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Fireworks MX TutorialsIn the course of working at my new job, I have become fairly accustomed to Fireworks MX. I used to think that it was a far cry from the power of other graphics programs like Photoshop or Quark. It really isn't. What I like most about Fireworks MX is simple - almost everything that you need or want to know about an image can be found from a simple right-click on the canvas (not on the picture, on the gray part). The main thing that I used it for was to create transparent GIF page headers, and also for their pretty cool drop down menus. The trouble with the drop-down menus was that I couldn't find a resource to explain what all that generated Javascript meant. See, when Fireworks makes a drop down menu...tell you what, let's step through how to make a drop down menu and I'll explain it as we go.
Part I: The Saga Begins Step one in any tutorial - make sure that you have the program that the tutorial is about. For those of you that don't (I can't imagine that you wouldn't have it, but still...), skip over to Macromedia's site and download it. Start it up and open a new document. Remember that we're doing a menu, so it doesn't need to be huge. We'll make this a horizontal menu, so set the width at 750 pixels and the height at 50 pixels. For most 800x600 resolution monitors, this will fit quite nicely. For monitors bigger than that, we can set it to center on the web page later. Okay, now we've got a blank canvas. Make sure you have the Layers window open (if you don't, press F2 and it will pop up). It's probably safe to assume that you want to have a line of text open up the drop down menu, so we'll do that first. Click on the 'A' on the Toolbar (the Text tool) and type what you want the main menu will say. I spaced it out with just text and then inserted Rectangular Hotspots over the text. See figure 1 for what your screen should look like. Figure 1. - The Fireworks
screen so far. On the next page we'll set up the drop down menu and customize it.
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BrainStorm MultiMedia is an internet-based company run by Bradley Beard that provides free tutorials on PHP, MySQL, Dreamweaver MX, Flash MX, ActionScript, Fireworks MX, ColdFusion MX, cPanel X, Photoshop 7, CuteFTP, SQL Server 2000, how to start ranking high in Google, web site promotion and enhancement, and search engine optimization. Along with these tutorials, I also do freelance web design using PHP/MySQL or ColdFusion.
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