Wow! eBook – Blog

Book Description

Photoshop CS6 is truly amazing, but it can also be overwhelming if you’re just getting started. This book makes learning Photoshop a breeze by explaining things in a friendly, conversational style—without technical jargon. After a thorough introduction to the program, you’ll delve deep into Photoshop’s secrets with expert tips and practical advice you can use every day.

The important stuff you need to know:

• Learn your way around. Get a guided tour of Photoshop’s beautiful new workspace.
• Unlock the magic. Discover the most practical ways to use layers, channels, masks, paths, and other tools.
• Fine-tune your images. Learn techniques for cropping, retouching, and combining photos.
• Play with color. Drain, change, and add color; and create gorgeous black-and-whites and duotones.
• Be artistic. Create original illustrations and paintings, use text and filters effectively, and edit video clips.
• Share your work. Produce great-looking images for print and the Web.
• Work smarter and faster. Automate common chores and install plug-ins for complex tasks.

Table of Contents
Part I: The Basics
Chapter 1. Photoshop CS6 Guided Tour Download Now »

Book Description

With the advent of HTML5 and CSS3, web designers can now create sophisticated animations without the need of additional plugins such as Flash. However, there hasn’t been an easy way for creating animations with web standards until now. This book enables even those with little knowledge of HTML or programming web content to freely create a variety of rich compositions involving motion and interactivity.

Learning Adobe Edge will quickly get you up and running with this professional authoring software to create highly engaging content which targets HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. Content created in Adobe Edge does not rely on a plugin – so it can be run within any standard browser– even on mobile.

Learning Adobe Edge begins with an overview of the shifting web landscape and the Edge application. We then move on through the variety of panels and toolsets available, and explore the many options we have when creating motion and interactivity using Edge.

The book presents the reasoning behind engaging, standards-based web content and how Edge fills the need for professional tooling in this area. In the book we’ll examine content creation and how to achieve fluid animation and advanced transitioning through the Edge timeline. Sprinkled throughout the book are tips and references for those coming to Edge from a background in Flash Professional.

Whether you are coming to Edge from Flash Professional or are totally new Download Now »

Book Description

Starling is an ActionScript 3 2D framework developed on top of the Stage3D APIs (available on desktop in Flash Player 11 and Adobe AIR 3). Starling is mainly designed for game development, but could be used for many other use cases. Starling makes it possible to write fast GPU accelerated applications without having to touch the low-level Stage3D APIs.

Most Flash developers want to be able to leverage GPU acceleration (through Stage3D) without the need to write such higher-level frameworks and dig into the low-level Stage3D APIs. Starling is completely designed after the Flash Player APIs and abstracts the complexity of Stage3D (Molehill) and allows easy and intuitive programming for everyone.

Obviously Starling is for ActionScript 3 developers, especially those involved in 2D game development; of course you will need to have a basic understanding of ActionScript 3. By its design (lightweight, flexible and simple), Starling can be used also be used for other use cases like UI programming. That said, everything is designed to be as intuitive as possible, so any Java™ or .Net™ developer will get the hang of it quickly as well.

About the Author
Thibault Imbert is a Flash Player product manager focused on graphics and rendering. After a few years working for different French agencies as a Flash developer, Thibault became an Adobe Certified Instructor in Paris where he taught ActionScript at an Adobe training center. Download Now »

Book Description

Developing Blackberry Tablet applications using Adobe Flex 4.5 for mobile will walk you through creating your 1st AIR on Blackberry application. Next, you will learn how to interact with the devices camera, gallery, accelerometer, GPS, multi touch display and native services using Adobe Flex 4.5. Finally, you will learn how to compile your application and deploy to BlackBerry App World.

Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Hello World
Chapter 2 Application Layouts
Chapter 3 Permissions and Configuration Settings
Chapter 4 Exploring the APIs
Chapter 5 Working with the File System
Chapter 6 OS Interactions
Chapter 7 Publish to BlackBerry Installer
Colophon

About the Author
Rich Tretola, an award-winning Flex developer, is the Rich Applications Technical Lead at Herff Jones Inc. He has been building internet apps for over a decade, and has worked with Flex since the original Royale beta was introduced in 2003. Rich is highly regarded in the Flex community as an expert in RIA, and is also an Adobe Community Expert. He has authored or co-authored a number of books on Flex and AIR, and has a popular Flex and AIR blog at Everything Flex. Download Now »

Book Description

The Essential Guide to Open Source Flash Development is a practical development guide to creating Flash applications with open source Flash tools and workflows. You will walk away with an understanding of what tools will best suit your current situation, making your development easier and more productive, and with the knowledge of how to install and set up some of the best tools available, including the following:

• Papervision3D: to create 3D in Flash
• Red5: to stream video over the internet
• SWX: to build data-driven mashups and mobile apps
• Fuse: to make ActionScript animation a cinch
• Go: to build your own animation tools in ActionScript 3.0
• haXe: to create Flash files and more
• AMFPHP: to communicate between Flash and php

Open source Flash has been a revolution for Flash and has made a major impact on how people build Flash content. The open source tools available expand on Flash’s existing tool set, enabling you to perform such tasks as easily create full 3D in Flash or hook up to an open source video-streaming server. Many of these useful tools are powerful yet lack documentation. this book explains in step-by-step detail how to use the most popular open source Flash tools.

If you want to expand your Flash tool set and explore the open source Flash community, then this book is for you. If you already use some open source Flash tools, then you will find this book a useful documentation resource as well as an eye-opener to the other tools that are available. Download Now »

Book Description

Written by the best known and most trusted name in the ColdFusion community, Ben Forta, The ColdFusion Web Application Construction Kit is the best-selling ColdFusion series of all time. Volume 3: Advanced Application Development, focuses on application security, scalability and high-availability, and integration with other systems and technologies. The book starts with two sections dedicated specifically to scalability and security, and then focused on extending ColdFusion applications using web technologies, other languages and platforms, and sophisticated integration techniques. Complete coverage of ColdFusion 9 is included in “Volume 1, Getting Started” (0-321-66034-X) and “Volume 2, Application Development” (0-321-67919-9).

Table of Contents
Introduction

Creating High Availability Applications
Understanding High Availability
Monitoring System Performance
Scaling with ColdFusion
Scaling with J2EE
Managing Session State in Clusters
Deploying Applications Download Now »