Ever since the merger between Macromedia and Adobe, I’ve been enjoying exposing Photoshop users to Fireworks. For those of us from the Macromedia world, we’ve long been aware of the advantages of using Fireworks in our web workflow. I even know web designers that do all of their comps in Fireworks instead of Photoshop. That’s not to say they don’t use Photoshop at all, but rather they use Photoshop for their image edits and adjustments. But when it’s time to do a layout, they feel more comfortable in Fireworks’ more object oriented mode of working – and the fact that Fireworks is a hybrid application, working with bitmaps and vectors equally.

Since the merger, the Fireworks team has been hard at work, getting Fireworks more closely aligned with Photoshop. With CS4, Fireworks understands even more about Photoshop files that it is opening. In fact, opening a Photoshop file inside of Fireworks results in an identical image and layout. That is, unless you have done one very common thing in Photoshop – used an Adjustment layer.

If you open a PSD that contains an Adjustment layer in Fireworks, you’ll quickly see that the adjustment layer has been lost. Here’s the tip: before moving your PSD into Fireworks, you need to flatten any layers that use an Adjustment layer. Simply right-click on the Adjustment layer and choose Merge Down from the contextual menu. Save the PSD (although you will probably want to do a Save As in order to be able to return to the Adjustment layers in your original, if needed) and open the PSD in Fireworks.

Hope this saves you some frustration… Skål!

You know the old adage of the two truths in life – well, I think there are actually three! The third, of course, being tourists that are always getting in the way of your nice pictures. Believe me, with all the travel that I do, it happens way too often. Thankfully, Photoshop CS3 has a brilliant way of removing the tourists. I show this in almost every demo stop, and was recently asked if I could write up the technique – so, here it is.

Obviously, the first thing that we need are a few photographs. Here are three pictures that I took in front of the Graz city hall, and as you can see, there is a tourist in every one of my pictures, basically ruining the shot. The other thing that you might notice is that all of the pictures were taken without a tripod (I’m not dragging one all of the world with me!), because the framing of each shot is different. (more…)

I can’t tell you how much fun I have when challenged by the “standards” crowd to implement something with the Spry framework for AJAX. At the end of last week, I was privy to a conversation that Stephanie Sullivan was having with one of her fellow WaSP colleagues concerning Spry’s ability to be completely unobtrusive. In other words, to provide a completely standards-based, bare bones version of the page free of any extraneous semantic markup and/or JavaScript, and then to progressively enhance the page with AJAX functionality only at runtime for JavaScript-enabled user agents.

As you may have read here, I covered this technique in chapter 6 of Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS3 using not only the ability to externalize the JavaScript code which initializes the Spry widgets (a Spry Menubar and Sliding Panels widget), but also dynamically assigning the Spry attributes such as “spry:region” via the same external JavaScript. The issue was raised, however, that there was still some unnecessary code in the page – from a standards’ viewpoint. To understand this, let’s take a look at a simple accordion in Spry. (more…)