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My Tutorial is on Devnet

I should have blogged this a few days ago but better late than never…

I’ve had the pleasure of having my Removing Image Backgrounds With Fireworks 8 tutorial published on Macromedia’s Developer Center. It is a great honor for me and I want to thank Stefan Gruenwedel from Macromedia for asking me to publish it and for guiding me through the process. Having previously worked on a Fireworks book (which was never published due to Glasshaus going bankrupt) under insane deadlines, I can say it was a pleasure working with Stefan and the editors at Macromedia. You can find the (edited) tutorial here:

Removing Image Backgrounds With Fireworks 8

6 thoughts on “My Tutorial is on Devnet”

  1. Congratulations:)

    Your tutorial deserved that! :-)

    I made it quite easy in 5 minutes the first time, when I saw it on your website, so, it must be a good tutorial:)

    Now it’ll help even more people with Fireworks 8.

    *thumbs up*

    Keep up the good work!

    –M.

    Reply
  2. Well, it’s more complicated than that. The book had several writers and I was involved in "only" two chapters (although both were over 13000 words long…). The book took you from the mockup/design stage of a Web site layout to the slicing, optimization and coding of it. My contribution was with the Slicing and the implementation/coding parts. The book also had an emphasis on best practices so I used Dreamweavr to build the code structure and only used code exported out of Fireworks for quick prototyping and show how much it sucked… ;-)

    If I take on that project again for myself I’ll need to start from scratch as the design wasn’t mine and although it looked great it was not at all my style.

    This is definitely on my to do list but it encompasses a lot more than Fireworks and will require a lot of time. If I do it I’ll probably try to sell it here as an eBook. Let,s just say that the pay for my contribution to the original book would have been very small compared to the effort involved… ;-)

    Thanks again very much for your kind words Michel!

    Reply
  3. Hm…

    Well, I see it’s complicated. But that’s maybe worth it… :-)

    For me, as I am xhtml/css designer, I use Fireworks only to create the graphics I need. I do not do any slicing nor inside Dreamweaver, nor inside Fireworks. I simply export images I need and then insert them in the webpage using CSS (as backgrund images) – using floats, relative and absolute positioning, etc.

    Slicing which is generated by a program is always very messy and I prefer code all by myself :-)

    In this way, I know what happens *exactly* in the code I have written, and if it actually does something, or is superfluous and I can get rid of it ;-)

    Good luck! :-)

    I think, a book on Fireworks’ strong sides (vectors, web optimization, ease of use) is much needed nowadays, especially for FW 8.

    See ya again soon on this site and elsewhere:)

    Michel

    Reply
  4. Michel,

    Just to be clear, slicing doesn’t mean using code from Fireworks. I never export any code from Fireworks either but I do slice the minimal graphics I’ll need to recreate the layout in (X)HTML/CSS. I do my coding in Dreamweaver or TopStyle Pro.

    I visually layout page mockups in Fireworks then slice and optimize the parts I need and export only the images. That’s the process I explained in the book chapters.

    Reply
  5. This is very good :-)

    I am doing something similar, I guess. I create the large image, and then select parts and repeating backgrounds I may use, then export them, write CSS for their positions on the page:)

    (Slicing some time ago meant a lot of extraneous stuff auto-generated by some application for web, so I apologize!)

    So, if this is what is/were your book about, then maybe… I don’t know, you can simply share some parts of it in another mode, like a tutorial or two?

    Or think about the Big Book again? :-)

    I never had in mind writing a book, about what I do or what I have learnt so far. Maybe simply a blog, with different categories, a snippet or two, some examples… Bad news is that lately I have so much work that I can’t even THINK about my own website, I’m just making websites for the company I work… :( Maybe some day this will change :)))

    Good luc to you! :)

    Reply

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