Articles

  • Variable Data Images: Adobe Photoshop Add On

    Variable Data Images: Adobe Photoshop Add On

    Variable Data Images is a Photoshop Add On that let’s users merge variable data with a photoshop document. The Add On allows variable text to substitute point or paragraph text in a photoshop template; including an option to automatically resize text if it causes overflow. Layers in the photoshop template can be turned on or…

  • Using Adobe Flex & PHP together with Zend AMF

    Update: Adobe Flex and the Flash platform have been retired. There are a variety of methods we can use to communicate between flash and our server side web applications, including XML and HTTP POST/GET. However a much more robust methods exists–Action Message Format (AMF). AMF uses binary encoded messages. Because of this the messages are…

  • Character animation using inverse kinematics in flash

    Update: Adobe Flex and the Flash platform have been retired. Adobe Flash CS4 has made character animation in Flash a lot easier. The following post shows an example of using Inverse Kinematics and the bone tool to animate a skeleton character. Firstly we need to divide all of the limbs of the character into movie…

  • Search Engine Optimisation

    Currently Google, Yahoo and Bing share just about all search traffic on the internet and as we know Google have most of the market share. Perhaps as high as 80%. Before Google arrived on the scene search engine results contained a lot of irrelevant results, illicit advertising and spam. Search Engine optimisers had discovered methods…

  • Crawling the web with PHP

    The internet is full of web spiders (also known as robots). The biggest and most powerful web spider is probably googlebot, google’s web spider, responsible for crawling the web, looking for new web pages to index, and checking if pages already in it’s index have been updated. This post shows how we can use PHP…

  • Papervision3D Basics

    Update: Adobe Flex and the Flash platform have been retired. Papervision 3D is a powerful open source 3D library for Flash. It allows us to create animations and interactive applications in 3D. The current release of Papervision 3D supports Actionscript 3 and can be downloaded here. This post runs through some of the basics of…

  • Turning a photo into a sketch

    In this post we are going to explore one method of manipulating a photo to look like it has been sketched by pencil. We will use Adobe Photoshop.

  • Audio books from blog posts

    Sometimes it is convenient to listen to a book in audio format rather than to read it. This way we can take advantage of driving, cooking or exercise time to listen to books. This technique is also useful for reading technical documents, blog posts or other articles with little emphasis on graphics.

  • Using PHP with Google’s Language API

    Google hosts a terrific Ajax language Application Programming Interface (API), which allows developers to integrate Google’s translate.google.com service into their own applications. We don’t have to use the Ajax API in order to take advantage of this service. Google allow access to the API via url calls–supplied with GET or POST url variables. Please click…

  • Fixing Broken Websites with Greasemonkey

    Sometimes a website doesn’t function correctly. Even if a website works fine we may want it to display or perform differently. With a few web development and javascript skills we can change a website for ourselves using the Greasemonkey Firefox extension.