Latest News from Jim Babbage

A Fireworks Quickie - Optimizing Text

Wed, 25 Oct 2006 14:45:00 EDT

Getting good quality text in a JPEG file has long been a concern for many designers. Fortunately for us, Fireworks MX and higher versions have a very useful feature to help with this called the Selective Quality. In Fireworks MX 2004 and higher, we also have the ability to adjust and customize the aliasing of text. In this short tutorial find out how to utilize these features to keep your text crisp and snappy when exporting a file as a JPEG image.

Batch Processing in Fireworks 8

Mon, 24 Jul 2006 16:15:00 EDT

I've lately seen a few posts on the Adobe forums and here on CMX about batch processing in Fireworks. Considering the Fireworks 8 Batch Processing utility had some noteworthy revisions, I thought it would be a good idea to go over the wizard in detail. Streamlined and enhanced file renaming, the ability to check file dimensions when scaling during a batch process and the addition of a status bar and log file are the most notable improvements to Batch Processing. There are many articles here on CMX that touch on Batch Processing, but they are geared towards specific goals. In this article, we'll examine the utility itself piece by piece.

Sailing the Wine Dark Sea With Macromedia Fireworks MX

Wed, 03 Aug 2005 14:15:00 EDT

Sailing, sailing over the bounding sea... Or in our case, inside a wine glass. We've all seen the ship-in-a-bottle knick-knack. Well, I'm here to show you how to set a sailboat afloat in a wine glass, using Fireworks MX or MX 2004, vector AND bitmap masks. Heave ho, matey, and don't forget to buckle your swash!

Still Snowing

Fri, 21 Jan 2005 00:00:00 EST

In 'Let It Snow, Man' (MXDJ Vol. 2, issue 12), I used Fireworks to create all the essential ingredients for our frozen friend. We then exported the pieces using Export as CSS Layers. This gave us a starting HTML page (generated by Fireworks) and all of our graphics in absolutely positioned DW layers (DIVs).

Let It Snow, Man!

Tue, 21 Dec 2004 00:00:00 EST

Well, there's a chill in the air. The leaves have fallen, the wind is brisker, and sometimes, even in early November, there's that 'scent of snow' in the air. In the lead-up to the holiday season, I have created a two-part series that uses both Fireworks and Dreamweaver. The end result will be a fun little 'build your own' snowman Web page.