it right on the Mac – it always seems to have some problem somewhere.
At this time, I am using the latest release of Firefox for the Mac (3.0.13) and this release fixes some earlier bugs Firefox had that made it crash a lot. But in exchange, now the Flash player is not working to well .. it doesn’t seem to respond to mouse clicks and I have to use the keyboard to do things like play a Youtube video.
… The solution maybe to reinstall the Flash player, I still have to try.
The Larger Point
Maybe it’s me, but the consistent problems that Firefox on Mac has, is not something you see on Windows. Yes, Firefox on Windows seems to work just fine. The Firefox team should push a little more of that donated money towards Mac development.
I am posting this tip again because a lot of people seem to have a hard time finding the answer on the site … I am one them!
… I thought I posted this before, but non of my site searches came up with anything. Here is a common question:
Enjoyed the first video about building web sites. Very clear and to the point. I just have a difficulty since I’m using Mac 10.5.7 and I tried the Text Edit application but didn’t get the same results. I managed to save it to my Desktop as an html file and it did open in the browser but the code just appeared exactly as the code appeared in Text Edit rather than in bold with different font sizes (h6 or h4) or paragraphs and so forth. What am I getting wrong? Am I using the wrong application (SimpleText is an older Mac app).
If you are trying to create an HTML document using a Mac text editor (like Text Edit) and all you are getting is the code being displayed rather than a web page, watch this video on creating an html document with a Mac.
