Being able to include the power of the number one search engine on your site can be very useful. Not only can you allow users to search Google without leaving your page, but you can also use it as a substitution for the default search option that you have on your site. So now you have the power of Google right in your site’s search feature. On a fun note, this API is used in GOOSE to allow the ability to search Google via a command line interface.

2. Google AJAX Feed API

Another powerful API that you can include on your site. This API can allow you to display the results from RSS or Atom feeds on your site. If you ever used Gmail, you know that ticker at the top of your inbox? You can create a similar feature on your own site. This API can even allow you to rotate images from Flickr, Photobucket, and Picasa Web Albums, so you can show off all those great pictures you have stored online.

3. Youtube APIs and Tools

If you include Youtube videos on your site, this API is a must have. This API allows you to do a lot with videos that are linked from Youtube. You can change the color of the default gray player to anything you want. You can even use a chromeless player which would make the video blend better with your site. Most of this can be done by adding variables in the URL for the video, but those can be forgotten and you will have to search for them again, so why not just use the API where that information is right at your finger tips.

4. Google Web Toolkit

Most of the time when developers create code it is for one site, and isn’t portable, or take a long time to make the code be correct across different browsers. Google Web Toolkit API is designed to take away those headaches. The great thing about this API, it can also be combined with Google’s Eclipse plugin.

5. Google Map APIs

Google Maps API is great way to interact with users. Using this API you can create features that allow you to display the the location of visitors to your site based on GeoIP information, allow users to get directions to your company’s location, and more. The flexibility with Google Maps is endless, but what is great is that Google has even expanded the API to make it easier to use. With other APIs like Google Static Map API (http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/staticmaps/) you can really create user specific maps on the fly.

6. Google Earth API

Google Earth API is very similar to Google Map API. You could even say that Google Earth API is Google Map API on steriods. According to the description on this API’s homepage, you can transform your Google Map API into the 3D world with as little as one line of code. The only issues with this API are that it is supported only on Windows and OS X 10.4 or greater, and the user must have Google Earth Plugin.

7. Google Friend Connect API And OpenSocial

Both of these plugins are designed with social sites in mind. OpenSocial’s goal is to connect multiple social sites via common APIs. There is a large list of sites (http://wiki.opensocial.org/index.php?title=Containers) which include big names like Yahoo!, MySpace, LinkedIn, Friendster, and even Google themselves. Google Friend Connect has a similar goal in mind. Friend Connect wants to make it easier for users to interact with sites without the hassle of registering, but also provide developers the security know that the user isn’t a spam bot. These two APIs are so closely related that Friend Connect actually uses OpenSocial.

8. Google Calendar APIs

Google Calendar APIs are great ways to stay connected to your users. You can display important events to your users very easy with this API. If you have a site about movies, music, or video games you can use the API to display when a new product is being released. You could also use this API to display holidays, or user’s birthdays.

9. Google Charts API

Creating dynamic charts can take a long time, and can cause a lot of fustration. Google Charts can solve both, and provide a lot of options while doing so. This API doesn’t only provide you with the ability to create a basic pie chart, but also veen diagrams, scatter plots, and radar charts . You can even create a map to display statics, or even use a gauge like representation called a Google-o-meter.

10. Gadgets API

Gadgets, also known as widgets, can provide a degree of interactivity that can take a while to develop yourself. If you have ever used iGoogle, you now how powerful these widgets can be. One beneifit of creating a Gadget, is that you can submit it to Google so that it can be published, and it can be used at least on iGoogle.

According to Weintraub’s research, the new Unibody Macbooks have the exact same screen that the MacBook Air has. The screen provides better quality colors, black blacks, and better washout reduction. If you’re interested to see if you have one of the new screens, Weintraub has a walkthrough to check your screen’s model number.

Original image:

Open your image. Duplicate the layer and change the mode of the duplicate layer to Color Dodge.

Press Ctrl + I to invert the duplicate image. You will see a mainly white image now.

Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Now you will start to see come color come back. Although the image isnt complete, I think just this step makes the picture look pretty cool.

Now you want to remove the colors. To do this, go to Image > Adjustments > Threshold. Adjust the image until you see the parts of the image that you want showing.

Create a new layer and change the blending mode to multiply. Start painting your image. Of course, you can use whatever colors you wish. Again, this could be your complete image, but we aren’t done yet!

To make a layer into the halftone comic book looking pattern, choose Image > Adjustments > Threshold and drag the slider to the left until the color disappears.

Select Filter > Sketch > Halftone Pattern and move the contrast slider to the right and adjust the size of the checks and click Ok.

I added a bright yellow background to mine, just to make sure the main image stands out more.

All of them put together:

We are assuming you’ve already got your ad/animation/webpage ready to go, and now you want to customize your cursor to match. You can have some fun with this, making it a fancy arrow, a cross-hair, a little face, a pencil, a torn off hand, whatever you want – you can even make it animated.

Step 1: Make Your Cursor

I have made something resembling a bull’s-eye. Also, I am making it a little transparent using the Alpha settings in the Color Mixer. This way, when you slide your cursor over your animation, you can see through it to the background.

Here’s the cursor’s design:

You want to convert this shape to a symbol (F8 or Insert>Convert to Symbol), give it a behavior of Movie Clip, and name it something like “newcursor”.

Step 2: Giving Your newcursor an Instance

When you converted your new symbol into a movie clip, it saved it in your Library. If this is not open, open it now (F11, CTRL+L or Window>Library).

Go back to your blank stage and drag your new movie clip from the Library, onto the stage. You can resize your symbol now if you want to, but it’s not necessary.

Now, down in the Properties window (Window>Properties), change the Instance Name to “newcursor”. **When giving a symbol an instance name, it does not have to be the same name of the symbol itself, we are just happen to be using the same name.

Step 3: Make Your Cursor Live!

Open your Actions window (Window>Actions). Create a new layer at the top of your timeline and name it “actions”. Click on the first frame of this new layer.

Copy this ActionScript and paste it into your actions window (making sure you have that first frame of the new layer selected):

startDrag(“newcursor”, true);
Mouse.hide();

By looking at this code, it’s doing pretty much exactly what it says. It’s hiding the old cursor, and dragging the new cursor with the instance name of “newcursor”. Now you know why we gave it an instance name, since not all symbols need one. When we named it, we essentially gave it a name for the ActionScript code to look for. This code is only applied to the symbol with the instance name “newcursor”.

Save and publish! We’re done!

First download this picture:

Start a new document about 800X900px and make the background black.

Grab your gradient tool first

Start a new layer and drag your gradient on the screen until you get something similar to this

Open your picture of the girl and put it in the middle of your document.

Duplicate your face layer so you have a backup and hide one of them.

On the layer you did not hide hit ctrl+U on your keyboard to bring up your hue/saturation tool and use these settings:

Now she should look purple like this

Now use your level tool to darken her a bit by hitting ctrl+L on your keyboard and use these settings

Now on to the letters.

Create a new layer above all the rest and add the letters A-Z on your canvas using
separate layers for each one, I know this sounds time consuming but its not bad.
Randomly place them but keep them close together.

I am going to use the font called “viking”.

Now for each letter go through and use your transform tool (ctrl+t) on each letter and spin them all so they look more random

Now choose one of your letters to add these blending options to

Now right click on the letter you added them to and pick “copy layer style”

Then highlight all of your other letter layers together, right click them and click “paste layer style”

Now they should all look the same, similar to this

Now merge all those layers together and then copy the new layer a few times and move it over her face

Now duplicate a few more of them and make them smaller and also cover her face

Next duplicate a few more and place them around her face on the canvas.

Here is what I have

Now drag the picture of the face above all the layers and set its blending mode to pin light

After you do that there will be black area around the face so take a large soft eraser brush and erase to get rid of the black. I am using a 65px brush.

After that I have something like this

That is about it for this tutorial. There are many more things you can add to this to make it really good, but I am just trying to get you jump started in the right direction so have fun!

But the free iPod touch isn’t the only deal the Apple store is currently offering. What many may not have noticed is that Apple is also offering a bit more bang for your buck if you’re shopping for the basic 13-inch MacBook. At $999, the white MacBook now offers 2.13 GHz, while the aluminum 13-inch offers only 2.0GHz with a much pricier tag of $1,299. So if you’re into brains over beauty, you’ll definitely appreciate Apple’s addition to the basic white package without adding to the price. And that’s the only difference between the 2 MacBooks. Choose the white MacBook, and yes, you’re getting more Mac for less. And this offer is available to everyone, not just those who qualify for Apple’s Back to School promotion

Think of Oracle Database 11g Standard Edition One as a Chevrolet Corvette or even a Nissan GT-R, if you will.  A press release sent out today explained how it aced the database equivalent of a horsepower per dollar examination.

The release stated, “Achieving 232,002 transactions per minute with a price/performance of $.54USD/tpmC, Oracle Database 11g Standard Edition One with Oracle Enterprise Linux running on an HP ProLiant ML350 G6 server with a single-socket Intel(R) Xeon(R) E5520 quad-core processor and HP Smart Array P411 controller delivered the best price-per-transaction-per-minute ever achieved with the TPC-C benchmark, in addition to delivering the fastest result for a one socket system.”

Impressed yet?  John Gromala, the director of product marketing over HP’s Industry Standard Servers division, also said, “The TPC-C benchmark is the industry standard OLTP benchmark, and HP’s leading price/performance further reinforces the significant value HP ProLiant servers running Oracle Database provide to our customers.”

So although this setup may not make as great of a glossy poster as an Aston Martin, it sounds like there’s definitely something new for database professionals to drool over.

Right now, we have a pretty solid definition of how CFSCRIPT should work so that you can write entire components. Mostly it follows what you may have seen Adobe show off at conferences but Adobe is still making changes in response to feedback from the committee (and its own banks of prerelease testers, I’m sure) and some of Adobe’s suggestions were considered vendor-specific by the committee.

But we’re stuck on a couple of tags that we’re really struggling to define in CFSCRIPT. We’d like you to help us make some decisions here!

First off, here’s a simple component written using core CFML2009:

Extended core CFML2009 would allow the <cfscript> tags to be omitted (with rules about what is allowable outside component). Extended core also adds a few other useful constructs that are optional for vendors (but if they implement them, they should follow the committee’s spec).

You’ll see import and new in here, as well as var appearing somewhere other than the top of the function. You’ll also see that we’ve voted to include throw in core CFML with a function-call style syntax that allows attributes to specified like named arguments. We’ve generally followed that pattern for tags-as-script, so you can say, for example:

But we’ve run into some problems trying to solve this for cfmail and cfquery. The problem is that the body of these tags is treated specially. It isn’t just code, it’s text with embedded code. You can see the problem clearly in this example:

In the tag-based version, it’s easy to identify code: it all begins with <cf or is wrapped in # but in CFSCRIPT, code looks like regular text.

Both cfmail and cfquery have nested tags and we can clearly put those in the tag-as-script body:

Since CFML allows multi-line strings, we’re considering adding a body attribute to cfmail and a sql attribute to cfquery so you could do this:

We’ve reviewed a lot of syntax options and dismissed most as either unworkable for some technical reason or just downright ugly.

What would you like to see for mail and query in CFSCRIPT?

And, yes, we’re still discussing cfmail vs mail. For some tags, the name without the prefix is likely to clash with existing user variables and functions – and may not be as easy to read. For example, which of these two are more obvious and less likely to cause compatibility problems with your code:

So, input please! On both the syntax for mail and query specifically but also tags-as-script in general.

Comments

To begin I am going with my new native screen size of 1920×1080. You can use whatever screen size you like. Fill the document with #364143.

Then do a search for a nice large forest make sure there a no people in the picture. Add it to our document. Then hit CTRL+U check the colorize box. Using the base color as a reference adjust the hue and brightness to match.

Now we are going to add our first set of fog. There are some awesome fog brush set on deviantart I found a few there I used in this tutorial. Make a new layer Now using these three colors (#467170, #6c9696, and #425354) and using the fog brushes you found make a mixture of different colors and brush to get an out come like below:

Next we are are going to add our first set of light beams through the trees. Using your Pen tool Make three 45° angle selections of various widths. Then go to your Paths Palette and CTRL+Click your work path. Make another layer and fill the selection with #81a38a. Again using the pen tool remove some of the color from in front of the trees. Then go to Filter > Blur >Gaussian Blur and select a radius of 20 – 40 and hit OK. Finally set the layer fill to 50%.

Use the same steps as above create another light beam. Make another layer and fill the selection with #FFFFFF. Then go to Filter > Blur >Gaussian Blur and select a radius of 20 – 30 and hit OK. Finally set the layer fill to 80%.

Next we need to find a good photo of a knarled tree for our foreground. Once you have found one remove it from it’s back ground and add it to our document. Follow the same blending method as we used on the background forest.

Make a new layer. Using your pen tool make a shape like below and fill it with #355155. This will serve as a base for our marble monument.

Now again do a search for a highres stone texture. Once you have found one you like add it to the document. Then go to Edit > Transform > Perspective and move the top width to a third of the base. Next CTRL+Click you marblebaselayer to make a selection. Copy the stone texture in that selection. Set the new texture layer to Multiply.

Again Using your pen tool make a slection of the top. Using the selection you just made copy out the selection from the original stone texture. Then go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian blur and give it about a 5 – 10 radius blur. Finally go to your blending options and add a coloroverlay. Set the Overlay to mode to color and the color to #87a5a3.

Now we are gonig to add out last Light Beam. Make a new layer and using you pen tool make a 45° selection like below. Fill the selection with white and use the same Gaussian Blur as on the others. Set the fill to 60%

Again do a search for a CG render of Link’s Master Sword. Then cut it from it background and add it to our document.

Make a new layer. Now we are going to make our midground fog. Using the same steps as on the first set of fog make this layer but this is only going to cover a part of the monument.

Now do a search for a nice rounded top stone tablet. If you find one you like but it has writing on it we can remove it or rather cover it using the clone tool. Once you have the one you like cut it from it’s back ground and add it to our document. Next using a soft eraser at 20% opacity remove a a bit of the bottom.

Make a new Layer. Using your pen tool make a rounded selection at the top of the tablet where it meets the sword. Fill the selection with black. Then go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur use 10 – 20 and hit OK. Set the Layer Fill to 75%

Next CTRL+Click the sword layer to make a selection. Make a new layer and fill the selection with black. Then go to Edit > Transform > Perspective and angle Sharply to the left. Then go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur use 10 – 20 and hit OK. Set the Layer Fill to 75%

Now we are going to add some text. I used “Angerthas Moria” ,which is a free font, but you can use any rune based font. Then using that font type out “Who so ever pulls this sword from this stone shall be king” (10 points if you know where that’s from). Then break the sentence into two line make the second longer then the first and center the entire phrase. Scale the text to fit on the stone. Now we are going to add a bevel and emboss. Go to your blending options and select Bevel and Emboss set your style to Outer Bevel, Technique to Soft Chisel, and your size to 2px and hit OK. Finally set the layer fill to 25%.

Now that we have most of the shadow and the text we need to finish the shadow from the sword. So again grab your pen tool and make an angled selection over the top left of the tablet. Make a new layer and fill the selection with black. Then go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur use 10 – 20 and hit OK. Set the Layer Fill to 60%

Now make a selection of the stone tablet and make a new layer. Fill the selection with #203133. Then set the layer blend to Vivid Light and the fill to 50%

Now we are going to add a bit of light glare on the tablet. So again take your pen tool and make a 45° right angle jagged top and rounded bottom selection the width of the tablet. Fill the selection with white. Then go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur use 10 – 20 and hit OK. Set the Layer Fill to 25%

Next make a new layer and CTRL+Click the Top Marble selection. Then using a soft brush with black as the color make two filled areas like below. Set the Layer Fill to 40%

Next find some good selections of ferns by doing a search on google the larger the image the better. Once you have 4 – 5 images cut out the ferns and add them to the document. Thens scale the ferns down and mke a blanket of them at the lower portion of the document. Merge the fern layers. Then hit CTRL+U check the colorize box. Using the fog layers as a reference adjust the hue and brightness to match. Then add a dropshadow. Set the blend to multiply, the opacity to 75%, the distance to 10, and the size to 30

Make a new layer. Now we are going to make our foreground fog. Using the same steps as on the other sets of fog make this layer but this is only going to cover a parts of the ferns.

Finally make a new layer and fill is with #121714. Then using your Eliptical Maruqee tool make a nice large oval. Then to Select > Modify > Feather. Then feather the selection 10 – 20 pixel and hit Ok. Next hit the delete key. Set the layer to 90% and you are finished.

There you have from arisit concept art:

To realistic render art:

Let me see what you come up with and I will post them here.

Many years ago, Toronto-based i4i was granted a patent related to “[s]ystem and method for generating an XML-based fault model.”  The abstract specifically mentioned Word documents, and then such documents were named many more times throughout the rest of the application.

As for the subject of legal contention, Emil Protalinski reports, “Word 2003 and Word 2007 use extensible markup language (XML) for encoding and customizing the XML in a way that i4i believes infringes on its patent.”

Now, a federal jury’s sided with i4i, and you might judge the importance of the decision in light of the fact that i4i’s website is down (think traffic overload).  With most tech-related companies, that sort of thing doesn’t happen every day.

Unfortunately for i4i (and perhaps XML pros who would look to the company as something of a hero), Microsoft does intend to appeal the $200 million verdict, so it may be quite a while before anything’s final and money changes hands.