Wow, today was a great day for the Fw CS3 Jam Sessions as we had Ryan Smith do a demo of the new sample he submitted that now lives on the Fireworks Developer Center > Samples.
Also, a very special guest joined us today, Tom Hobbs from the XD team at Adobe dropped in and shared some killer techniques that he uses on a daily basis with Fireworks. Some of the techniques shown today have really made me rethink how I design in Fireworks!
http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p89009038/
Thanks Tom and Ryan!
Here’s the recording for last weeks Fireworks CS3 jam session making it our 12th session so far. In this session, I’d suggest scrubbing to 18 minutes and watch Lian give some killer tips on handling bitmap and vector highlights in Fireworks CS3.
How do you export PNGs as SWFs from Fireworks? Its not that common of a question, but always has me searching for an extension that Jesse made awhile back that does just that. He also posted the source and a Draw Grid guide command too!
Tonight, I’ll be giving a Fireworks CS3 demo in Los Angeles at the LAdobe user group and helping out with any design or technical related questions thereafter. Hope you can make it! If time allows I’ll geek out and show off some progress with a new and improved CSS export script and cool extensions that can improve your current workflows.
Also, dont forget the Fireworks Jam Session is in 45 minutes at 11am (pst)! Its a totally informal Connect session. We usually start the first ten minutes figuring out what everyone wants to see or demo…you never know today we may do a design train or dive into some troubleshooting or help someone out with a question related to Fireworks.
Ben at pixelfumes ported over his kuler panel from Flash CS3 to Fireworks CS3 and would like some feedback in terms of how Fireworks users would use the panel. I was delighted to see him write a Flash developer center article on the kuler panel and expose the development efforts it took to create the panel as well as hand out the source so anyone else can de-construct or extend the panel. This is truly the best way to learn and I personally value designers and developers highly when they push out something they want to share with the community.
Download the Fireworks kuler panel and have fun!
Be sure to give Ben some feedback if you feel the panel should be working differently than it currently does inside Fireworks CS3.
Thanks Ben!
Today is a great day as John Dunning updated his list of current Adobe Fireworks Extensions. I’ve always considered John to be an elite Fireworks user if not the godfather of Fireworks and its time to give him recognition as a FireworksGuru for all the insanely helpful extensions John has given to the Fireworks community. You can also find John over at fireworksguruforum.com helping people out with extending Fireworks.
Thanks John for all you do!
Here’s this weeks recorded Fireworks CS3 totally informal jam session recording in all its glory. Aaron over at fw.abeall.com gave a sweet demo of the new Paths panel that allows you to easily manipulate vector paths in one centralized panel. Thats the highlight with this weeks session! Other than that, we answered a couple questions based on the support forum posts.
Anyone see Bridge Home which essentially acts a central hub for content from within Bridge?
It’s cool and an easy way to quickly surf tutorials, extensions, community blogs etc.. for our products. With Fireworks, a lot of the information is already on the Fireworks Design and Developer Centers, but its nice to know you can easily access the content while using Bridge.
If you live in San Francisco and use Adobe apps like Fireworks, then you could be a part of a video for the Adobe Users Conference. Here’s the post below from Gregg. I chopped the post down to reflect the app I want you to talk about…ahem…Fireworks!
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LOOKING FOR ADOBE USERS IN THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA TO TAKE PART IN A VIDEO FOR THE ADOBE USERS CONFERENCE.
Are you a web developer who uses Fireworks? Are you primarily focused on designing with Fireworks?
We are looking for true Adobe enthusiasts to be interviewed on-camera for the production of a video to be shown at the annual Adobe Users Conference in Chicago – Adobe MAX.
The video is tentatively scheduled to be shot August 28th , 29th and September 4th in San Francisco. We would need you for just one of those days. The shoot will be short, 1 to 2 hours maximum.
To submit yourself for consideration to be in this production, please email the following information:
Email Gregg at adobecast@yahoo.com
We are not having an audition for this so please be detailed in your email.
If interested I will get back to you with more details.
Thank you!!!
Gregg (female) 
Casting Director
Today we touched on using Behaviors, utlizing the Paths panel and working with Blend modes in Fireworks CS3. Thanks to everyone that kindly did a demo that was a lot of fun as always.
First half (Covered behaviors for the most part)
http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p41283388/
Second half (Blend modes/Paths panel I think)
http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p66605021/
Next week we may see Lian give us a demo on using Textures for various type of effects, not sure yet as we’ll decide what we want to do in the first 5-10 minutes of the session.
