Notoroge

Welcome to a brand-new session of 'Fireworks MX with Notoroge'. The short and skinny of it all is essentially that so many Photoshop tutorials are flooding the net constantly, and most of them are really cool, that I figured the folks that use 'Fireworks MX' are left to woddle on their own, not knowing where to start, or how to make the best of their software. So I've decided to start my own strand of Fireworks MX tutorials that will show you how to do the same stuff you can do on Photoshop, but in Fireworks. Please, if there's some cool effect that strikes your fancy, that you would want to see a tutorial on how to make, feel free to send me a PM and I'll write one when I have the time. For my first tutorial, I decided I would do something that lots of web-designers love, but don't know how to make. Gel Buttons! Ever since the release of OS X, people have been using the Gel effect for anything they can get their hands on, and lots of people go: " " when they see it, and don't realize just how Easy it is to make your own! So here we go, 14 (Well, less if you don't want drop-shadows) steps to make your very own Gel buttons! Step 1: Create a Rectangle Make sure you make the rectangle 20px (pixels) wider than you actually want it to be when creating. It'll come in handy for the next step. For this tutorial, the dimensions of our rectangle will be 120px*30px. NOTE: DO NOT make the rectagle huge or small, and then resize it to the dimensions you want. Instead, when creating the button, look at the bottom left of screen and make sure you drag the corners to make the size you want from the get-go. Make sure you do it that way. As it'll screw up the edges when we go to round-off the button. Seriously. Make sure you do what I just said. It is key in making sure your button has the right shape. Fill this rectangle in with the colour of your choice. For this example, we'll go with the 'official' colour of the Aqua theme buttons and use a light-blue. Note: Don't make it too light. This is the background colour of your button, and the background is the darkest part of the whole deal. So if you want it to look like a vibrant, shiny button, go with a dark-shade of a light colour for the background. Otherwise, the final product will look like you turned the gamma way too high, and it looks watered down. It's the difference between a pink-diamond, and a ruby. Step 2: Rounding-off the EdgesThis step is important for getting that gel-look we want to achieve. When's the last time you saw a blob of Jello or transparent tooth-paste with perfectly cornered edges? Naw, we need to make it smooth. So we'll go to the bottom middle (Slightly off to the left) of the Fireworks environment and we should see this: Click the little drop-down arrow beside "Rectangle Roundness" and drag the little lever all the way to the top. (or just click the text, type in '100' without quotes and hit enter). Step 3: Fixing the edgesNow at this point, it's round. But it's too round. Thank-goodness we made it 20px wider than it had to be, right? Just go to the very bottom left of the Fireworks IDE, where you should see this: Now, where it says "Width", take 20 off the number you see there, in the example, we'll change the number to '100'. Since the original number was 120. Step 4: Change 'Fill Type' to LinearAs seen in the image below, change the fill type to 'Linear' by hitting the little drop-down arrow beside the word 'Solid' and selecting 'Linear' from the menu that pops up. This little drop-down box is beside the box to change the fill colour in the bottom pane of the Fireworks IDE. Step 5: Change Blend DirectionMake sure you have the black arrow selected from the pane on the left-hand side of the Fireworks MX IDE. So that you can see a little black line going through your button that has a little circle and a little box on both sides, respectively. Like thus, Now, click and drag the circle on the line to the bottom-edge of your button. Then click the square on the other side of the button and make a straight line upwards. The box should line-up with the top border of the button, like so, Step 6: Change the Blend ColoursChange the black to a slightly lighter shade of the same colour that you chose for the background of your Gelly-Button® by going to the "Properties" panel. Click the little box beside the bucket icon, and a little box will appear showing the properties of the shade. For now, all we'll do here is click the little-black box underneath the strip showing the colour transition. A little colour palette will appear. What we do here is click the little multi-coloured circle on the top-right of the pallette. It kinda looks like the little "busy"/"beachball of death" cursor from Mac OSX. Then a bigger colour pallette will appear in the form of a little tool-box, like thus, Here, what we'll do is choose the same colour you had for your background, and then on the slider furthest to your right, and shift the colour to a lighter tone. Then just "OK" out of all of that and your button should look like thus so far, If the colours are reversed, meaning the lighter colour is on the bottom and the dark colour on the top, then just go back to the little strip that shows the colour transition and click and drag the little boxes under it to the opposite corners of the strip so that your button looks like the image above. Step 7: Creating the Glossy EffectAlright, now that we have the basic colours and transitions set-up, we just have one more thing to do, make it look Glossy! So now we'll go to the Properties panel again and click the box beside the bucket icon to bring up that strip that shows the colour transitions. Now, click two spots under the strip, on the same line where the two smaller boxes under it are, but near the middle, so that it to looks like this, Now, this is where you have to pay very close attention, to make sure you get maximum coolness. Click on the little box in the middle that's to the left and make it the colour of your background in the little pallette that pops-up by using the slider to the furtest to the right (Remember, click the little "Beachball of Death" to get to the pop-up pallette with the slider). Now the little box that's furthest to the left, make it slightly lighter than the backgroun colour. But no-where near enough as light as the blue that's furthest to the right. Just SLIGHTLY. Almost indistinguisheable. Now, click the little box in the middle that's to the right, and make it slightly darker than the blue that's furthest to the right. Again, only slightly. If you make the difference in colours too huge, you get really goofy results. The goal of this is to make the top transition of the button to be light, and the bottom to be dark. This is what we should have so far, Step 8: You're DONE! If you've been glancing over at your button the whole time, you'd have noticed that you've now got your awsome looking button. It should look like this, Now, generally, this is where I'd stop. But, some people like to have a drop-shadow under their buttons, so I'll quickly take you through that. In the same Properties panel you should see a box off to the right-hand side that says "Effects". Click the little arrow beside that and select "Shadow and Glow", then "Drop Shadow", tweak it out to your liking. These are usually the setting I use for anything. It looks best most of the time, And there you have it. Your very own glossy button. TAKE THAT PHOTOSHOP!

Those are good quality sigs. Now, I don't mean to be an *bottom*, just take this as constructive criticism. First off, althoug the quality is good, I've seen the exact type of sig so many times that it's lost all impact. Before, I used to think they were cool, but they've been *way* too overdone. Anime in sigs is something else that's been done to hell. Secondly: The dimensions. I don't mind a good looking sig on people's posts, but one thing I really dislike is making them any taller than 50px. It just gets *way* too obtrusive and seriously distracts from the actual content (not to mention it makes the site look ugly as a whole). Avatars on the other hand, I don't mind being 100px*200px. Because those are off to the side, and their height is about the height of a standard post anyways, so it doesn't matter. But when you add 120px to the bottom of a post, it just adds far too much space. Wide sigs, on the other hand, I don't mind. My ideal dimensions for a sig would be, 450px*50px. Thirdly, Sigs should be something personal, made by the same person, and an avatar of sorts that describes and identifies who you are. Hence the phrase "Signature". The style of an sig should leave the person who just saw it with an impression of the type of person that you are. That why I think making one own's sig is essential if you want to make it worth your while. Yeah, there are people that don't know how to draw graphics, but bah, learn how to; it comes in handy. Anyways, yeah, that's just what I think.

Anyone remember how Adobe bought out Macromedia recently? I don't know the physical working of this buy-out and how it affected the overall staff and structure of either company, but all things concidered, I'd be expecting applications like Fireworks and Freehand, for example, to start taking a shape more closely resembling that of Photoshop and ImageReady. From a marketing stand-point, it would make sens to try and make every release of MX-Studio more closely resemble that of Adobe's products, slowly, but surely. So that in the future, we will see people eventually breaking off from Macromedia's line of products since Adobe's will be essentially the same thing, and they'll be the official releases from a more established company (albeit both being the same company, but people will feel otherwise due to the names and corporate logos). Soon enough, Adobe can kill Macromedia completely, make Flash part of their own product lines, and get people used to an environment close enough to their own applications' that switching wouldn't be a problem for most of the userbase. But then again, this is al speculation. I don't really know if any of this has any merit, to be honest.

It's not old news. 'Windows Genuine Advantage' is fairly recent. Before you were required to 'Activate' Windows upon installing. But now you are required to authenticate with Microsoft servers whenever you want to download security patches or generally access most of the popular Microsoft downloads. But that's okay, since there's a quick and dirty way to bypass this requirement, and worry about authenticating, Go to 'Tools' and 'Manange Add-Ons...' in 'Internet Explorer' There'll be a drop-down box, select 'Add-ons that have been used by Internet Explorer' Now, in the list-box directly below it, locate 'Windows Genuine Advantage' Click it, and then the 'Enable/Disable' radio buttons in the section directly below it should now be clickeable. Select 'Disable' and then hit 'OK'. Restart 'Internet Explorer'. That should be it. Now you'll be able to download and install anything you want from Microsoft again. Note: Whenever you want to download updates from 'WindowsUpdates.com; and it tries to run the 'Genuine Advantage' check, ignore the pop-up message. It'll just keep going. Sorry for the double post. My browser cached the page and didn't refresh it after I made the original post. So I thought that the message didn't go through and typed it up again. Mods, feel free to delete the first message. I like the second one better. Notice from BuffaloHELP: Instead of deleting I merged your 3 posts. Deletion should be the last request since it will raise your warning level AND give you the negative credits. I don't think you wanted neither Choose wisely when asking for deletion, next time.

Okay, well, in my own lack of care, I managed to somehow forgot to come back to the forums to make some useful posts. So now it said the account had been suspended. I quickly ran off to some threads and shared some input while at the same time hoping that the site would be brought back up. I'd like to know the procedure and timeframe of bringing a site back online once the adequate credit limit is reached again. I quickly skimmed through the post 'Credits' dialogue which said something like, obtaining at least 3 credits before the site would be re-posted, and that it would take a couple of hours to do so. I'm just curious as to how long that actually is, if I should be worried about any potential penalties, and if there is a limit as to how many times this can happen before further action is taken by administrators? Sorry if this has been answered before, but I haven't seem a topic relating to the issue (maybe I'm not looking hard enough), and I'd like to see an answer. Thanks for taking the time to read this.

Microsoft's Virtual Earth service may seem like it's a good cometitor for Google Earth. But in reality, it's far from it. This is simply Microsoft, once again, trying to not fall short of Google. It's say really, because being such a powerful, influential, and wealthy corporation, you'd think they'd be able to put out software that was at least a viable alternative to something else. I use Windows, and I think it's decent. But some of Microsoft's other products have me worried. Especially this new attempt at fighting Google. For one, there are a lot of different areas in MSN Earth that are just plain inaccurate, and not in the sense that they're outdated (which is still unreasonable), but completely messed. Scribbles here and there, etc. The interface is another thing to gawk at. It's slow, and no-where near as sleek as Google's own. And Google provides more back-end support to their service than Microsoft does (Since %80 of their effort goes into making the interface look cool instead of making it work). Google actually renders their service custom tailored to whatever browser happens to be using it to work at maximum performance, and give great results. All their maps are up-to-date, and they are doing at great job at maintaining it. Just because Microsoft recently released it is no excuse for it to suck. Microsoft, working with the resources they have at their disposal, has no room for mediocrity.

ISPs do that all the time. It's not unusual for an ISP to upgrade their services from time to time. For example, the standard High-Speed here in Canada for Rogers internet, IIRC, was 2Mbits. But then it got upgrade to 3Mbits. Then they released a deal that in short, stated that if one were to buy a modem from them, they'd upgrade you to 6Mbits free of charge. It's all marketing. And since every-now-and-then resources tend to get cheaper-and-cheaper, eventually it's cost efficient and sound for your image as a company to upgrade people's services free of charge. You probably love that company now. And you'll most likely be sticking with them for a longer time now. Am I right? Ah, gotta love clever marketing schemes. Especially when they work to your benefit. Everyone wins, so that's good. Have fun. I myself am running on 6Mbits. But I know of some countries (Sweden?) where the standard home-line is 100Mbits for the same price I get my 6Mbits here in Canada. I'd sell my soul for the kind of service.

Do you want to know why coding for Firefox is so much more difficult? That's because Firefox is Standards Compliant. That means that Firefox will render pages just like the W3 tells them it should. For you that don't know what the W3 is, go here: http://www.ostrick.com/w3enom.html . In short, the W3 makes sure that there is a standard for HTML, CSS, etc, is rendered the same accross all browsers. If your website works pefectly on Internet Explorer, and not on Firefox, then your code is broken. It's as simple as that. Microsoft has a tendency to not play nice with any other campanies, and forget about them working with someone else's guidelines. Internet Explorer has much-much fewer features than Firefox, due to Firefox's Extensions-system. You can literally go to https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/ and download thousands of different plugins for Firefox that let it do just about anything you would ever want a browser to do. Not to be an *bottom*, but it's because of lazy programmers like you that the horribleness of Internet Explorer is perpetuated. I personally don't like Firefox, I use Opera, but I do recognize that Firefox is better than Internet Explorer.

Then you probably support making Alcohol illegal too, right?

Are you a communist? Why do you hate freedom? Please, answer these questions. Why do you want to deny people the right to enjoy their vices and live a life where they are their own decision makers? People have died for the right to freedom, and here comes an ignorant child that has been brainwashed by the psycho media into believing that they are fighting for freedom themselves. HELL NO!. You're not fighting for anything other than oppression. I agree, that everyone is entitled to their own freedom, and hence, why we call it "Freedom" and not "License". But you nubiles want to oppress smokers and make them submit to your lifestyle, which is no better than smokers blowing contaminated air in your faces. I support anyone that wants to smoke for their own sake, for the same fundamental reason why I support the legalization of natural "drugs", and alcohol. For the same reason why I agree that everyone has a right to live freely. For the same reason that I support Freedom of Speech and Democracy. Anyone that says they hate smokers are hipocritical animals that believe they are better than everyone else simply because they do not share the same vices. And in my opinion that makes you worse than the worst of drug-addicts. There has to be laws regulating when/where people can do anything to make sure people don't infringe on other's freedom, but that doesn't mean banning smoking all together. Smoking outside is non of your concern, smoking in my house is non of your concern, smoking in public places where smoking is allowed is non of your concern, unless someone walks up to you and starts blowing-puff in your face, you have no right to be enraged. Who are you to judge smokers on their own personal vices? If you judge people for being smokers, you are openly giving me the right to judge you for being African, or for wearing black socks. You have your right to think freely, but not opress others based on your opinions. That is something I can never permit. Ever. I will gladly die for that, if it means maintaining one ounce of what makes the free world free. If I wan't to slowly kill myself with smoke, so be it. It's my choice. MINE. You don't see me telling you to not eat at MacDonalds and banning MacDonald's because it's unhealthy, do you? If you're concerned for the well being of others or your environment, fight for accepting the Kyoto Protocol. Be an advocate for cleaner fuels. Help stop global warming by not throwing out so much trash, and recycling. Donate to just organizations that really help those poor people in the middle-east that your governments have destroyed over the years by raping their oil reserved and destroying their lands, turning them into nothing more than useless deserts; those people that don't even have the ability to smoke if they wanted to. Help fight against pollution and find solutions to cleaning the Earth's water supply. Boycott companies that exercise unmoral practices in order to save money and resources. You are the peasants that make me sick. You think you're doing the world a favour, in reality, you're not. You're the ones being conter-intuative, and destructive. I have more of a right to be enraged at you, than you have a right to be angry at me. I bet I've done more in my life to make this world a better place, than some pinko'-whino that thinks smoking is what makes this world evil.

Yeah, screw that crap. I'm too cool for school. Let's all go flip burgers and clean toilets for the rest of our lives! HELL YEAH!. I'm going to assume that everyone in here that says they hate school are either less than 14 years old, have mental problems that impede them from learning and retaining information for more than two days, or are greater than 14 years old and live very bleak and unsuccesful lives. I don't mean to be an *bottom*, but someone has to knock some sense into you fruits. And I know you won't gives two farts and a half (that's math for you younglings) about what some whino says on the internet, but since you're reading this I'd might aswell reply. But I agree though, drop out of school. Don't go. If you don't like school, there's no reason for you to go. School is only for thinkers. People that want to learn more about the world around them, the naturally curious, and for those that want to help expand and improve the planet's quality of being. Unless you're applying to Ivy or Law school. Then you're just an *BLEEP*. Schooling is for those that don't want to live a small life, for those that don't want to comform to being a working peon for the rest of their lives flipping burgers or taking orders. School is for those that want to make real money, and have a sense of pride and satisfaction in their future, not building toys on assembly lines. So I say, if you don't like school, go ahead and drop out, we don't want wastes of skin uselessly consuming teachers' time with dead-ends. So again I say, drop out. Because without High School drop-outs and people that don't take Post Secondary, I wouldn't have anyone to fix my coffee in the morning.

You shouldn't care whatsoever if you break up with someone. Want to know why? There are many reasons for people to break up, but ultimately they all come back to, "You suck as a couple". Which is good, because why date someone you know you suck as a couple with? If you find someone that's really worth it, then you wouldn't be having problems enough to concider breaking up with. Of course, this isn't the green-light to break up with people just because they don't like the same kind of music as you or something, but it means that if the situation were to ever arise that the relationship is to be cut-off, it was for the best anyways. Word of advice, don't ever bother trying to retain a friendship after dating. It DOES NOT work. Guaranteed. That's a fact of life. Don't even try to prove me wrong on this. You can't. It's impossible. This doesn't mean you should hate eachother, just don't bother thinking about it. Besides, it's not like you're tied down to the person. I'm assuming you don't have children with that person, or are even married for that matter. So it really shouldn't matter. That's why you're going out with that person right? Kinda like, testing out the merchandise before making a decision. It's never too good to get tied down to someone, even if you really do love that person. But when I say love, I don't mean "Infatuation", I mean "Love" as in "Jesus" kind of love. Because Love + Clinginess don't go well together. Mainly because if that person ever leaves you, you'll go insane. But if you love that person but at the same time lose your "desire", as it were, to be with them, you'll be a lot happy. Doesn't mean they bore you, just that it won't bug you when they go away. It's a hard thing to accomplish, but once you get the hang of it it's not hard. It may seem a bit cynical to say this, but it's the truth. People are imperfect, and as such, they will let you down. No matter who they are, at one point or another. It's about being able to cope with this. In short, don't take any relationship seriously unless you're married.

Maybe you didn't upload all the files by accident? Missing the most inane ".php" file somewhere could cause your site to crash horribly. I remember this was the case with WordPress when I installed it. I forgot to upload to some template file, and it cause the entire to just out-right not work all together. If I were you, I'd flip through the site's file-tree and see if you're missing any files.There's always the possibility that the file "functions.php" itself doesn't work and has some sort of line ommited from it that should have been there to begin with. Why don't you go over to line 470 on that file and tell use what it says on that line, and we can help you from there? Most likely (From how I read that error), there's a class on a file somewhere that's not available becaues it doesn't exist. That's what I think. But if you fiddled around with that file, you might have changed a line and now it's pointing to a class that shouldn't be there because it's a typo of some sort.I don't really know the exact nature of this problem right now because I've never used this mxbb, but that pretty much sums up the possibilities that I think are the problem. Check them out, if it's not what I said, then at least you discarded two possibilities.

There are tons of thing that you could do to keep yourself occupied during the wee hours of the morning. But ask yourself this, do you really want to be awake at 3AM and them getting up at 2PM having missed most of the day? I highly recommend fixing up your schedule a bit and sleeping regular hours. Not just because of the health factor, but because it's just so much better to actually be awake when the sun's outside and be asleep when it's dark. You get a lot more out of the day. One of the main reasons is that your body naturally gets tired when it's dark and boring (but if you sleep all morning will be unable to pass out), but when it's light outside, you can have more energy, and actually have things to do. Of course, if you have to and/or are going to stay up late for a particular reason from time to time I see no problem in that, but making a habbit of it is kind of pointless in my opinion. Just because there is nothing to do at 3AM in the morning. Not usually anyways. So in conclusion, Fix up your schedule, Exercise lots (it'll burn you out and have you ready to pass out nicely right on time, but not in a bad way), drink a warm glass of milk before going to sleep. It seems like a childish thing to do, but it actually works, another thing that you might try, actually go and lie down on your bed and just lay there with your eyes closed. You'll toss around for about 30 minutes, but you'll eventually pass out.

Microsoft Anti-spyware is actually quite amazing. Not surprising, seeing as it wasn't coded my Microsoft itself, but was instead purchased from a smaller company. Personally, I've never used it much. I installed it about a couple months ago but haven't bothered using it, and eventually uninstalled it. The main Anti-Spyware software that I use, is "Spybot Search & Destroy". I highly recomment it over any other alternative you have come across. Most of the benefits I've seen include, It has an amazing interface, It is very easy to use, Has an extensive collection of optimizations and tweaks to prevent spyware from installing in the first-place, Updated frequently, and you can set it to protect your computer in real time, kind of like Norton Antivirus It's a very advanced Anti-Spyware suite that I believe should be used by everyone that wants one. I highly recommend it. If you want to know more, go here: https://www.safer-networking.org/